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Home Products RARE Canadian Counter-culture comic book 'Beer Comix' September 1971 Dave Geary

RARE Canadian Counter-culture comic book 'Beer Comix' September 1971 Dave Geary

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            BEER
            COMIX
          50¢ No. 1
Booze Culture Capers

 

Laffs*Gags* Guffaws*Practical Advice*Thrills Psychic Violence*Eyeball Kicks*Things to do Too!
No Minors Allows to Read this comic.

Sept. 1971 Published by Public Pubications (sic) -920 Temperance Street, Saskatoon, Sask. © 1971 Dave Geary. Strories, Characters, and incidents in this comic book are all true!

Called the first truly underground comic!

RARE+++

Beer Comix

Alright, so here’s a hot comic from Canada’s underground which, as I write this, is selling for $156 on ebay. Completely produced by David Stewart Geary, or Dave Geary, the comic focuses primarily on beer and features much of the same bawdy tones as many other comix of its time. Geary was another master of the Underground comix age in Canada, producing other titles such as Gopher Freedom and Fleshapoids.

Definitely some mature content, and I have to tell an anecdote. Inside the front cover in the indicia, there is what I assume to be a purposeful “typo”. This typo asserts that the comic was published by Public Pubications, and not Public Publications. I laughed, which I’m sure was the intent of the writer. The funnier still was the entry made in the old finding aid. The person who went through this collection before me did not put down a publisher! There’s no way they could have missed this, and it’s blasphemy that they put nothing. What I assume happened was that they couldn’t cross check it, and rather than embarrassingly putting down what was there, they put nothing at all.

Published in Saskatoon in September of 1971, the heart of the Underground comix era, Geary did put out two more issues after this one. Here are the titles from Beer Comix #1:

  • Chimo Queen of the Ritz in Love’s Labours
  • You Betcha
  • Eco Tunes and Murky Maladies
  • I Love My Frog
  • Goony Bunny answers that Age Old Question, “Is it Sex or is it Lust?”
  • Things to Do: “How to Get on Everybody’s Nerves”
  • Dream of the Rave Beer Fiend
  • Love on the Slopes: A Shelly James Ture Romance Adventure
  • A Beer Comix Vignette
  • Metropolitan Comix
  • Chimo Queen of the Ritz
  • Lurid Pap Comix
  • Goony Bunny the Philosopher Rabbit
  • Stark, Scary and Lustful
  • A New Era Dawns in Agadir-Morocco

In the first Chimo comic, Chimo’s name is given this introduction:

*Chimo (Pron. CHEE-MO) Ancient Canadian Colloquialism. Mod. trans. “Eat poop white eyes”

http://comicsyrup.com/

 

Underground Comix

If you lived in a big metropolis today in 1971 and you went into a head shop, you might find these two comix sitting on a shelf next to the psychedelic posters and water pipes.  Underground comix were not like other comics.  They weren't easy to find and you never knew what would be on the shelf when you went looking for them.

Underground comix were a product of the 1960s counter culture and a unique distribution system that arose at that time to supply mostly head shops with posters and related materials.  Some people claim to be creating underground comix today, but they are only doing so in the style of the undergrounds.  The true underground comix started in the 1960s and disappeared with the head shops in the early 1980s.  The comix were a rejection of the 1950s-1960s sanitized newsstand comic books and the idea that comics were for children.  Inspired by Mad and other similar irreverent humor magazines, underground comix captured the spirit of the counter culture.  They vanished when that sub-culture lost its significance and was absorbed by the dominant culture.
Beer Comix is an example of the self-published aspect of some underground comix.  With undergrounds, the creators had control of their artistic efforts, not a corporation.  It was a typical comix with a color cover and black & white interior pages.  Dated September it was probably still on the shelf in a head shop here in December since undergrounds really had no expiration date.
http://todayincomics.blogspot.ca/

 

Dave Geary was a key figure in the Canadian underground movement. He was associated with Saskatoon and contributed to such titles as Bridge City Beer Comix (1971-1973), Bridge City Revue (2 issues, 1976 and 1981), Fleshapoids from Earth (1974), Gopher Freedom Comix (1975), Nature Comix (1970) and Scratchatune Comics.

https://www.lambiek.net