soc #01 crabs
soc #01 Crabs
Head Press/Family Fun (1973)
The best of this content comes at the end of this issue, where Art Spiegelman’s four-page “Prisoner On The Hell Planet,” presents a harrowing account of the aftermath of Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide. Spiegelman was just 20 years old and he had already suffered an intense nervous breakdown and spent a month in a mental hospital before facing his mom’s unexpected suicide. One can only imagine the agony he endured after such a horrific life event, yet Spiegelman admirably conveys that experience just a few years later in a comic book (did I already mention how underground artists pursued deeper meaning in their creations? Yes I did).
Short Order #1 also features Bill Griffith exposing the superficial nature of fashion models (“Zippy in ‘Real Live Dolls'”), Spiegelman’s satire on false muses (“Just a Piece o’ Shit”) and Griffith’s dissertation on shallow people in which they are literally depicted as two-dimensional (“Randy and Cherisse in the 2nd Dimension”).