middle-class fantasies
middle-class fantasies
Last Gasp 1973-1976
Jerry Lane produced the first issue of this brief series as part of his Masters thesis in art at California State University at Fresno. It’s his first effort in comics and I think he did a hell of a job. Middle Class Fantasies #1 provides the first chapter of “The Frogman,” which is about a mysterious man in a diving suit who floats into a young woman’s life on a recurring basis. The first issue also has a terrific homage to one of my favorite comedy teams (read “old people’s favorite dead people”), the Marx Brothers. In Middle Class Fantasies #2, Lane gives us the last three chapters in the Frogman story and several other tales, including the intriguing “Cantua Creek.”
Lane practically disappears from the face of the Earth after producing this interesting series. My extended research to track down Jerry Lane today virtually proves that he is not a children’s book author (that Jerry Lane is a pseudonym for Patricia Miles Martin), not a country singer (that Jerry Lane is Jerry Max Lane, who had a handful of albums in the ’70s and ’80s), not the plagiarist of cheesy paperback novels from the ’60s (that Jerry Lane is a pseudonum for Jerry Goff) and not the Jerry Lane who recently supernaturally channeled the teachings of Jesus and the Virgin Mother Mary (at least I hope not).
I still do hold out hope that he is the Jerry Lane who wrote An Old Man Who Lives Alone and Talks To His Cat, published in 2005, but my understanding is that that Jerry Lane attended college in Kansas, not Fresno.