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Changes 88
  
solid writing
skilled art
historical bonus 2
total score 7
Changes #88
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Only Printing / June, 1974 / ? pages / Changes
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eastvillageother
East Village Other
AVERAGE SCORE 8
Changes was a monthly New York tabloid that covered the city's arts and entertainment scene in the '60 and '70s. There's not a lot to be found on the internet about this publication, but they had a pretty good run that lasted at least 7 1/2 years, and they certainly covered a broad range of topics related to arts and entertainment.

This 1974 issue features a short interview with Robert Crumb, who at the time was really focused on his music career. In the interview, Crumb almost sounds like he's done with comics and ready to move into a completely new phase of life. When he comments about Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat movie, he acts like Bakshi is the one who is plagued with a deviant perspective, stating that "Bakshi's philosophy of life is real sick, real twisted. He's got a really twisted attitude. He portrays this violence that's sick and sadistic and tries to make it funny." As if Crumb was innocent of doing exactly that for the past several years!

Was Crumb trying to burnish his reputation with a new patina for the sake of his music and his band, which he was apparently convinced would become his primary career? Did he really think no one would remember what he had been doing since Big Ass Comics in '69? Did he believe that the popularity of Fritz the Cat (a huge hit when it was released in '72) could be leveraged to blame Bakshi for any of Crumb's portrayals of sadistic violence for laughs?

A year before this interview in Changes, Crumb talked about Bakshi and Fritz the Cat in an interview with Mike Barrier in Funnyworld #15: "There's something real repressed about it. In a way, it's more twisted than my stuff. It's really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way.... I didn't like that sex attitude in it very much. It's like real repressed horniness; he's kind of letting it out compulsively." Did he actually say all that with a straight face? Many years later, Crumb used almost identical words to describe his own mindset about his comics in the early '70s.

Fortunately for all of us, Crumb did not give up drawing comics in 1974. He soon returned to the drawing board (and in fact, he never really left it) and gave us another four decades of comic art with a brilliantly twisted attitude.

The page after Crumb's interview, Will Eisner wrote a brief review of Mark James Estren's A History of Underground Comics, which gives us as much insight about Eisner's own viewpoint on underground comics as it does on the book (while complimenting Crumb prodigiously).

This issue of Changes also includes many other articles, reviews and ads that reflect the popular culture of New York (and America) in the mid '70s. By no means does it cover the counterculture like the East Village Other did, but it does represent aspects of the liberal-leaning mainstream culture that pervaded urban America during this era.
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keyline
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HISTORICAL FOOTNOTES:
It is currently unknown how many copies of this tabloid were printed. It has not been reprinted.
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COMIC CREATORS:
Robert Crumb - 9 (interview, art), 10 (art)
Sy Johnson - 9 (photo)
Will Eisner - 10 (text)
Ron Cobb - 10 (art)
Leslie Cabarga - 10 (art)