Media of the Moment: April 2006 Archives

A friend was kind enough to lend me this hardcover, a 1968 first printing (on Grove Press) of The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-geist, written by Michael O'Donoghue and drawn by Frank Springer. (Click the cover for a much larger [220 KB] image.) I have no idea how you'd find a copy of this thing (OK, it seems to go for around $70 on eBay) but I like it a lot -- it's a beautifully rendered parody of the damsel-in-distress comics genre with chapter titles like "Peril Diving," "Abjection Overruled," and "Impending Doom: The Early Years." Phoebe loses her clothes in episode I, dies in Episode III ("Sorry, but that's the way things turned out," says the narrator, before going on to chronicle the continuing adventures of Phoebe's corpse) and is revivified in Chapter VI by an eskimo priest (!) who means to sacrifice her. If you don't mind squinting, you can read the whole thing as a Flickr set.