By Nick Green
By the mid-70s, when Raeburn entered elementary school, Wertham’s suggestion in a 1954 Reader’s Digest article that comic books would result in the delinquency of America’s youth had been largely dismissed as overzealous crackpot theorizing. But if Raeburn had been born a generation earlier, he might well have suffered the fate of thousands of kids no different from himself: comics collections were burned, ripped apart, and destroyed before children’s very eyes in the cold war era’s second biggest witch-hunt.
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Six months later the Imp was born. Raeburn explained the title in his introduction to the first issue: “Comic books were intended for kids…[but] are still clearly the work of the devil.” He wrote, designed, marketed, and distributed the issue all by himself–standard practice among zine makers but nerve-racking nonetheless–and financed the first issue with his life savings, a thousand dollars he had squirreled away in his bank account.
With the issue on Ware, Raeburn broadened the scope of his criticism by writing articles on the 1900 Sears catalog and surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, two undeniable influences on Ware’s comics. But it was hard to present a complete context for Ware’s complex work. “It was particularly difficult trying to write about the compiled version of ‘The Acme Novelty Library’ that Ware was putting together at the time, especially since the third issue of the Imp came out before the book was even published,” Raeburn says. “Even though Ware was incredibly kind and patient with me, no one likes to talk about works in progress. I don’t want to make the Imp into an excuse for torturing working artists.”
