There’s no question that Dobie Gillis, which ran from 1959-’63, was just about my favorite TV show ever! I was coming of age, wanted to be Thalia Menninger and date Dobie just like every other young nubian my age. I loved how preppy Dobbie was in his starched khakis but had the good sense to have Beatnik friends like Maynard G. Krebs. I didn’t catch Warren Beatty as the rich kid, Milton Armitage, so much but after he left the show I was heavily into his cousin, the ultra-snot, Chatsworth Osborne, Jr. And, of course, all hail Zelda Gilroy aka Shelia Kuehl, whose nerdiness paid off when she became a US senator in real life in 2000.

This comic book was put out every other month by National Comics Publications, Inc.. This one is No. 6 from 1961.  The pages were filled with teenage angst…:

And there were ALWAYS ads in 50’s and 60’s comic books to build whimpy muscles up, in this case by emulating Joe Weider, who went on to mentor such muscle maniacs as  Arnold Schwarzenegger and also to get sued for a variety of weight loss and bulk up products that didn’t quite live up to their claims.

There were also ALWAYS ads to earn money. A very popular one is this one where you banked coins by selling popular patriotic and religious mottos,  just what every kid wanted to do.  But, most importantly, there were ALWAYS prizes to win…

Comic books offered lots of ways for an industrious kid to make money. I myself did the one showed below several times. I loved the little packets of seeds  and I was obsessed with getting the prizes. For sure I got the pocket radio but you had to sell about 4 tons of seeds to get the three speed bicycle, the full string guitar (did they also have prizes of guitars with no strings?!),  the typewriter, the movie projector or anything else that was of real value. Although I had big entrepreneurial plans most of the seeds ended up getting planted in my backyard. I think an onion grew once but that was about it.

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Here’s how I spend my spare time, making this highly sophisticated -NOT- animation with Prudence Fenton, of Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Peter Gabriel videos fame. After being a private joke for 15 years, we’ve finally committed (in all senses of the word) the Pigmy to film. If anybody deserves a place on the mantle of Kitsch Klassicism, it’s Pigmy Will. 

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Made in Tijuana in 1998, this velvet portrait suffers from an over prescription of Kitsch which causes the Carrott Top pumped-to-within-an-inch-of-bursting-his-skin steroidal physique rather than the normal man size of George Reeves who this is a portrait of. This plump-as-a-Thanksgiving-turkey Superman is more apt to pop some Creatine and protein powder than leap off a tall building where he’d most certainly sink like a rock.

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Heavy 1970’s metal belt buckle puts the power where you need it, on the belly of the beast. I’m still looking for the matching cufflinks.

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If only for the polyester bellbottomed poolside fashion shows and the razor blades embedded in Pam Grier’s afro, Friday Foster has attained classic blax- and kitschploitation status. This 1972 Dell comic book version, billed as “Action-packed excitment in the fashionable world of the Jet Set” features assistant photographer Foster gone Shaft in the aptly named timepiece, “The Beautiful People”.

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