3 out of 5

There was a certain breed of weird in the 70s that made for projects like Weird Trips – a mostly text mag of sex and aliens and murderers fiction, put out by Kitchen Sink – that just would never appear nowadays.  Even with digital allowing for more people to get in to the comic “biz” (if only for an issue or two), the kind of offness and experimentation put out by KS, sometimes by Fantagraphics, by Last Gasp, and other off-breed publishers, just hasn’t really been replicated.

Weird Trips is maybe serious, but mostly of a darkly humorous bent, and features some names you’d know – Mike Baron, Doug Moench – and then others whose names only seem to link to this issue (which was one of two, of this shortly lived oddball mag), contributing fiction about vegetable-themed cults (Baron), dodging the draft (Moench), having sex with small-weinered cops, alternate-dimension dental projections, and… rape.

I don’t know exactly what to make of it.  I was glad each piece was relatively short, as I’m not sure any were out-and-out enjoyable, but they were all well-written to their themes, and elicited confused giggles where appropriate.  The one blight is perhaps the comic from Evert Geradts, which seemed purely for E.C.-type shock value, bumped to an X rating; the latter half of the book functions somewhat in this adults-only type vein, but elsewhere we get more standard weird fiction / parody, which verges on the kind of stuff you could actually see supporting an ongoing rag.

The Baron story – why I picked this up – shows that, early on, he had a firm grasp on his random, pseudo-serious stylings.