This isn’t really comics, but National Lampoon once boasted the best comics section of any publication of its era, and maybe any publication ever: Jeff Jones, Vaughn Bode, Bobby London, Shary Flenniken, Edward Gorey, B.K. Taylor, Gahan Wilson, Charles Rodriguez and many more were regularly featured along with cartoonists like Sam Gross, Jack Ziegler and B. Kliban. Brian McConnachie was an editor there for a number of years.

Brian would later write for SNL and SCTV and had there been other shows known by acronyms, he might’ve written for them too. I met him once and it was one of those situations that really only happens in New York, or at least in the New York of Woody Allen movies.

I was with a cartoonist friend on our way to lunch and amid shout outs of “Hey!” “How are you?” “You look well!” there was an outburst of handshaking and backpatting. Seconds later, I was being introduced to Brian, who probably forgot my name by the time he’d stepped off the curb 5 minutes later. Still, jokes and clever witticisms flew fast and furious, though I was only an observer, which would certainly be a good reason to forget my name.

Brian was then trying to put the funding together for a new magazine, The American Bystander, and my cartoonist friend and I were eager to hear about it, because we were always on the prowl for a job. The magazine never pulled together. Happily, I was blindly stumbling through the internet recently and saw that Brian’s still around.

Comedian Dennis Perrin paid him a visit and discussed a book coming up by Rick Meyerowitz that’ll be a history of National Lampoon, and Meyerowitz was one of the guys who was there with Brian. With a great title like Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great, this looks like my must read book of the summer.

[Artwork: The best cover of National Lampoon]