#03 Spirit
#03 Spirit
Kitchen Sink November 1972
Snarf #3 is the only underground from the golden era that can boast a front cover by the legendary Will Eisner. The Snarf cover is a classic, depicting the Spirit and Commissioner Dolan busting into the Krupp Comic Works office, which is appropriately located in a sewer and populated by hippy types and staff artists. Kitchen Sink would end up publishing those two reprints of Spirit, too, but then the reprint concept was stolen by Jim Warren, who lured Eisner to Warren Publishing with the promise of newsstand distribution. That deal lasted for 16 issues, but then Eisner and Warren split and Eisner returned to Kitchen Sink, which published 25 more issues of The Spirit Magazine.
We welcome Peter Loft and Tom Christopher, who join the Snarf team and provide more conventional comic stories that have their own ups and downs. They both introduce their signature characters, one being a postal carrier duck (by Loft) and the other being an omnipotent dwarf (by Christopher).
Loft would go on to appear in several other Kitchen Sink comics, but Christopher gets the upper hand here, as his dwarf is established as a deviant lunatic in the first half of the book and then appears out of the blue in the latter half of a seemingly unrelated story about a pair of everyday house painters. Christopher has a perverse sense of humor, which of course we all like, but unfortunately we will not hear from him again in Snarf. He has an esteemed history in fanzines and small press comics, but is probably best know for his ink work during the nascent years of Marvel’s Silver Surfer comic. Christopher has his own website, filled with arcane insights about beatniks and early comics history.
Snarf #3 is distinguished by the lead story by Ed Goodman and Peter Poplaski called “Bucky Wright, Boy Radical.” Bucky is a spoiled 17-year-old teen who becomes enamored with the style of the “radical” hippy movement without really embracing any of its ideals or philosophy, except what is needed to fit in with the craze. He soon experiences that joining a radical movement just to raise hell has its consequences.
Goodman also collaborates with Kitchen on an all-too-brief series of comics entitled “Ramshackle & Slumlord Realty,” which adroitly lampoon the money-grubbing nature of predatory real estate investors. Evert Geradts returns to provide a weak one-pager and a solid two-pager featuring his two anthropomorphic cows (getting really down and dirty with some ass fucking).
Snarf #3 gets a bonus point just for the Eisner cover (which is reason enough to own the book), but overall it remains roughly on par with the content of the first two issues, which means Snarf gets off the block with three solid issues of underground comics.
#03 Spirit
