Jerry Garcia talks comics...

Jerry Garcia talks comics...

https://sites.google.com/a/nerdtoyourmother.info/www/Home/9th-art-patron...

<<Introduction

By Jerry Garcia

I've always thought the comics were just a great way to tell a story, you know—pictures and words and good ideas. Grateful Dead Comix has been fun and satisfying, although in some sense I tend to think of it as a tribute to the EC comics we all grew up on.

    "The first comic that made an impression on me was an EC that my stepfather gave me when I was eight or nine. It was beat up, it didn't have a cover on it, it was absolutely hideous, really horrible—just perfect. I had asthma as a kid so I got into reading and the way I got into reading was from these comics. I got fascinated by them, by the horribleness of them, for one thing, and by the tongue-in-cheek humor. I found them funny and reasonable and wise, in a kind of Old Testament way—of course, I didn't know it in those words at that time—but EC comics were always eye for an eye, the bad guy always got it. They were horrible, but they were really well executed, the drawings were excellent and so forth, in fact unparalleled to this day—Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Bill Elder, Harvey Kurtzmann, they even had Frank Frizetta for a little while. Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Shock Suspense Stories—I just loved them, and I started collecting them.

Later on in the fifties the comic-regulation deal clamped down heavy on EC. Now, the other thing about EC comic books was that they had a fantastic readership—the readers were very active; the letters-to-the-editor page was always hilarious; there was this continual row going on between the editors and the readers—called "fanaddicts" (fanatics)—and when the government started persecuting the editors, the readers stuck up tremendously for them—"I'm a schoolteacher and I love these comics... blah blah." It was kind of a heroic effort by a small group of people who loved what they were doing, not unlike the Grateful Dead. The parallels are fairly obvious—they were dealing with it in the graphic world, but they had their following, like Dead Heads, and they were very devoted to their following, too, they addressed them directly, and they took into account what they said, and so forth. The whole thing had that populist hero kind of quality to it—the struggling little publishing company taking on the government....

Anyway, they finally hit it big with Mad comics, which turned into Mad magazine, and Bill Gaines is still at it. Most of those guys graduated, some of them went on to tragic ends, and they've been a running sidebar to my life. And then, of course, when I became a freak, I started to meet all the younger cartoonists who'd been influenced by EC like I was, and they started to put out the underground comics which in a way owed a lot to EC comics except they were like "Okay, now let's put out comics the way we want them with absolutely nobody telling us what to do, completely wide open, you can have anything in them." And that was my second phase of comics—I was a collector then too, Zap, and so forth.

So Grateful Dead Comix has been the realization of some very old dreams. Our models are the best quality things that are coming out, so we're trying to hang in that top category, in terms of production values, although the artists are on their own—I wouldn't want to be telling anybody what to write. But presumably they're finding something of value in the songs, and some of them are really powerful stuff, especially "Dire Wolf" and "Cumberland Blues." That's like having something realized in a really nice way—it scratches the itch. The covers are tremendous, too. The Grateful Dead has always been eclectic stylistically, and so are these comics, going from hard illustrative styles to cartoony, comic-y, bouncy animated stuff. Being able to have that spread of style is fun. I don't know that there's any absolute aesthetic to comics, just like music, and whether or not this material has any interest to anybody besides Dead Heads I couldn't even begin to guess. It doesn't matter, really.

For me, it's given me new covers to collect, and made me a happy fan. Still a fanaddict after all these years.

Jerry Garcia,     San Rafael, 1991