from the vaults: ‘Hep’ #1 by Marc Bell
Ahhhhh, this is the stuff, such a classic, ‘Hep’ by Marc Bell. Being a teen in Michgan, with limited ways to get underground stuff, coming across Marc Bell was like the sweetest cake. I think I got a couple issues of Mojo Action Companion Unit, Hep, and a couple others that I can’t recall. These were all procured by mail order, which was extremely difficult because that dude was on the move all the time at that time if I recall.
Looking back, I now realize that Marc Bell the man inspired me just as much as his comics. I knew he was on the move a lot because it was next to impossible to mail order from him and in his little auto bio snippets here and there he always depicted himself as a shaggy wayfarer living out of a backpack. As a teen in the suburbs desperate to get out that sloppy lifestyle was a golden ideal. It didn’t take many Marc Bell comics to get me out of the house, within 2 years or so of buying this comic I had given away all of my possessions and was backpacking around the country. I’ll tell the story sometime of my amazing collection of 90s era mini comics that i basically gave away after going nuts on LSD and deciding I must be penniless and possession-less. You know those two ‘treasury’ of mini comics compendiums? I pretty much had all of the stuff collected in them. And then I gave them away. Blah.
Well I got rid of everything except for a little tiny stack that I had to keep, that I absolutely could not give away. They were Coober Skeber, everything I had by Marc Bell, Teratoid Heights, and a couple Souther Salazar minis. Probably a few others in the mix that I’m forgetting about right now.
This Marc Bell stuff is so funny, so good, drawn so crazy insane awesome. Off the top of my head it feels like these kind of funny books don’t exist anymore, there isn’t enough optimism around or maybe its because irony is something young people desperately strive for as an aesthetic rather than something to laugh at or exploit, or that exploitation and humor are completely frowned upon nowadays.
Sorry to sound like an old dude but if you weren’t there you missed out. Getting a Marc Bell comic in the mail was absolutely the best thing in the universe and tales of Chia Man and Bingo Bango Man and Shrimpy and Paul and Mr Socks were such a great evolution of stuff done by Crumb and Brown and all those ‘Steven’ comics and shit, those were the good ol days for sure.
