“Saw a big Brangus Steer standing right over there so I rustled up a fire, cooked him medium rare. Bar-B-Q’ed his brisket, a roasted his rump, fed my dog that ol’ Brangus Steer’s hump.” From Eat Steak, written by Jim Heath.

Some find the term “comic book” to be annoying. By and large these pamphlets, now in many different forms and media, hardly are “comic” in the traditional sense of the word. Most contemporary stories are more or less along the lines of “let’s stop the world from ending,” although there are quite a number of tales about “what should we do now that the world has ended?”

We have another term that is of similar usage, although it’s a much more acceptable term. That word is “hamburger.” There’s no “ham” in hamburger. The United States Food and Drug Administration — assuming it’s still in business by the time you read this — has strict rules on how hamburger meat can be made, prepared and sold, and quite frankly these rules sound pretty useful. Well, unless you’re a vegan; I do realize several vegans actually read comic books, before they eat them.

So you can’t find a hamburger made out of ham… and it’s damn hard to find a comic book that is comic.

Sure, there’s Mad, the wonder of my childhood and the entity that made me what I am today — well, that and the original Mars Attacks! cards. I discovered Mad when I was eight, having swiped a copy from my sister’s comics stash. I immediately conned my parents into subscribing. Back in those days we had “funny animal comics” and that category included Harvey’s ghosts, devils and ghouls as well as Dell’s Disney and Looney Tunes titles. But while these stories often were funny, they weren’t really “comic” in the LOL sense of the word. Please note, I greatly enjoy the works of Warren Kremer and Carl Barks; both then and now.

But when it comes to sheer off-the-wall humor, the stuff enjoyed by readers who preceded me became relatively extinct. Humor need not be linear, and it really shouldn’t be so constrained. I had to wait until the underground comix movement of the late 1960s for that sort of stuff, which I truly loved. This stuff changed the way I viewed American comics. I became friends with the likes of Jay Lynch, Skip Williamson, and Denis Kitchen, three brilliant cartoonists, who had they been born two generations later, might be in El Salvador today.

With our current, wonderful explosion of comics genres and the matching growth of cultural influences from our present band of pen-and-ink minstrels, there are quite a number of truly comic comic books out and about. Many are produced by unusual humans who passed for normal before they were allowed to go to their drawing boards and go nuts. Hilary Barta, Dee Fish, Don Simpson, Ryan Pagelow, Andrew Pepoy… Dan Parent has been able to extend the boundaries of traditional Archie fare to bring new life and energy into the stalwart franchise and he has become one of my favorite cultural insurrectionists.

There used to be quite a prejudice against any types of comics that were not heroic fantasy…and in color. Generally, this attitude was found in the brainpans of some comics shop owners and certain comics distributors. These folks seemed to conflate “humor” with “children”, and they felt children were too high maintenance and they didn’t spend any serious money. Well, Magic and Pokemon provided them wrong.

At the time, I maintained, rather loudly, that if you shoo away the kids, who’s going to buy your “serious” comic books a decade later?

DC used to blurb “Comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” Yes, and that was reflected by the majority of their output — as well as Marvel’s and, to a smaller percentage, the so-called independent publishers. So now, finally, it turns out comics aren’t just for adults anymore.

It’s still an uphill struggle. I would love to see a Mad/Sick/Cracked comic book that was rethought from the ground up employing the services of the gifted creators I mentioned above and those out there in the webcomics ether. This non-existent title would overlook the approaches to humor in the 20th century and be targeted to those whose worldview was shaped not by Don Martin and Dick deBartolo, or the Muppets and Family Guy. We need off-the-wall humor more today than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis (google it if you need to), and that’s true of readers of all ages, political persuasions, and tastes.

Wacky is, as wacky does.