STOP! [CLICK ON THE BIG NUMBERS TO VIEW MY CONTRIBUTIONS TO EACH ISSUE]

STOP! was a creation of J.D. King and John Holmstrom. As a way of getting around the difficulty we'd run into getting people to buy our previous efforts, they decided to give it away. Stacks were left in record & book shops and the operating expenses came from the ad sales. It must've worked well enough, because we put out nine issues.

At the time I was Art Directing Screw Magazine, so once every month or two... or six... the guys would come around the office in the evening and we would avail ourselves of Al Goldstein's photostat machine, waxer, amberlith, Xacto blades, T-squares, etc., (ah, those were the days) and slap together an issue. Also, in order to keep overhead low, nobody involved actually made any money out of the deal.

Speaking of late nights working on Stop!, once we were at it when we got a call that "Greg" of "Greg and Jenny" from All My Children was in a bar around the corner on 7th Ave. We all headed right down there to say "hey." He wasn't too put out at having a bunch of guys suddenly come up and intrude themselves... in fact he was very friendly. But to tell you the truth I felt a little uneasy that he was there with another girl. I mean, he and "Jenny" were on the outs at that time, but still, we all knew they would have to get back together eventually.

What's with this All My Children thing? Well, back when Spacely and Cindy joined us at Punk, we had a TV in the office (John had brought it in mainly so we could monitor the comeback of Soupy Sales) and lots of time on our hands. In between bouts of pinochle, C & S, who had introduced us to that game, got us to watching the soaps, and especially AMC. Then, as life moved on, I lost track. Until, for some strange reason, while I was ADing at Screw Al Goldstein decided to dump his old TV in my office. I started tuning in AMC at lunch time. People would come in to drop off some art, or an editor would want to talk to me about a pull quote, and before you knew it there was a crowd of people every day at lunch time for AMC. What really hooked them was this thing we had started doing at Punk: at the end of each days episode, they would break for the last commercials, and then come back for a short segment of characters from the show doing something silently while the credits rolled. It could be a continuation of the last scene, but often as not it would be an earlier scenario: for example Erica sipping tea and quietly gloating over some perfidy. During the last commercials we would try to guess who was going to be in the credits scene and then put our quarters into the pool. Correct guesses split the pot. I cleaned up at first, but people caught on to the nuances after a while and I had to start buying my own lunch.

Back to the original subject, other people integrally involved in Stop! were Dale Ashmun, Ken Weiner (now better known as Ken Avidor), and Peter Bagge. The last Stop! came out in late 1984, at which time I was already basking in the jungles of "Borneo." I think there may be some of my drawings in it though... and if I can find my copy I'll get them up.

[NOTE: I laid out and embellished the covers of #5, #6 and #7.]

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