Click on the link below and you’ll find yourself transported to a magical website where most of the pages from the entire Stig’s Inferno run have been scanned by fans for my brother’s homepage. Lots of free fun. That’s why the internet exists, for Buddah’s SAKE!
Ty Templeton's ART LAND!! 
This is my first exposure to Stig’s Inferno; I read about it on CBR. It seems to me that Ty must have watched a LOT of Monty Python and listened to a certain amount of Firesign Theater in his misspent youth. That’s a compliment, by the way.
I never heard any of the Firesign Theater growing up, my first exposure to it was in my late twenties (after Stig was finished) and I didn’t love it…to me it was trying too hard. (I’ve heard it had many followers, and I probably heard the wrong episodes to start off with, it was an album called with Marx and Lennon on the cover (Grouchy Marx and John Lennon) so I don’t begrudge its fans just because I got to it late…) Most of my comedy came from Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad Comics and Mad Magazine, from Not Brand Ecch (a slavish copy of Mad Comics) and from Playboy (which of course, featured Kurtzman’s Little Annie Fannie). Of course I was into Python, everyone was back in the late Seventies/early Eighties (in fact, my eleven year old JUST watched HOLY GRAIL last night for the second time), but I don’t think Python was in my brain when I was writing Stig (other than the obvious connection to the name Stig itself, which comes from the “Rutles” movie). I was going for cartooning sources primarily, Pogo, Doonsebury, Mad, Not Brand Ecch, B Kliban, Gahan Wilson, National Lampoon (a HUUUGE influence) and places where cartoonists ruled. Glad to see the CBR article brought a new reader!
Ty the Guy
Pretty much all of the stuff you mentioned was part of my education. Except for the fact that I’ve never really delved in to Pogo. I was a fiend for Not Brand Ecch, though, and I especially loved Marie Severin’s style.
I’m not a huge fan of Firesign, in general, but certain cuts really bowled me over. Especially “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger…” from the album that you mentioned. Which was probably because, in turn, I was a big fan of old time radio shows like The Shadow and the Green Hornet.
And of course I know what you mean about Python. Watching them on PBS, back then, was practically a sacrament. (Particularly since that was around the same time that we were trying out a certain herb.)
Okay, you will like this, then. When my second son was born, my wife and I considered naming him Jake Danger Templeton, so at some point, he could claim “Danger is my middle name” and prove it with his driver’s license. We were actually hovering over the birth certificate with a pen, and I broke and said “No, wait, he’s a human being, not a bar joke.” So his middle name turned out to be “Peter”. He’s fifteen years old now, and says he wished we’d named him Danger. But he’s at that age. Believe it or not, I’ve never watched or listened to Python while high on anything. They also say they never worked while on chemicals (except for Graham, of course, who was a raging alcoholic for years), and I’m not sure it would work. The comedy is sufficiently cerebral that I wouldn’t want to miss anything. This is NO judgment at all, I’m a musician, and ALL of my band mates smoke the ganga like chimneys when they play, and I’m not against any of that behavior whatsoever, it just never seemed like a way to enjoy Python for me. It’s more of a Saturday Night Live drug anyway.
As for Marie Severin, I had the astoundingly rare treat of working with her on her retirement story. She specifically requested that I wrote her a “Not Brand Ecch” style story for the Batman: Black and White series as her last art job, which is did about seven or eight years ago. It was called “The Secret of Batsman” and is found in the B:B&W anthology that has the Mike Mignola cover.
ALSO: Because we’re both sound junkies, my wife and I go to sleep every night to an episode of the Shadow, the Superman radio show, an episode of Hitchhikers, one of the dramatizations of Jane Austen, or an old Bob and Ray episode. She’s not as fond of Gangbusters, Dragnet or Lone Ranger, so I tend to pop those ones in when she’s out of town….but olde tyme radio is a MUST around our home. The kids do it too, but tend towards comedy albums by Seinfeld, Mitch Hedberg, Steven Wright, as much as they do old Shadow and Superman shows.
We seem to have a lot in common!
Ty the Guy.
My wife and I gave some thought to naming our first “Wolfgang”, but didn’t want to seem like we were aping Van Halen. As you said, now he says he wishes we had gone for it (Cullen is 20, by the way and uses Wolfgang as a pseudonym). But hey, if we’d started that, the kids names would probably be Wolfgang, Boris, and Magenta; so it’s probably as well that we didn’t. I always thought that being stoned heightened my appreciation of the subtleties of Python; but then again, one tends to ‘think’ things like that when one is stoned.
And I was in a band for a while, back in the 80s. “It was the best of times… it was the worst of times.” It’s a looooong story, but hilarious in spots.
I’ll have to see about getting a copy of the anthology that you mentioned. I don’t believe that I’ve read that one.
I haven’t listened to the old time radio shows at bedtime for a while, as they tend to keep me awake following the plot instead of putting me to sleep. That, and the fact that I tend to ‘rewrite’ the dialog in my head. If I’m not careful, I can be awake for way too long re-imagining an episode of say, ‘The Green Hornet’. Meanwhile, across the hall, my younger son sleeps to stuff like Rap and Hip-Hop. Go figure.
Oh, before I click Post; I just got to issue 6 of Stig’s Inferno. The homage to Elder is fantastic, and the waitress’ Beehive Hairdo literally made me snort beer out my nose!