#02 Amazing Adult Fantasies
#02 Amazing Adult Fantasies
Moods Publishing Empire (1973)
New Paltz Comix #2, subtitled Amazing Adult Fantasies, is the most “underground” issue in the series and runs 48 pages plus covers, which led to Gilbert producing a flip book with two front covers (read half the comic and then flip the book over to read the other half). When choosing which cover to display for a flip book, I always choose the cover that includes the indicia and/or table of contents on the inside, which would seem to make it the primary cover. But with this issue, one cover has the indicia on the inside and the other has the table of contents! I chose the one with the indicia.
There are several interesting contributions to New Paltz Comix #2, beginning with “Rubber Soul,” a collaboration between Gilbert and Raoul Vezina. The story is told in flashback mode, featuring the horn player featured on the cover shown above, who is an amazing musician that showed up out of the blue and turned an average band into a great one. The script is pretty good and the artwork is quite good, dare I say reminiscent of Greg Irons (high praise indeed).
Other fairly strong contributions are “The Sprite” by Brian Buniak, which is a spoof of Will Eisner’s Spirit; “Masks” by Jeff Eisenberg (credited as Ironmountain), which follows a young woman into her home and watches her masturbate with a carrot and cucumber (which she later slices up for a nice salad); several hit-or-miss comic strips by Bruce Metcalf that were excerpted from the New Paltz college newspaper; and a couple lascivious strips by Brian Buniak that are well designed and illustrated.
New Paltz Comix #2 includes several more experimental comics that Gilbert was keen on giving an audience. Most of these are from Linda Kent and I will say I didn’t care much for them, especially the “Rorschach Review,” which feels elementary and utterly pointless. There’s also other inferior material that dragged down what could have been an exceptional book. Indeed, if you took out the weakest 16 pages of material, you’d be left with a high-quality 36-page comic book. But then it wouldn’t have fulfilled Gilbert’s vision for the series.
#02 Amazing Adult Fantasies
