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Chicken Gutz

I loved Chicken Gutz when I was in high school and college –by my buddy, our brilliant cartoonist, Randy Enos. Randy writes about the strip here …


If I’m ever remembered for anything at all, after I pass on to that great slanted drawing board in the sky, it’ll most likely be for Chicken Gutz, the comic strip I created for The National Lampoon in the early 1970’s. Shortly after I started illustrating for them, they instituted their Funny Pages. They asked me and a goodly number of other cartoonists to come up with some strips that would run every month. My contribution was Chicken Gutz. He was a little man who wore a tall black hat upon which stood a bird. The bird was never named and functioned as a spokesman (or spokesbird) commenting on and criticizing  the various goings on that unfolded below him. The little man in the hat was totally unaware of the bird but the bird was certainly aware of the man.

The name Chicken Gutz came from a phrase my high school friends were always saying, “suck chicken guts”. The idea of a bird on someone’s head came from a photo I once saw of a girl in a Greenwich Village club that had a big crow standing on her head. I started doing a little man with a bird on his head. Chicken Gutz first appeared in an animated commercial I had done for an insurance company. Later when I worked at Pablo Ferro Films, I did a painting that was on a piano hinge to cover our rear projection screen. The painting was of a man with a bird on his head confronted by a bird with a man on his head.

My intention with the strip was to create a really different kind of comic strip than was being seen in the venues of the day. I wanted to break some rules. I wanted it to be totally free to pursue any avenues I wished to pursue.

The first thing that was different was that I lettered most of the balloons in cursive or what we used to call “long-hand.” I left myself free to smudge the ink, spatter it, blob it, and to generally create a mess. In Chicken Gutz, trees and brooks and rocks could talk, God or the Devil might make an appearance, the characters could talk to the reader and even the very structure (the panel outlines, word balloons etc.) of the strip could be subject to break-downs. Gravity and other laws were always ignored in favor of, hopefully, a laugh. I indulged my interest in the nostalgia of the old radio days and my love of the old early comics. I didn’t want it to look like anyone else’s style and I think I succeeded. The strip could be a nightmare to the copy editor, the long-suffering and wonderful Louise Gikow, who once advised me to just put a comma after every word because it would be easier to remove the unnecessary ones than to put in all the necessary ones. But, she was great because she always understood the purposeful misspellings.

One important feature of the Gutz strip was the use of commentary around the edges of the panels in which I would write notes to friends, fake advertisements, and all sorts of ridiculous space fillers. I couldn’t seem to be able to tolerate empty space in the panels. All this seemed to appeal to my readers who would write to me in an effort to get their names in the strip. One fellow wanted to propose to his girlfriend through the strip –so he did. I lost a wallet in a taxi in New York (again) and I thanked the driver, Nelson Cisneros in the strip when he returned it to me. Another guy named Gene mailed me an old advertisement depicting a 50’s woman opening a refrigerator. He said that he was hoping to get his name in the strip by doing so. I replied (in a border of the strip) that “No, Gene, you don’t get your name in the strip by mailing me a lousy advertisement of a woman opening a refrigerator!” One of my friends “Kathryn from Nantucket” almost became a regular character in the strip because I mentioned her so much. In the strip shown here in the column, you can see my reference to her singing at the “Brotherhood of Thieves” in Nantucket over on the right side of the last panel. Because of this note, an old high school friend of hers reunited with her by showing up one day while she was singing.

I got a lot of fan mail on the strip even years and years after it had ceased publication. I also got presents from fans like a 16” high stained glass replica of Mr. Gutz. I got a little stuffed Chicken Gutz doll, an embroidered Gutz and also a denim shirt with a large Gutz embroidered on the back. I got an actual laboratory slide of chicken guts and some sort of a partial rubber face (medical?) and a big set of colorful Mexican cards that have pictures of animals, humans and objects with the Spanish names. I lined the doorway of my studio with them. My biggest fan was a girl named Snooki that wrote me voluminous tomes. She was very creative sometimes writing in mirror image. I never met Snooki but I was privy to every turn in her life from being a Black Oak Arkansas groupie to finally a married woman with a daughter. Snooki wrote to only three people, Charles Manson, David Bowie and me. She threatened to come to visit me a few times but never did. She phoned me once or twice. I actually heard from her a couple of years ago.

Gutz appeared as a half- page for a while and then a full page (or the other way around. I forget). He appeared only once in color in a Christmas issue.

He also appeared later on in two long features in the same issue of the Fantagraphics “Blab” (issue 18).

He has also appeared in a new magazine called American Bystander.

A while back, I wondered what it would be like to do a daily strip because I have never done one. So, I created a blog where I could resurrect my old tall hatted friend and do a strip a day. I think I did about 45 or so but got derailed by a big children’s book project. You can see my aborted daily strip efforts here: http://chickengutz.blogspot.com/

One experience with the fans sticks in my mind. Bobby London who did a strip for the Lampoon (and also Playboy) called Dirty Duck was staying with Leann and me for a while. I introduced Bobby to Bud Sagendorf who drew Popeye. Many years later after Bud died, Bobby ended up doing Popeye.

One day I got a letter from a Gutz fan and having nothing else to do that day, I suggested to Bobby that we both draw some fantastic pictures for the college kid. We spent all day making the most elaborate drawings and sent them off knowing that it would blow this kid’s mind. I was right –he sent back the most fantastic letter describing his incredulity when he opened our package. He promised to be our slave, wash our cars, etc., forever and ever.

You see, cartooning can sometimes be a whole lot of fun.

“Don’t neglect that right back fender there!”

Email Randy Enos
 

Read more more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the National Cartoonists Society

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Randy and the National Lampoon

Here’s another memory from our cartoonist Randy Enos

New Magazine in Town

One day in the 70’s, I was trudging along Madison Avenue, doing my rounds, lugging my big black portfolio, when I bumped into the cartoonist Stan Mack. After I helped him to his feet, he told me about a new magazine that had come to town from Harvard, The National Lampoon.

Stan said, “Get over there and show ’em your stuff, everybody’s working for them!” So, I went down the street to 59th and went up to the offices they shared with Weight Watchers to meet the art director Michael Gross. After looking through my portfolio, he gave me an assignment and for the next 15 years, I worked for the humor magazine (long after the founders Henry Beard and Doug Kenney and even Mike Gross had left).

I became very close friends with Mike and his family until his wife and finally, he, died just a few years ago. I worked with him through his stints at Esquire, Mobil Oil, his own design firm, an avant garde, sophisticated porno site and his Hollywood career, producing films like Ghost Busters.

Shortly after I had joined the Lampoon family, I was asked to contribute a comic strip to their new Funny Pages. My strip Chicken Gutz went on for many years. Occasionally I would throw in additional comic strips like my As The Tears Jerk which was a kind of soap opera strip and Specks-the smallest cartoon characters in the world which was a tiny strip consisting of tiny spots which talked to each other.

The work I did illustration-wise for the magazine was different than my regular lino-cut stuff I did for Time, The New York Times, N.B.C., Playboy, etc. in that I didn’t use my own style. Because of the nature of the material, I was required to assume other styles in parody. So, I did Picasso, Robert Crumb, Heinz Edelman (Yellow Submarine), Rube Goldberg etc..

I worked a lot on features written by Michael O’Donoghue, Sean Kelly, Doug Kenney and others. BUT… along with this, I was sometimes asked to pose in photo shoot parodies. One such shoot occurred on a day on which I had delivered a job to them and was on my out the door. I was getting very sick with the flu or something and I wanted to rush home. Mike Gross stopped me and pleaded with me to do this photo shoot. He said, “I know what a ham you are and you’re perfect for this. So … I did it. It was the poster for The National Lampoon Show which Ivan Reitman was producing. It starred Belushi and Radner and others (before Saturday Night Live).

The poster (below) consisted of a large title at the top and then four panels showing a back view of me in a trench coat trying to get a pretty model to laugh.

Panel one: I’m giving myself a hotfoot.

Panel two: I’m tipping my top hat. There’s a rubber chicken draped across my noggin.

Panel three: I’m slamming an ice cream cone into my head (remember, I’m getting very sick at this point). We went through a huge box of ice cream cones (Hagen Dazs, no less) for take after take after take. All through my futile antics, the model is just bored… UNTIL in …

Panel four: I open my trench coat and she dies laughing. These posters were all over New York. Everywhere I went I saw the poster and the creative work done by grafitti thugs who portrayed graphically what the model was looking at.

At that time, my wife was doing a lot of acting in New York and one day she was stepping off a subway train with one of the actors that was in the play with her at the time. He had never met me. As they stepped off, guess what was right in front of them.

Without missing a beat, my wife said, “Oh, by the way, this is my husband.”

Randy Enos

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