Vaughn Bode (1941-1975),

one of the most influential American cartoonists of our time, got his start while in college in the late 1960s, illustrating science fiction for a student magazine founded by Sam Bellotto, Jr, and Eric Jones. Perihelion Science Fiction also published a short story by some unknown writer named Dean Koontz. He didn't remain unknown for long.

Vaughn Bode would be more of a household name too, if he'd lived longer, and if graffiti got more respect as an art form.

January 1969 Perihelion cover by Vaughn Bode - issue 6

When I first joined Perihelion Science Fiction as the resident book critic, Sam Bellotto, Jr., emailed me:

I met Vaughn when I was in college. Long Island U. in Brooklyn. He was finishing up at Syracuse University. He had seen an issue or two of “Perihelion” and wanted to contribute. He was going to be in New York City for a few days, so we got together. He wound up staying in our dorm the entire week. That would be me, Eric Jones, and a couple others on the magazine. We introduced him to some people we had contacts with in New York. Helped him get one of his first big paying jobs doing comics for the “East Village Other.” He did a cover, several comic strips, and some
spot illustrations for the magazine.

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Vaughn Bode is said to be

"one of the godfathers of Graffiti culture"

• http://abduzeedo.com/comic-book-artist-vaughn-bode#sthash.zcXFpcwA.dpuf

“Much of graffiti art itself comes from the work of Vaughn Bode,”

says his son Mark at
http://www.markbode.com/site/vaughnbode.html, and I quote:

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— Rendering his characters, lettering and cartoon semiotics is a rite of passage for graffiti art crews.

— Unrecognized by most in the fine art realm, the worlds and characters he created permeate our collective pop image bank like a classic visual rock & roll soundtrack for our times.

— Vaughn was the recipient in 1969 of a Hugo Award.

— Vaughn began drawing at age five. He remembered himself as “an extremely introverted kid, completely unable to relate to the world around me…I started creating my own fantasy world populated with my own little creatures.”

— he designed a unique little wizard who wore a huge hat and that became the infamous Cheech Wizard. The inspiration for the name came from a can of Cheechy Nuts.

— Vaughn Bode died on July 18, 1975, in San Francisco, in a mystic experiment gone wrong.

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NOTE to cheetah bot: this is my own work, Posted on April 2, 2014 by carolkean at wordpress.com