The guy had a threesome going on with these two great women, they all loved each other, though they did have their problems, of course. They were into bondage. The idea of a woman superhero was really strange at that time. Got me interested in what those original comics were actually like, so I got a couple of collections (from Amazon, naturally).
Comics were pretty basic back then, the drawing was just good enough to convey the idea, the stories were pretty silly, oh, & she was always getting tied up.
So I did a little homage to that on this sketchcover. TeeHee!
As the fantasy-horror narrative unfolds, like malignant origami, around us in the “Real World”, here in Cherry’s alternate universe, she’s entertaining suggestions as to what a Love Goddess ought to be doing. This is Lola Paluzza’s plan. Lola has a problematic attitude most of the time. She’s Cherry’s best frenemy.
The
Summer of Love in San Francisco had come & gone. The Bicentennial
in the USA came & went. “Underground Comics” was a thing;
comics being drawn by excited, disturbed young people who had grown
up under constant looming threat of nuclear annihilation &/or
arrest by fanatical crusading authority figures &/or being forced
into service as cannon fodder in a meaningless war in a mysterious
faroff land. They did what they had to do: got high & laughed.
Out loud. Onto paper. Well, some of them did; this was what came to
be known as the Baby Boomer generation, who mostly just went along
with the repressive Status Quo regime, but some of them saw the
absurdity & hypocrisy, & just had to rebel.
What
made it “underground” was decentralization; if we (the
subculture) made & produced &
distributed our
own comics, we could do anything we wanted, actually exercise Freedom
of Speech & the Press & shit, outside
of the autocratic system, so it was like black
market,
but not illegal. Underground-ish.
So what came out was all this shocking gross shit, of course:
violence, sex, pinworms, etc… Larry Welz said “What if somebody
did a comic where sex was fun & nice & nobody was a victim?”
Welz had been doing a superhero parody comic, Captain Guts, in the
last days of the 60s. He had many ideas for comics. The first
incarnation of what would become Cherry was Debbie Clambake, who
showed up in Tuff Shit Comics (Last Gasp), cute teenage girl shooting
heroin in the bathroom, drawn in the ‘Archie’ style, that is, Dan
DeCarlo. Having cartoon teenagers acting like real teenagers was
ironically altered perception. At that time every comic company had
or had done a wacky teenager title, so the riff was on the whole
genre. Cherry Poptart first appeared in a one-off called Funnybook #1
in 1971. It took Welz six years to do enough strips for a comic. He
gave the art to Ron
Turner at Last
Gasp in San Francisco. Last Gasp then moved from where they were to
Bryant Street, in the process misplacing said artwork for another
three years. 1981, Cherry Poptart #1 is published. Welz thought of it
as a one-off; he called it #1 as a joke. Turned out to be popular,
so he did some more.
Larry
Todd did an 8 page Vampironica story where
he did direct parodies of all the Archie™
characters, the only piece in the book to do so. Nervous about
possible retribution for Copyright Infringement, we
deleted that item & replaced it with other material in subsequent
reprint runs. Archie Comics is now doing a whole series of
Vampironica comics. For this special Legacy Edition reprint, we
have restored Todd’s excellent story, as well as Jay Kinney’s
Wholesome Twins story, so it’s a complete & accurate
reconstruction
of that groundbreaking experimental first issue of
Cherry Poptart.
