If there ever was a politically-incorrect superhero strip...
...it's this deliberately-inflammatory one by comics mainstays Ross Andru and Mike Esposito!
You'll note the pages are, in fact, scans of the original art, not printed pages from Klevart Enterprises' Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear #1 (1971).
That's because it was easier to find them than a copy of the printed book!
In the early 1970s, writer/Artist Ross Andru and artist Mike Esposito felt the time was right to try another Trump/Humbug/Help!-level b/w humor mag.
They produced two camera-ready issues of material and shopped them around to various publishers, but none were willing to take the financial risk!
So the duo self-published!
As Mike Esposito explained
HERE:
"Well, we did that because we wanted to do a dissenter’s book. Dissension.
We were teed off at the world, and politics, and racial prejudice; everything that was bothering us as liberals.
We were irritated, and we wanted to make a book about it.
We put out a book called “Up Your Nose,” ... Johnny Carson used to have an expression on T.V.: “May the bird of paradise fly up your nose, and out your ear.”
So I said, “Hey. Why not? ‘Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear.’”
“It’s not bad,” Ross said, “Why not?”
So we had t-shirts with the finger going up your nose.
We sold a lot of t-shirts. The college kids loved it.
We were starting our third one with a take-off on Marlon Brando, and we were knocked out of the box because what happened was the distributor said, “We got a winner!”
He got so excited; Kable News, he called us up and said, “We’re going to bury Mad magazine!” Because he approached it as a magazine, not a comic book, like Mad magazine, and he said, “We got a winner!”
Then all of a sudden the books started coming in from Hawaii, from the west coast.
Carloads.
Because they thought it was a drug book.
And it wasn’t!
But when they heard “Up Your Nose;” cocaine.
And also, the main character was Joe Snow.
And that was his name!
My daughter knew him from school.
So he was perfect for the book, and we gave him a contract, and he appears in all the stories in photographs and we’d draw around him..."
We'll be presenting the only other adventure of
Ace of Spades next week!
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(which details the background story of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito along with info on of Ace of Spades, Up Your Nose and Out Your Ear and Klevart Enterprises!)
