Border Cops Read Reason (Hey Kids, Comics! Edition)
From the blog of Fantagraphics, publisher of Peter Bagge and Bob Levin's The Pirates & the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture, which we excerpted last December. The writer is Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics describing a trip he took to Canada:
Last December, Greg Zura and I traveled up to Vancouver for a day to attend meetings with our Canadian distributor, Raincoast Books. We headed back home in the early evening, after dinner, and hit the U.S. border around 8PM or so. It was an unusually quiet night with almost no traffic, and we pulled right up to the first available U.S. agent. As always, he asked us where we were coming from and what our business was in Vancouver. I told him we were publishers, visiting our distributor. He asked me, "What do you publish?" Things got weird from here:
ME: "Comic books"
AGENT: "Comic books? Ever heard of them 'underground' comic books?"
ME: "Uh, yeah."
At this point Greg and I look at each other and start to get nervous; is this a sting operation or is Ashton Kutcher about to jump out from behind the Peace Arch and yell "PUNK'D!"?
AGENT: "You ever read REASON magazine?"
At this point I just figured I met the world's least likely Peter Bagge fan, but no.
ME: "Uh, yeah, are you a Peter Bagge fan?"
AGENT: "Yeah, he's good, but you ever read about the Air Pirates?…Well, remember guys, you gotta spread the libertarian word. You gotta get out and pound the pavement. I can't do it all myself—I'm here all day!"
Whole thing here.
Question: Is "REASON…a firmly libertarian mag in the Ayn Rand model," as Reynolds avers? And if so, could somebody please tell that to readers pissed off at our coverage of Rand's 100th b-day?
Hat tip to Elizabeth Spiers of Mediabistro.