Radical Muckraking, Black Power and the End of the Sixties
Warren Hinckle, who became executive editor of Ramparts when it was still a Catholic quarterly, was perhaps the most colourful figure in the magazine’s offices. When he was recruited in the early 1960s, Hinckle had already carved out something of a reputation for himself as a muckraking journalist on the San Francisco Chronicle. His predilection for the investigative style was to colour the magazine’s reporting during its golden period. His prodigious spending would repeatedly nudge Ramparts into the red. When in New York on business, Hinckle worked out of the exclusive Algonquin Hotel, and during 1968’s riot-scarred Democratic National Convention he and his staff stayed at Chicago’s Ambassador Hotel. ‘There we were, all staying at the Ambassador Hotel […] while the movement kids were getting their skulls cracked’, he later told Time magazine, partly, no doubt, for effect.
Karl Whitney on Peter Richardson‘s A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America.
The Funnies
The unfinished & unpublished Alan Moore + Coming soon, Alan Moore‘s Dodgem Logic 3 [via] + Tom Gauld at the Stockholm Central Library + Chris Ware‘s rejected Fortune 500 cover [via] + On Luc Besson‘s The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, based on Jacques Tardi‘s graphic novel series + Rhys Tranter‘s Coffee Breakdown + Forbidden […]
(A) Morally bankrupt evening
Pulp Press announce their annual charity book launch and burlesque show on April 24th (tomorrow), at the Horse Hospital: Independent publishers Pulp Press celebrate the launch of four new modern pulp fiction novellas; Charlie McQuaker’s Die Hard Mod, 3:AM‘s Alan Kelly‘s Let Me Die a Woman, Dominic Milne’s My Bloody Alibi, and the eagerly awaited […]
Melding Fiction & Reality: The World of Mike Carey
“There is currently this feeling now in psychiatry that the self is narrative. When you start looking for what used to be called the seat of the soul – the part of you that is you, that is the observer behind your eyes – the current thinking is it’s just the story that you tell yourself as it joins up the things that you’ve done and the things that happen to you. Your sense of that history, of that story, is yourself. It’s the closest thing you have to a soul. These are things that Peter Gross and I have been talking about for a long time, and it was Peter who had the idea to take a character and tell their story in real life and in a narrative in which they’re a fictional character.”
Gregory Frye interviews Mike Carey.
Enlightenment
A jungle clears to a stinking crocodile-infested pool where an imposing man stands on a giant’s lotus leaf hypnotising a toad.
‘Imbibe from this horny toad my western ghost, and its blood will flood your skin,’ booms the ego that is Doctor Jones.
His pygmy assistant, Axel Rose, leads an ailing Missionary towards the radical, magical Doc.
‘I don’t think I can go any further, Master Axel,’ whispers the Missionary.
‘Shut the feck up you custard coward, and step your hush puppy soul on the crocodile path that leads to his enlightenment,’ growls the miniature assistant.
By Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss.