Motor City Comics #1, April 1969, Rip Off Press, Robert Crumb, Underground Comic
1st
Printing / April, 1969 / 28 pages / Rip Off Press / In the spring of 1969 Crumb
produced Motor City Comics #1, which introduces Lenore Goldberg, one of his
strongest female characters to date. While she displays some of Crumb's
favorite physical attributes, such as muscular thighs and cheesecake cleavage,
Goldberg is the most earnest feminist he had yet created.
After
opening with the absurd "The Inimitable Boingy Baxter," which is
about an everyday guy escaping a pregnant mistress, the cops and a Chinese
dentist by bouncing away in his spring-loaded shoes, Crumb delivers the
nine-page "Lenore Goldberg and Her Girl Commandos."
Lenore
Goldberg is the leader of a group of young women who storm a meeting of liberal
intellectuals to "clear the air of all this bullshot about
'femininity'!" Goldberg declares that "men and women must get
together as equals, but for this to happen the whole society must change
radically." She never explains exactly how society must change; instead,
Goldberg and her "girl commandos" ridicule the soxually repressed
intellectuals by pretending to flirt with and seduce them, but it's all just a
game and they exit the meeting after humbling their enemy.
When
Goldberg and the commandos are pursued by police as they flee the meeting, one
of them is caught and brutally punished, but this only strengthens their
resolve to expand their membership and push the feminist revolution to the next
level. Of course, in Crumb's eyes, the revolution does not prevent Goldberg
from going home to have oral sox with her boyfriend and give him a blob job.
Motor
City Comics #1 is the second title published by Rip Off Press (Radical America
Komics was the first), and though it has plenty of weak spots, the strength of
the Lenore Goldberg story makes it a must-read for fans of the Crumb and the
underground.
The
only copy of the first printing I own is the slabbed copy shown above. If I
ever unslab that book or acquire another copy of the first printing, I will
replace the image used above with my usual scanned image. It will also give me
the chance to show the copyright on the inside front cover that is the only way
to identify the first printing.
HISTORICAL
FOOTNOTES: There are seven known printings of this comic book, the first six by
Rip Off Press and the last by Last Gasp. It is currently unknown how many
copies of this comic book were printed for any of the printings. The first five
printings all have 50-cent covers and can be somewhat difficult to distinguish.
The first two printings have no company logo on the front cover, state The
Print Mint address on the back cover, and have copyright information on the
inside front cover. But only the 1st printing does NOT have the copyright
symbol © on the inside front cover. The 2nd printing added the © symbol to the
copyright information.
The
3rd to 5th printings all have the Rip Off Press logo added to the front cover.
The 3rd printing still has The Print Mint address on the back cover, but the
4th and 5th printings change to the Rip Off Press address. The only way to tell
the 4th and 5th printings apart is that the 4th printing has a glossy paper
stock cover and the 5th printing has a matte cover stock. The 6th printing has
a 75-cent cover price. The 7th printing is the first published by Last Gasp and
has a $2.50 cover price.
COMIC
CREATOR: Robert Crumb - 1-28
Disclaimer: We may have chosen to alter and block a portion of the
cover of this particular comic, because it contains simple drawings,
sketches, cartoon funnies and caricatures, showing the features of
its subjects in a humorously exaggerated and satirical way. For Adults Only is printed on the cover
because it’s not a children’s comic book. We have listed this issue in the
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