The 4th issue of our second year.
This was my last issue...as a student of NYU. I didn't let a little thing like graduation keep me from being involved. Apparently it saved the staff the grief of bringing in new members. Which, as we would discover, would cause a lot of grief to the old members.
I don't know how we got two issues out in the Spring of 1979. We tried to do 3 a year, Fall, Winter and Spring. I don't remember why we did issues two months in a row, for a total of four for the semester. Maybe we had a lot of submissions to use. Maybe our budget had been increased and we had enough to do another issue. It was my farewell issue and the guys gave me (and Amy Burns) a shout-out in the masthead. We were the first two members to leave, not just disappear or submit one & done, but to graduate and move on, kinda.
Anyway, the whole issue is here.
I was "leaving" in a good frame of mind. I was one for comedy traditions. My big influence was National Lampoon, if not for content, then for formatting. I liked having recurring characters, departments, concepts. It made the magazine feel part of something bigger. I did things like "Glance at a Week" which was our parody of the NYU newspaper's "Week at a Glance." We had a cartoon character "Super Rat" that was a serialized adventure. Once we settled into doing parodies of current events, it became "Plaguetone News." We had been working the Plague into things, both as a topic and a heading. Characters like Zol or President Sorehill would spring up occasionally. Even if we were the only ones paying attention, it felt like there was a thread holding it all together,
Yes, the group used to drive me crazy with the various graphic layouts and collages. But I could do wacky, too. Note how the candy spills out of the Cavemart ad into the rest of the issue...
And then I got to do an actual "farewell" bit, since I was the first staff member actually graduating from NYU. Everyone else was a year behind me, but because I was a transfer student, they were all there two years ahead of me.
And this was a weird repeat bit to use for filler.
This was one of my favorite running bits. It's like I got to create a character and play with it for a couple of issues. And, again, got to handle it as a (semi) exit...
