Goose

[web-ed]

We're going to see now a bizarre little item called Goose. This is the first and, as far as I know, the only issue of this publication, which billed itself as "The Adult Humor Magazine with a Fowl Name". As we will see, the humor had a foul smell as well. Here is the issue's cover:


Cover of Goose #1 (September 1976)

So what we're dealing with is a more risqué - I don't know that I'd call it more "adult" - version of MAD. I really have to wonder why someone - and I have no idea who the publisher was - thought there was a lot of demand for this kind of material. Humorama was well into decline by this time, with its full-sized magazines (the digests were already gone) full of reprinted cartoons mostly from 20 years earlier and some black & white female nude photographs of varying quality (we've seen some of them in "Humorama Models to See More Of" elsewhere within this forum). If Humorama was
slowly failing (and I imagine Charlton's Good Humor wasn't selling well, either), then why launch a new publication with all strip gags and no girlie pictures?

Let's take a look at one of the features, "Old Englishe Idioms". I've chosen to start with the second page:



You can get only so much mileage out of goosing people before you have to come up with something else. They try it with "Cans" and, even worse, "Dong," but they don't get very far.

In the next post we'll learn that "A" is for "Arse"

[web-ed]

Let have some more lame humor from Goose now. I feel a little sorry for them - doing a good humor book is extremely difficult, and there was a lot of competition in a similar style with MAD, Cracked, Crazy, and Sick among others. We saw some "Olde Englishe Idioms" last time, so let's return to them and begin at the beginning with the letter "A":



This obviously makes no sense, although we have a nice bending-over pose. They should have taught next, "P" is for "Paddle" and here's how it's applied!


We keep our eye on the ball and The Behind in Mind here at CSR.

We might say that Goose's goose was cooked (although if I weren't exhausted and falling asleep here I probably wouldn't have) by a bad market, inept humor, and a limit on the variety of gags you can get out of goosing people.

[willjohn]

Is the round arsed lady getting a spanking with her diploma?

[hugob00m]

Hi Web-ed.

Interesting find.

I can see why Goose wasn't successful, with MAD having better writers. The drawings weren't too bad, though. I especially liked the one you chose as the centerpiece, the young lady with a well-rounded education (and that's not all she had that was well-rounded! ) bending over to receive her diploma.

[web-ed]

Is the round arsed lady getting a spanking with her diploma?

No, but she should have been. That would give a double-meaning to what B00m said, that she was "bending over to receive her diploma" - and how!

If Goose had broadened its horizons, so to speak, and embraced not only goosing but also pratfalls, behinds in jeopardy, and most of all, spanking - they might have found more maneuvering room for gags and sketches. And if they had broadened them more...well, they might have found themselves doing exactly what Humorama, Good Humor, and lesser men's humor mags of the day (some of which we've seen on CSR) were already doing, so it's really hard to see how they could have implemented a successful marketing strategy.

I'm not even sure why I included Goose here. It didn't have any actual spanking, and although it does represent a Missed Opportunity, I didn't post it under that topic because it's not really a comic book. Maybe because it was an odd item, which tends to appeal to me, and goosing does have some comedic possibilities. Which brings me to...

I should mention I have no interest in actual goosing even though years before I found Goose on Ebay (and I have to be careful not to reveal too much here), I had a hand in creating a super-villain who did enjoy goosing women - but that series died before I could put any actual spankings into it as I intended to. In case anyone is wondering, I couldn't create a spanking super-villain because that had been done before (twice!) with The Spanker and The Paddler. Dan's Captain Woodshed is the foremost spanking super-hero for me - that is, a super-hero who spanked bad girls - but I did create a super-heroine who was into spanking as a kind of parody of Wonder Woman (who else?).

Now, this story isn't a challenge the way "Who Was the ACES Artist?" sort of is (premiering today over on the main site in the Art Gallery). I say "sort of" because I don't really expect anyone to guess the man's identity; I just want everyone to have fun wondering about who he could be and of course to enjoy seeing all that spanking art! And if anyone does figure it out before I reveal all (in two weeks), wonderful! With my goosing super-villain, no one really has any hope of identifying him because not only did the series die, it did so before I could get it into any comics stores, thus only a handful of people ever saw it. (Diamond, with its monopoly on distribution, refused to solicit the book even though they were taking no financial risk as I most certainly was. )

If anyone is truly curious, drop me a line, wait a few weeks , and I'll try to send you the goosing part by email (the entire 24-page comic is too large to send that way).

[willjohn]

A sensitive lady from Worcester
At a ball met a fellow who gorcester;
A lecherous guy
With blood in his uy,
So she ducked out before he sedorcester.

(A play on English pronunciation).

[willjohn]

Does the goose in the drawings remind anybody else of Groucho Marx?

[web-ed]

A sensitive lady from Worcester
At a ball met a fellow who gorcester;
A lecherous guy
With blood in his uy,
So she ducked out before he sedorcester.

(A play on English pronunciation).

That's actually quite a good limerick.

Does the goose in the drawings remind anybody else of Groucho Marx?

With his cigar and that black stripe as a kind of mustache? You know, I think he does!

Another possibility, since this was 1976, is that he was inspired by Steve Gerber's Howard the Duck over at Marvel, who also smoked a cigar. (Everybody remembers Howard from his appearances in Comics Galleries 1 and 2, don't they?). Howard was at about the peak of his popularity then, even staging a mock run for President as the candidate of the All-Night Party.

[butch46163@yahoo.com]

Don`t remember Goose Magazine but that round Arse lady will be in my mind forever Nice Find