Do You Remember? The Very Last Post of September?

Yes, you yacht-rockers you, that's a play on lyrics from "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire, a favorite around here--all year, not just month-appropriate. Lately, my wife says to me every day, "Are we enjoying it?" Meaning, we look forward to the autumn and Christmas seasons all year, so we damn well better appreciate it now that we're in the midst of it. Not to mention we're not spring chickens anymore, so another of these seasons isn't exactly guaranteed. (We're definitely closer to fall chickens.)

Honestly, I'm not feeling overly inspired, but I don't want September to slip by without a post. I'm just gonna toss a few Fall Preview covers of the ol' Newsday TV Book on here and call it a day. If the year is a link (the first four, of the six in my collection), follow it to see more from that issue.

1972

1973

1974

1978

1981

1982 (recently acquired--just noticed I didn't even edit the photo! Whoopsy! Who cares-y?)

And finally, just because I already have it scanned and just now stumbled over it, here's a neat John Severin back cover for a Cracked fall special from 1980, signed with his middle name Powers.

Actually, here's one more: I scanned this peculiar ad from a 1976 issue of People when I was digging up Bicentennial stuff. So while I'm posting illustrations of spaced-out weirdos, here are some heavenly bodies wearing groovy threads from A. Smile Inc.

More fall-y foolishness coming, I swear!
This year!
Stay Tuned!

Newsday TV Book, September 2-8, 1973.

I had already taken a brief look at this issue, but as part of a larger post for the entire month of September in 1973. I'm reprinting most of that here, and adding all day Monday, Friday, and Saturday as well! Let's start from the beginning, shall we?

 (The pics look better if you click on 'em. Just sayin'.)

The cover by Art Sudduth reflects the many cop shows premiering that fall (well before they were called "police procedurals").

I still love the detail that the real name of Room 222's Heshimu was Arlington Banks.

Here are the preview pages, which included the debut of Long Island's own WSNL 67, which lasted about twenty months. Here's a look at the TV Book for that Thanksgiving, when the channel began broadcasting, and another post about their resident kiddie show host, Captain Ahab.

Before I get to a few full day's schedules, here's just Sunday morning and late-night.

And now, all day Monday, Friday, and Saturday.

Whoops, let's throw in a bit of Wednesday--not for the listings, but because I dig the ad for Nichols Foot Form (in my hometown of Plainview, woot!), perhaps a bit late for back-to-school shopping...

Here's an ad I uploaded in the earlier post, and I'll just mention again that I love the juxtaposition of clip art with varying degrees of verisimilitude...

...and finally, this "Fall Preview Specials" page features a really neat CRT television illustration housing some really dull ads.

Happy September! More nincompoopy nostalgia coming soon!

A Little Less Color in the World.

 

Gary Viskupic’s Christmas 1979 portrait of Dolly Parton, colorized

It's Only Make-Believe...

Page seven, Gary Viskupic's "Make-Believe: A Visual Study of a Mass Movement"

I've written about the work of Newsday illustrator Gary Viskupic before (this link will take you to the first time I did so, with lots of reproductions of his art, and progressive links to other pages with more scans). Other than the drawings seen in the Sunday Newsday TV Book, I've never really given much thought to collecting his work, although I had considered acquiring a print on occasion. Now, however, I have come into possession of about as unique an artifact as one could hope for. (Unless there’s another one out there, of course.)

I was contacted by an incredibly considerate woman from Long Island who had found something in a bookstore's ephemera bin, a stapled booklet of heavy paper attributed as "A Graduate Graphic Design Thesis Book Project entitled Make-Believe: A Visual Study of a Mass Movement. Designed by Gary Anton Viskupic, at the University of Illinois, Champaign 1968." She paid fifty cents for it, and in searching for more information she found this blog. I imagine she was intrigued by the Nazi theme--just as Viskupic himself had been, enough to base his project around such striking imagery. The depiction of war--sometimes blunt, sometimes abstract--remained a subject of fascination for him throughout his years providing content for the TV Book. 

I'll present the twenty-three printed pages objectively first, and then offer some thoughts. All pics can be enlarged for clarification.

(centerfold)

Viskupic would have been about 24 years old when he created this, with his earliest work in the TV Book appearing four years later. He clearly had a style of his own upon graduation (he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1965).

While I'm nobody's idea of a teacher--hell, I was barely even a student--to be frank, I'm gonna call this a C-grade thesis, at best. It seems to me that Viskupic put a lot of effort into the impressive construction of the project but half-assed its concept, creating some really cool pictures and then slapping in a bunch of Bertolt Brecht anti-war poems critical of Germany alongside them—verses that do nothing to further the stated theme of Hitler creating theater out of war.

The "Thesis Intent" offers somewhat bloviated academic language but little else of meaning, e.g., "The collages are personal expressions of the artist and by the very fact that they were executed in 1968, imply contemporary images." (Duh, and double-duh.) It's brief, yet still somehow feels padded. I suspect, in addition to being a graphic artist of considerable talent, he may have been a skilled BS artist as well! The arresting illustrations do the heavy lifting (and degree-earning).

In any case, it's an extraordinary relic, and one I will cherish. If you check out the comments on my first GV post, you'll see that, upon his death in the summer of 2024, many roll-off trash containers were parked outside his home and loaded with its contents. I suspect this item, among many others, was scavenged.

Many thanks to the kind and generous Kathy for sending this to me--and asking nothing in return! More thanks to the bookseller, The Next Chapter in Huntington, "Long Island's largest independent bookstore," established in 1977. You’re doing the lord’s work, says this old atheist—there’s no such thing as too many books! Unless you’re driving a bookmobile and crash into a lake, in which case you’re going down like an anvil.