The fourth issue of The Sunday Paper adds a letter column, which proves to be rather entertaining with its mix of slavish admirers and utter nutcases. Especially curious are two letters that include the real (?) names and addresses of two people, including one 19-year-old woman named Crystal who just moved to San Francisco. She's a self-admitted "freak" who says "it's hard to find companionship" and would "dig meeting other freaks that dig the same thing I do." And then she volunteers her street address! God only knows how many men Crystal entertained in the weeks that followed her letter being published!

John Wilcock ruminates on just about anything in his regular column "Other Scenes." This week he comments on Ralph Ginzburg's incarceration in a minimum security prison at Allenwood, Pennsylvania. Ginzburg had been convicted on obscenity charges years earlier but finally went to prison in 1972 after every effort to avoid jail time had been exhausted. Wilcock says the jailing was "a horrible travesty of justice" but opines that Ginzburg, like so many underground press publishers (who Wilcock bravely names in the column), was a selfish bastard, so little wonder that people weren't rushing to sympathize with him after his ass ended up in jail.

Jim Handler's "Pop 'N' Roll" column finally covers some musicians you're sure to have heard of: David Bowie, John Prine, King Crimson and the Atlanta Rhythm Section. Bear in mind these are very brief reviews, but it's always interesting to read what people thought of music when it first came out.

Other articles include the full-page, self-explanatory "Facts About Vaginal Infections"; a brief snippet about Gary Arlington's comic book shop; Antonia Lamb's "How Astrology & Sex Come Together" (hint: Zodiacal Kama Sutra!); a chronicle of a TV junky's week of TV watching; and Leo Daughtery's review of William Burroughs' The Wild Boys.

Comics Section Update: After Trina Robbins made her final appearance in the previous issue, Larry Todd bids us farewell after one more Dr. Atomic strip (and probably the best of the four about Dr. Atomic's robot). Comics editor Willy Murphy brings in Michele Brand and Larry Rippee to contribute strips, both of which are pretty good. Murphy and Jay Lynch round out the comics section with a couple of decent strips...which just about sums up what you can say regarding the quality of comics in most issues of The Sunday Paper: they're decent. And I don't mean that entirely as an insult, as the quality of comics is always at least decent and never dips into mediocrity while Murphy is at the helm. Murphy's too sharp of a cartoonist to ever let that happen.

At least The Sunday Paper finally cleans up most of its production issues for this edition, which is much cleaner than the past two. Overall, it's another decent (there's that word again) issue of The Sunday Paper, but as I mentioned in the publication overview, it's mostly empty calories.



HISTORICAL FOOTNOTES:
It is currently unknown how many copies of this newspaper were printed. None of the seven issues were reprinted.

COMIC CREATORS:
Jay Lynch
Larry Todd
Willy Murphy
Michele Brand
Larry Rippee