select their decorative ruling tapes, benday and transfer-type sheets, and
settle down to design pages.
The East Village Otherpremiered in 1965 and quickly evolved from a
neo-beat community organ into an alternative culture clarion. It was among
the first to publish the masters of underground comix, including R. Crumb,
Spain, Kim Deitch, and others. Intentionally or not, it borrowed graphic
techniques from dada and surrealism. The cover of one early issue was a
photomontage (in the manner of German satirist John Heartfield) of a
serpent emerging from the battle fatigues of America’s commanding general
in Vietnam, William Westmoreland. For irrepressible irreverence, for dogged
antiestablishmentarianism nothing could match the East Village Other.As a
testament, it was declared contraband by the United States armed forces.
As for its graphic design,EVOwas resolutely formless. While it
had an anchored editorial page, the features and regular columns were
unfettered by aesthetic or functional rules. The layout staff of between five
and ten people on any given Thursday were all erstwhile amateurs without
a clue how to create consistent design even if they wanted to. This had
been true since its inception, but occasionally a professional would wander
in, someone who knew the ways of the grid and central axis composition,
who would attempt to insert a “correct” page into the anarchic mélange.
But rather than bring order to the chaos, in the end, all approaches were
thrown into the stew that was EVO.
In the final years of EVOduring the early 1970 s, the biggest
influence on the layout sessions was the work of a veteran animator, Fred
Mogubgub who drew obsessively intricate designs for the covers (including
the masthead) and some inside pages. He usually indicated that they be
printed as a split fountain (the gradual mixing of two colors from top and
bottom of the page) going from unreadable yellow to garish orange to
bright red. Mogubgub’s quirky, detailed, comic style for Seven-Up and Bit-
O-Honey television spots had changed the look of animated commercials
in the early 1960 s, but he left Madison Avenue to pursue an unrealized film
career. Along the way he had altered the style of EVO.
By 1972 the East Village Other’s circulation, which in its heyday
hovered around seventy-five thousand, had plummeted to five or six
thousand. It was kept afloat only by the sex advertisements and classifieds.
Indeed this was consistent with the general demise of the underground
press. The issues of EVOprinted on cheap newsprint are difficult to find
these days—they were either discarded or have turned to dust. The few that
remain, however, represent a remarkable period of counterculture
publishing, naïve design, and youthful exuberance that marked a truly
democratic period (prefiguring zines and the World Wide Web) when
cheap communications were available to many.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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