The Smudge Remastered!
What was Randal Huiskens doing in High School? Why, putting out a publication called The Smudge, of course. Actual copies of the publication today are rare, but now, it is being remastered! The stories, drawings and cartoons from this ground-breaking publication are being faithfully restored and presented online as The Smudge Remastered. Find out what a small group of high school students in the early eighties already knew! The Smudge is a humorous and entertaining publication, and now, you can read it too!
THE SMUDGE - NO. 1
Contains several humorous stories and cartoons, including "Geometry Hurts," "Skalpel, M.E.," and "David's Goodbye To Romance." Also featuring cartoons such as "Kingfish," "Dwight," "WZOO," and "Early One Afternoon At Dewey's Pub," and the strangest Reader Survey ever published! It's 8 pages of Smudgetastic Fun!Click Here To Read This Issue!
Some Notes On The Smudge Remastered
The restoration of The Smudge is currently an ongoing project with me, and it is quite a process. I do not have access to the original artwork and pasteups at this time. I believe they still exist, but after numerous attempts to try to retrieve the originals from the person who has them, I have resigned myself to restoring the issues from the printed copies. That wouldn't be a problem had they been printed with offset lithography, but The Smudge was a mimeographed publication, and the school mimeograph did not exactly produce the most faithfull results, including the complete inability to print a nice solid black. In addition, some of the pages have faded over time, and some of the issues I have only 1 somewhat tattered copy of.Still, I am putting my best foot forward and am doing my best to make this material come alive again. I have scanned all the copies I have and am carefully adjusting the contrast to darken and refine the line art, then adding color to what was originally a black-and-white publication. As I progressed through the first issue, I started to become more excited about the process. The strength of the material started to shine through, and the addition of color made it come alive in a way that it never previously had.
As I have worked on restoring The Smudge and have reviewed the early issues, I was struck by how some of the material was so representative it was of its time. It is easy to forget that as a youth in the eighties, there was a different kind of "perpetual war," going on, the Cold War. The Smudge featured many references to impending destruction such as nuclear explosions and caricatures of political leaders pushing red buttons. Other references that may be lost on today's reader are cultural, such as the Kingish cartoon in the first issue. If you were around in the late seventies/early eighties, you were probably aware of the NBC TV show "Real People," and that ABC followed this with their own version of reality TV with "That's Incredible," which is the basis for the joke of that cartoon. If not, well, perhaps this will help to explain the joke.
Much of the humor is timeless, though. Unlike a Saturday Night Live skit that features cultural references that are so rooted in the current time, The Smudge usually took a silly, timeless approach to humor, which makes it as humorous today as it was when it was first published in the early eighties. I hope you enjoy it, and look forward to brining you subseqent issues of The Smudge - Remastered!
--Randal Huiskens
