Ron Turner (2015)

The reason is because we had a draft then.

The draft brought all the males back then into conflict with what their life goals were. And thus they had some skin in a game. So they were anti-war, anti-things that took their own lives. So they protested the cleverly mining the rich veins of poor people to fight wars for rich people. They avoided involving the rest of the country in war. So that's why.

It's hard to not read autobiographical genres in comics if you read at all. That's one of the main differences between underground and main comics. Justin Green described himself growing up with complicated attitudes about sexuality, and so he wrote Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Binky was really Green, so it should have been called "Justin Green Meets the Holy Virgin Mary" because that was his nickname when he was a kid - and it's how he got neuroses because he was ill-prepared for sexuality. So he wrote about it as an attempt to achieve mental health. He didn't even know it was going to finish it - it was like a gamble. And when he did that, then some of the great names in comics, Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman said it was like a gauntlet being passed to them - saying "Hey, I did this, what did YOU do?" And so that caught on, and so now the great majority of comics are autobiographical. How people like to nit-pick their egos in front of the masses.

That might have to be "Amputee Love." It was run by a Canadian artist, Brent Boates, and he was a very very talented cartoonist artist and illustrator and animator. And I'd seen him do a strip that had something to do with an amputee - a frog that had had its legs removed or something - anyway, he was into it, and he was so good, and he gave a very nice introduction to the amputee's life. And he was a stickler for authenticity. So he went to some place in Canada that made amputee limbs, and walked in with his portfolio, and the guy's pitching arms in one bin, legs in another bin, and he looked at the guy - he said "Left one, right?" and he said "Excuse me?" and the guy who made artificial limbs said "You need a left leg right?!"

But he didn't really need a left leg - he was just leaning that way because of his heavy portfolio. Another case where art imitates life.

Sometimes some people think they're nefarious and I think they're okay. I knew people like Jim Jones, is that nefarious enough?

Boy, that's a hard one.

The answer would be an easy way to make friends AND enemies.

My favorite new artist, there are many, but Nina Bunjevac comes to mind. http://ninabunjevac.com/

Also if you say artist I can think comic form, or painterly form, or audio artists. It helps to be more specific. I hate to single somebody out. There are just so many!

And because Jon Longhi would ask a question like that!

And no we are firing.

EDIT: spelling

S. Clay Wilson was more of a designer artist than a cartoonist, and his designs just happened to assume the form of pirates, and skag-nasty people, and strange beings, and lots of pirate penises and bulldykes on motorcycles.... I don't find that offensive, I find it great design skills. There's only been a few things I ever attempted to censor, and that was only when it was out of context. One was Robert Crumb, he made a parody of kids that were gone missing, and we used to have all their faces on milk cartons, and it became a cliche to say "You'll be on a milk carton if you're not careful" - well, Crumb wasn't happy to hear that. And eventually that piece ran in a comic somebody else published. I just thought it was too close to the surface, not really a parody. It was a judgement call for me. Had nothing to do with the reality.

EDIT: first line

Oh boy. I got 3 postcards from Charlie Manson complaining about not getting comix fast enough. "I sent you guys a request for comix six minutes ago and I ain't got nothin yet."

I have an R Crumb drawing of Brooke Shields, a parody of WEIRDO jeans, showing these incredibly big legs & thighs that only Crumb can draw, so she's bursting the seams of those jeans, and if you look closely at her mouth, you can see some kind of substance, just a great rendering of contemporary art.

EDIT: comix, not postcards
EDIT: added Manson quote

I thought we shipped that burning boat off to the ocean about 20 years ago. People hang onto things that they love, and there's a lot of love around comics. But they're not underground anymore, you can get them anywhere. Things that were hard to get, you had to know somebody to find them, it was a risk to your personal freedom and pocketbook to be found with them, it cost many people their jobs to be found with them... there you go. I mean, there's comics now, and alternative comics, but is there underground comics? It's not the same.

Spain and I liked to tell stories to each other. Mine were about Fresno and Firebaugh, his were about Buffalo. Stories about sex, gang fighting, cars. One time we were so into it, we forgot we were supposed to pick up our daughters. And when our wives came home, they were like, "where are the kids" and we went, "oh shit." They had been given three dollars and were found in an egg roll shop having a soda after their acting class let out.

Here's some more about Spain: http://bernalbeach.com/provocations-of-spain-rodriguez/

Not really, but there should be a plaque at 2180 Bryant. The building was owned by Frank Westlake, whose Bindweed Press produced the first psychedelic rock posters. Charles Plymel, a surviving beatnik poet, had a printing press purchased by Alan Ginsberg in that building. He and Don Donohue met up at poetry readings and lamented that a great cartoonist by the name of Robert Crumb was doing work for an underground newspaper called Yarrowstalks in Philadelphia and wouldn't it be nice if he was in San Francisco (because they wanted to publish a comic book of his). Crumb met Donohue at a party in SF and Plymel printed the first Zap comix at 2180 Bryant. Later Last Gasp moved into the building and was there for 20 years.

I like salty greasy fried things. Not too much on the sweets anymore. Once I start eating sweets - I naturally avoid them. But salty crackers and a dip kind of thing of salsa.

I guess it became a prank because Jack Davis was having his 50th birthday party, and he was very, very well connected with politicians. So we decided to have a major, crazy party for him. You can click on the link in my bio that takes you to that video. It's a very long, complicated story.

There have been lots. We'll have to think about that.

One of my favorite places in the WORLD. Definitely have to get in a visit to Mitchell Brothers if you come to San Francisco. Unfortunately both the brothers are dead now. Jimmy killed Artie, and then he died of a heart attack. My company started in 1970, and the Mitchell Brothers started in '69. And somehow we connected, and because I had heat exhaustion in Antioch, and I spent 3 days in the hospital there back when I worked on the railroads, that got me in the inner circle. Pretty much anyone who worked there at Mitchell had been a friend of them back in Antioch. So it was a perfect inner circle that was very hard to breach. We became very fast friends. At some point during the first Gulf War, Jimmy was setting up - he started an anti-war newspaper called "War News" and I was the comic editor. And we had a place, we rented it out of the theater, but we ended up at a new joint on Broadway, and one day we were working on the paper in February - I think it was the 27th - I was with him all day long, and that night he had to leave, and he gave me $100 to make sure everybody got taxi rides home, and was gone. And in the next hour, Artie was dead, Jimmy had shot him, and all hell broke loose. So I was kind of close to that, and had been close to Artie also. I remember that became a big trial. And lots of movies, and books on it. Not much was ever written, or criticized, or anybody that had any connection with the Mitchell Brothers for 10 years prior to the killing. Anyway... Jimmy's daughter runs the theater now, as she has for the past 10 years there, and life goes on there. They have a fabulous Christmas party. Hope you get invited.

I practiced on fence posts.

ABSOLUTELY. You go around Twitter, and Google, and ask those engineers if they want to see their cheeky white ass in Iraq or not, and I think you'll get the answer.

I met Charlie Manson on Haight Street, after the Haight Ashbury golden days had gone, it had become a downturn district with plenty of burnouts and people getting into harder drugs. He used to sell weed on the corner of Haight and almost Ashbury, but one up. He lived at 626 Cole Street? Just a real creepy guy. Not someone you'd want to hang out with, or have a conversation with. He was troubled.

"Last Gasp" comes from when I started this project to do an underground comic book that would benefit the Berkeley Ecology Center, we had to come up with a name. And I was hanging out with the late Gary Arlington, and he and I came up with two names, neither of us remember who said what, but one was "Slow Death funnies" and the other was "Last Gasp Eco-Funnies." So I picked "Slow Death" for the name of the comic book, so the runner-book was the company name. And Greg Irons, the late, great Greg Irons, drew the skull with eyeballs and a tongue hanging out to make "Last Gasp" look like a last gasp for San Francisco there.

If I wasn't doing Last Gasp I probably would have ended up a bitter social scientist in a mediocre college.

What you said.

I can tell you a story about Marilyn Chambers. When they were filming "Behind the Green Door," she'd be up on the set, and she'd be in a trapeze, and there'd be the fluffers getting 3 guys ready for her so she could take them 3 different ways. And she had a boyfriend who like to attend these things. And he played the bagpipes. And he would play his bagpipes during these things. And the harder he blew, the harder she blew. Of course, the sound wasn't captured for the film.

As far as a book, I started getting publisher offers a few years ago. And then I had the joyous moment of asking "What's the advance?" which publishers dread to hear. Those questions went away very fast. And because people seem to be interested, I seem to get some kind of writer's block. But I should write these things. I realize that the last couple of weeks, I've had a couple of friends whom I've known more than 50 years just pass away. And I realize - who am I going to talk to, or ask, about who was what, or how did we do how? They're not just around anymore. I remember a friend of mine, she died when she was 100, and she used to drive her girlfriends to lunch all the time - and I asked her one day "Angela, how come you stopped going to lunch with your girlfriends, how come you stopped driving?" and she said "They all died. I didn't have anybody to go to lunch anymore."

So it's hit me. I'm getting old. I have to put this stuff on paper, so some soul can read it someday.

EDIT/spelling: fluffers

I think there were 17 on the list, and I just counted them.

But Jim Jones was on that list. I didn't really know Anton LaVey, i just met him a few times. Trying to think of who else was on this list. I mean, this is a wacky town, there could be a very expanded list. If there are particular people you want to know about, ask their names!

There's a lovely guy named Tom Crow. And Tom came to San Francisco from - I can't remember all of it this instant, but he decided he wanted to come in, and he thought he was the heir apparent to Wally Wood, who was one of the E.C. comic artists, whom many other people all tried to draw exactly like him, because he was the best of the best.

So we were on Fulsom street, in about '73, and he came in the door, and as he was coming upstairs to talk to me, with an overcoat on, he's slowly coming upstairs as I'm looking down at him, and behind him there was my friend Dick Durett who was from Texas and who always wore a big cowboy hat, and Durett was trailing behind him, and so he got up to the top of the stairs, and I looked back at Durett and he pointed down the stairs, and there was a trail of blood.

And I said to the guy "By the way, Tom, do you know you're bleeding?"

And he says "Oh yeah, I got hit by a car on the way over here."

Now, Tom Crow gets a stipend from the government to live, so occasionally he'd send me an alarm clock that he'd buy at the drugstore, and he'd always send people his artwork. And the late Stan Rodriguez used to have a Seder, and we'd go over for this Jewish thing, and at the end of the meal, Stan would pass out unopened letters from Tom Crow, and we'd have the pleasure of opening up a Tom Crow masterpiece, on a sheet of paper, usually some war-hero-mythical-kind of guy.

I think he's alive, but I've only received one piece of mail from him in the past year. He's slowing down.

I really can't think of anybody.

Probably about how some old geezer felt who lived by Golden Gate Park in 1967.

That would be a whole book. There are many.

Winning the chugging contest: 1958 Roosevelt High School, parking lot, Country Club Lager can, 1.8 seconds.

Yeah he worked there for a couple years as the night manager. To collect information for a book he never did. But he spent the advance.

About an 8.9 earthquake and tech bubble burst.