Reefer Madness: anthology of funny old weed-scare comic books

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/20/reefer-madness-anthology-of-f.html

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smoke-weed-everyday-Chappelle

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Dollman is based on a comic book series?

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Kitty

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http://www.ep.tc/problems/

Reminds me of Comics With Problems!

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03%20PM

  • paranoid
  • smokes weed for the first time
  • paranoia gone

checks out

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The cover seen here on he left,

was absolutely cribbed from a contemporary pinup photograph of Virginia Mayo.

But I can’t find it now!

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Goes inside drugstore

“Now I forgot why I came in here.”

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I need to finish scanning this issue. “Marijuana - Assassin of Youth” is an amazing piece of racist paranoia mixed with incredibly over-the-top lies. And it sounds just like something out of a Jeff Sessions speech.

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I always hated the stiff uniformity of “Leroy” mechanical lettering, but it’s use in a couple of the excerpts posted here makes me think that they were taken from old EC comics, which along with Classics Illustrated were the only comic book companies that I know of to use it regularly. Apparently other companies used it for some of their titles, but not all of them.

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ISO 3098

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What? You missed this classic!

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The history of cannabis suppression is steeped in racism. Originally against Latinos and subsequently African Americans. It was, and still is, terribly effective and those racist enforcement policies became a cornerstone of Nixon’s War on Drugs.

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Ron Mann, director of the first major documentary about the birth of underground and exploitation comix also made the first major doc about the racist motivations behind cannabis prohibition. Both excellent films and surprisingly relevant to this post:


Edited to change one of the trailers that sucked.

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there’s a youtube video of Ed Piskor giving a demo of one of these sets that @beschizza shot. Pretty interesting, and of course Ed knew the whole history of them and broke that down, too.

assuming Rob follows that @, Ed’s account was suspended for inactivity but now he’s back posting Grand Design, except under the generic BB account. Is that on purpose (he isn’t trying to deal with another social media account–totally understandable) or can we get it enabled again? He used to be pretty active in the HHFT comment threads, it was nice.
52%20PM

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took me a second. it’s the lettering in that wiki link, not the Leroy Lettering Set type
link to osifont type

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Haha…seriously, this is like celebrating Nazi comic books about the heinousness of Jews. These are pure propaganda that propped up a (ongoing) racist crime against humanity. I know white hipsters like to make ironic fun of these old rags but let’s not lose the thread. Millions of people, largely poor and non-white, have had their lives destroyed by the anti-cannabis laws these repulsive comics helped support.

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Thank you MF. I will never inhale again… " Oh, look 420!"

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