In 1958 Paul Krassner (not Paul Kantner as this author has embarassingly asserted to the occasionally more knowledgable counterculturalist) began publication of The Realist in New York. In the begining a mere 600 people (including Steve Allen and Lenny Bruce) subscribed to what the masthead alternately touted as The Magazine for Egghead Junkies and The Magazine of Applied Paranoia, and many others during its sporadic 146 issue run ending in 2001, with over 100,000 devotees.
Printing articles and cartoons considered too controversal or distasteful for The New Yorker or Playboy, as well as interviews with the likes of Timothy Leary and Norman Mailer, it stood with The Village Voice at the vanguard of the underground press. While it contained satire it was never satirical in form. Articles began with truth and crossed over to fiction without so much as a wink.
Banned by campus bookstores and burned by angry Christian parents. Now that's what I call Counterculture.
Some examples of content follow:
The article "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book." begins with many previously unreleased facts about the JFK assassination and ends with Jackie Onassis's personal account of the copulation of her dead husband's neck wound by Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Symbolising the fall of an empire after Walt Disney's death, Krassner commissioned illustrator Wally Wood for "The Disneyland Memorial Orgy". In what many Western anime fans might mistakenly define as an early-American form of hentai, the drawing featured such beloved characters as Snow White, Tinkerbell, Pinnochio, and even patron rodent Mickey Mouse in a display of Roman decadence.
Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair wrote an article claiming that Jesus Christ is a myth or at the very least a bastard and that the Virgin Mary was anything but, and quite possibly multi-orgasmic.
An Unexhaustive List of Contributing Writers and Artists
Invaluable Resources:
- http://www.wordiq.com
- http://www.flashbackbooks.com/
Corrections and Revisions:
The newspaper ran from 1958-1974 and was reincarnated as a newsletter from 1985-2001
Lawyers for one M. Mouse have brought to my attention that their client did not appear in "The Disneyland Memorial Orgy" but rather his portrait is shown being defaced by former companion Pluto.
Noted with my apologies to Mr. Mouse and his family.