Craig Fischer here. I’m a long-time comics fan who occasionally writes about this hobby (obsession?) we all share. Even though I don’t work at Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find, I’ve been asked to contribute a monthly column to the Heroes blog about comics that I’ve found provocative, infuriating, etc. I’ll begin with a story.

Last Saturday, I was shopping in an indoor antique mall in West Jefferson, North Carolina when I stumbled across a box of reasonably priced, lightly worn copies of National Lampoon. I searched the box for Lampoon issues from the first five years—1970 through 1975, when Harvard Lampoon alumni Henry Beard and Doug Kinney, along with fearless and talented contributors, turned Nat Lamp into the greatest America humor magazine—but no luck. People who own 1970-75 Nat Lamps hold on to them. I did, however, find and buy a later issue, from October 1976, and it’s still sharp. Each issue of Nat Lamp had a theme (such as “Paranoia,” “Isolationism and Tooth Care” and “Sin”) and October ’76’s theme is “The Funny Pages,” the name of Nat Lamp’s regular comic section, which took over most of its pages for just this month. The cover itself is a goofy parody of a Golden Age Superman comic.

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