Friday, January 16, 2015

Basement Potpourri

Another small pile of finds from my basement.

Yes, I was a young adult in the 1980s, as indicated by this cartoon mashing up Ronald Reagan as Steve Martin with an MX missile through his head:


It was sold as a postcard in a store in Washington, D.C. Cartoon by Ken Brown. I wonder what happened to him? This may be him.

This cartoon by Tom Toles is probably from the late 1980s or early 1990s:


See, my interest in new urbanism/anti-sprawl (or whatever you want to call it) goes way back.

This artwork is from the late 1980s:


It's one of several illustrations and cartoons I photocopied from a magazine called Processed World, which was created by radical workers intent on overthrowing the dehumanizing capitalist world of office work, among other things.

We've got lots and lots of books in the basement, of course, many of which are on their way to the used bookstore. This one, called Giraffe Raps (published in 1976), is probably the strangest. The cover gives no indication, but the contents is a series of professionally designed and photographed mock ads, making fun of a range of consumer products: cigarettes, alcohol, food, and stranger things.

I found the cigarette ads the most effective. Here are two of them.





Finally, the paper jacket from a picturebook:


I don't have the book; just the cover. Sad. I think it may be worth framing.

3 comments:

Michael Leddy said...

Ken Brown's cartoons were everywhere in Boston in the 1980s. I still have his book Notes from the Nervous Breakdown Lane. I always thought of him as a Boston guy, and never realized his work was well known elsewhere. Duh.

Daughter Number Three said...

Do you think that website belongs to the same person? If so, it seems he mostly got out of cartooning.

Michael Leddy said...

Yes, I think that’s him.