THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 80

When I was a kid I was constantly ensorcelled by the wall of tiny text & brutalist images that made up the Johnson Smith catalog ads that were ubiquitous in the backs of comics. I never ordered anything from them, but the ads really got me, not as a successful ad in making me buy something but as a cultural object. My friend Andrew Horwitz ordered from them & he got their actual catalog with his order. A hundred pages of cheaply printed, newsprint mystery! The descriptions were frequently hilarious with semi-strategic & semi-random “placement” of quotation marks. Johnson Smith sold an awesome mixture of Sea Monkeys, joy buzzers, ventriloquist dolls, x-ray specs, lucky rabbit’s feet, stink bombs, rubber masks, exploding cigarettes, fake noses, pocket knives, militaria, trick dice, rubber chickens, magic rocks, whoopee cushions, martial arts manuals & everything in between. The Johnson Smith Company was established in 1914 by Alfred Johnson Smith. In the early days it sold hoodoo supplies, secret society rings, tobacco pipes & guns along with the novelty items you would expect. The catalog was recommended by either Anton LaVey or Boyd Rice or both, I can’t remember as a propagator of this seedy underworld of carnie culture that was a constant companion to America’s children through comics. When we set up the PORK shop, Johnson Smith was one of my key influences. During those heady years in Eugene I happened on a yard sale of someone who used to sell novelty goods from their garage, I bought everything of interest. Ultimately, the charm of the catalog & the ads in particular was in stimulating my brain to the possibility of these things. Comic book ads were like that in general, 100 plastic soldiers for a dollar, the instant life of Sea Monkeys, become a musclebound Atlas instead of a 98 pound weakling. It was the possibilities that opened up vistas in my mind. I never bought anything from them, I didn’t have to, I was too busy creating things in my head.