KID COMIX, an underground comic mag in Vekllei

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

There are some comics that Vekllei syndicates just won’t publish. KID Magazine, or KID Comix ran for nearly a century. It was picked up and dropped by dozens of anonymous artists, writers and editors, all operating under nonsense pseudonyms — Red, Squick, Failson and Daddy Fun were some of the longest-serving. It would go out of print for years, until some contributing artist would revive the mailing list and recruit new editors and writers. Not even editors knew the names of their team — and so KID became a rag-tag, pornographic, angry, satire comic published anonymously anywhere from biannually to a dozen times a year and distributed through universities, underground comics syndicates and workplaces. A single copy might be repressed dozens of times and redistributed further, making original copies collector’s items.

Issue 36 blasted Vekllei munitions trade with the United States, which was by this point gripped by economic collapse as the industrial centres of the South were levelled by poverty and fighting.

The comic is not subtle: a stereotypical Vekllei girl complete with gi and fountain hairpiece offers an artillery shell to a deformed pigman soldier carrying the U.S. flag and an atom bomb. The girl wears the national flower on her apron. The pigman sits atop a throne of food and corpses, as he himself decomposes. Subtitled in English by Squick: “Just let the fucker DIE”.

The article inside parodied the sitting U.S. President, W. E. White, using Vekllei munitions as sex toys before one of them detonates and he flies off into the moon.

Such was the tone of the magazine, one of the most important examples of underground comix culture in the world and a landmark training ground for successful comix artists.

Post scriptum: Tzipora was introduced to KID through a contributing writer at her university. As a fluent English speaker she served for some time as KID’s first and only English editor, and would later contribute both art and articles to the magazine.

Let me know if you have any questions!