NEUROCOMICS TIMOTHY LEARY #1, 1979, 1ST PRINT, LAST GASP, UNDERGROUND COMIC NM for Sale

NEUROCOMICS TIMOTHY LEARY #1, 1979, 1ST PRINT, LAST GASP, UNDERGROUND COMIC NM For Sale

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NEUROCOMICS TIMOTHY LEARY #1, 1979, 1ST PRINT, LAST GASP, UNDERGROUND COMIC NM:
$69.35

Neurocomics Timothy Leary#1, 1979, 1st Print, Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, ID1 Underground Comic NM RARE

Only 1 left in stock - order soon

1st (only) printing. Cover and inks by Tim Kummero.Written by George DiCaprio (based on ideas by Timothy Leary). Art by Pete VonSholly. 7-in. x 10-in., 36 pages, black and white. MATURE READERS. Cover price$1.25.

In the realm of underground comics, Neurocomics isconsidered by many as nothing but a blip on the radar, a $15 comic book withthe name of psychedelic drug evangelist Timothy Leary emblazoned on the cover.For some collectors, the book seems to offer little more than a long-winded,confusing and obscure dissertation based on pseudo-science about the humanbrain. I can\'t entirely refute that perception, but I can contend that thedoctrine and concepts presented in Neurocomics should not be dismissed soeasily.

Of course, Timothy Leary is universally regarded as oneof the leaders of the 1960s drug culture, who coined the phrase \"tune in,turn on and drop out\" and influenced millions of people to takepsychoactive drugs for the first time. But by 1979, when Neurocomics waspublished, he was no longer widely proselytizing the use of psychedelics foreveryone. Instead, Leary was spreading the word about his eight-circuit modelof consciousness, which proposes that the human brain and nervous system arecomprised of eight circuits capable of producing eight distinct levels ofconsciousness, four of which are essential to the long-term survival of thehuman race (perhaps in another form of life).

The model is far too complex to completely explainedhere, but in essence Leary believed that there are eight circuits (or systems)of consciousness that are evenly divided between the two halves of the humanbrain. The lower-level circuits (the \"Larval Circuits\") are locatedin the left hemisphere and are commonly utilized by all adults. They are attunedto basic human functions like subsistence, communication, emotion, sexuality,politics, and morality. The upper-level circuits (the \"StellarCircuits\") reside in the right hemisphere and are much more cerebral,focusing on aesthetics, euphoria, self-analysis, philosophy, spirituality, andoneness with the universe.

Leary believed that the Stellar Circuits remainedessentially dormant in the human brain until the 20th century, when they beganto be activated by our DNA, which \"contains the blueprint design for billionsof years of evolution.\" Leary believed that Stellar Circuits offered anexpansion of consciousness that would lead to future scientific and socialprogress, including the migration of human life away from Earth and towardsextraterrestrial existence. Leary proposed that some people might activatetheir Stellar Circuits through spiritual endeavors and advanced technologies,including meditation, yoga, psychoactive drugs and other methods.

Neurocomics provides a detailed yet concise summary ofLeary\'s model, which was first presented in its fully developed state in hisbook Exo-Psychology (1977). To this day, many advocates of this model believeit provides a stable framework for mapping the advancement of their lifeexperiences. Several esteemed authors expounded on and refined theeight-circuit model, including Robert Anton Wilson in his landmark books CosmicTrigger (1977), Prometheus Rising (1983), and Quantum Psychology (1990).Together, Leary and Wilson promoted the idea of the human race living in outerspace and formed the anagram SMI²LE, which is presented (for the first time?)in Neurocomics. SMI²LE stands for space migration (SM), intelligence increase(I²) and life extension (LE).

Neurocomics was written by George DiCaprio based onTimothy Leary\'s extensive ruminations on the topic. Pete Von Sholly contributedthe artwork, which ain\'t bad considering the vast majority of the book iscomprised of the written word. Von Sholly is an accomplished illustrator whowent on to produce storyboards for over 100 feature films, including Nightmareon Elm Street (III and IV), The Mask, The Green Mile, and The ShawshankRedemption. DiCaprio has written and produced a multitude of underground comicsand entertained many counterculture celebrities while helping raise his son,Leonardo, in Los Angeles. Though a 32-page bookcannot possibly convey the full complexity of an elaborate concept like theeight-circuit model of consciousness, Neurocomics provides a concise primer onthe subject. In today\'s internet world, anyone who reads the book willcertainly be prepared to pursue endless research on the topic of the humanbrain and the fascinating world of Timothy Leary.

HISTORICAL FOOTNOTES: Last Gasp printed approximately10,000 copies of this comic book. It has not been reprinted.

In addition to developing the eight-circuit model ofconsciousness, which provides a pathway for humans to live extraterrestrial,Leary also wrote about colonizing outer space in Terra II: A Way Out (1974).His plan was to launch 5,000 physically fit and highly intelligent individualson a space ship (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities. Needless tosay, this never happened. In the 1980s, Leary began to embrace NASA scientistGerard O\'Neill\'s more realistic plans to construct and launch orbitingmini-Earths using existing technology and raw materials from the Moon. Hey,that sounds good to me! But no, that pipedream never made it into the federalbudget, as the U.S. government needed to spend trillions on wars, weapons andanti-missile technology.

COMIC CREATORS:

Tim Kummero - 1, 2-34 (inks, lettering), 36

Timothy Leary - 2-34 (script inspiration)

Pete Von Sholly - 2-34 (art, script collaboration)

George DiCaprio - 2-34 (script collaboration)

Disclaimer: Wemay have chosen to alter and block a portion of the cover of this particularcomic, because it containssimple drawings, sketches,cartoon funniesand caricatures,showing the features of its subjects in a humorouslyexaggerated and satirical way. ForAdults Only is printed on the cover because it’s not a children’s comic book.We have listed this issue in the Viewer Discretion Advised category to complyto ’s policies and rules concerning restricted items that may be consideredfor Mature Audiences only. However, it is at ’s discretion to prohibititems that they deem to be inappropriate and we agree with all of ’sdecisions to maintain a marketplace that all of members can enjoy. We willvoluntarily remove any cartoon comic book that may find unacceptable nowor any time in the future.

The following summaryof Timothy Leary is provided because he was one of the most intriguinghistorical figures of the 20th century and of great interest to scholars of thecounterculture in the 1960s and \'70s, which includes scholars of undergroundcomics.

In the first 39 yearsof his life, Dr. Timothy Leary had become a very successful psychologist(earning his Ph.D. at the University of California in 1950) and a facultymember at Harvard University. In the summer of 1960, Leary traveled to Mexicoand (after several shots of tequila) ingested psilocybin mushrooms for thefirst time. Years later, Leary stated that he \"learned more aboutpsychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than... in the precedingfifteen years of studying and doing research in psychology.\"

Upon returning toHarvard in the fall of 1960, Leary and his associates began a research programknown as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects ofpsilocybin on human subjects using a synthesized version of the drug, which waslegal at the time. The experiment began by treating alcoholism and reformingcriminals at Concord Prison, but later included giving LSD to (according toLeary) 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers. Learyreported that 75% of the test subjects reported the experience as one of themost educational and revealing experiences of their lives.

By 1962, Leary andHarvard associate Richard Alpert founded the International Foundation forInternal Freedom in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their foundation attracted manypeople who wanted to participate in the drug experiments conducted therein, butLeary could not accomodate everyone. In order to satisfy the curiosity of thosewho were turned away, a black market for psychedelic drugs developed near theHarvard campus. Not long after that, Harvard\'s administration realized what wasgoing on and both Leary and Alpert were fired.

In 1964, Learyco-authored The Psychedelic Experience with Ralph Metzner, in which they wrote:\"A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. Thescope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristicfeatures are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions,and of the ego or identity. Most recently [such experiences] have becomeavailable to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD,psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce thetranscendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind,frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.\"

Years later, Learyjoked about the potential side effects from using LSD: \"There are threeside effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory,and I forget the third.\"

In 1966 and \'67,Leary toured college campuses around the country to present a multi-mediaperformance called \"the Death of the Mind,\" which artisticallyreplicated the LSD experience. He also published Start Your Own Religion(1967), which encouraged people to establish their own cults with their ownparadigms.

One of Leary\'s mostnotable appearances occurred in January, 1967 at the Human Be-In in SanFrancisco, where he advised a throng of 20,000+ hippies in Golden Gate Park to\"turn on, tune in, drop out.\" The phrase, which Leary had coined theyear before, became his most famous quote and one of the most recognizedcatchphrases for the entire hippie generation (\"make love, not war\"and \"power to the people\" being other ones). The Human Be-In featuredbands like Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead, reknown beat poets, freefood (courtesy of the Diggers) and free acid (thanks to Owsley Stanley). It ledto similar events being held around the country and the world.

At the age of 47,Leary had evolved into a notorious counterculture figure, which naturally madehim a target of the U.S. government. In December of 1968, Leary was arrestedfor possessing two roaches of marijuana, which he claimed were planted by thearresting officer. In January of 1970, he was sentenced to ten years in prison(for two roaches). When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychologicaltests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Havingdesigned many of the tests himself (including the \"Leary InterpersonalBehavior Test\"), Leary answered them in a way that made him appear to be avery conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening. As aresult, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a low-security prison,California Men\'s Colony-West at San Luis Obispo. On a September night in 1970,Leary climbed a tree in the exercise yard, jumped onto the roof of thecellblock, shimmied along a telephone wire until he was over the barb-wirefence, and dropped to the highway below.

After escaping fromprison, Leary and his wife Rosemary were smuggled out of the country and intoAlgeria by the radical activist organization The Weathermen (for a fee of$25,000). The couple briefly hooked up with Eldridge Cleaver and the BlackPanther party\'s embassy in Algeria, but Cleaver was so dominant that it feltlike being back in prison. So the couple fled to Switzerland in 1971, but theirsituation didn\'t improve much, as their initial host was exiled French armsdealer Michel Hauchard, a ruthless bastard who stole much of Leary\'s $250,000advance from Bantam for his book Confessions of a Hope Fiend (1973). Afterescaping Hauchard\'s clutches, Rosemary got fed up with all the melodrama (andthe drugs, booze and Leary\'s philandering) and broke up with Leary in 1972.

Back in the states,President Nixon kept trying to bring Leary back to America to face justice, butSwitzerland\'s government refused to extradite him. Leary\'s two years offugitive life in Europe had many elements of glamour and excitement. Hebefriended English author Brian Barritt, who was no stranger to psychedelicdrugs and legal trouble himself. Barritt flew to Switzerland on Leary\'s requestto help Leary eradicate a bad case of writer\'s block. Together, they exploreddark alleyways of mysticism and the occult and even experimented a little toomuch with heroin. They kicked the drug after about a month.

The German band AshRa Tempel heard about Leary being in Switzerland and wanted to collaborate withhim on a musical project. Leary and Barritt had been working together on theLeary\'s model for circuits of consciousness (there were only seven at thetime), and suggested to Ash Ra Tempel that they make an album about thedifferent states of mind they had been experiencing. In August of 1972, witheveryone tripping on acid, they recorded the kaleidoscopic, mercurial albumSeven Up, which conveys musical interpretations of the Larval Circuits on sideone and the Stellar Circuits on side two. (There are several trippy musicalpassages on the album, which you can hear via the link provided above.)

In 1972 Leary alsomet French-born socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who he married at a hotel twoweeks after they were introduced. In January of 1973, Leary and Joanna traveledto Kabul, Afghanistan, where Leary thought he would be safe because Afghanistandid not have an extradition treaty with the United States. But Nixon, about toenter his second term, was tired of waiting for a legal opportunity to bringLeary back home and back to prison. Federal agents were waiting for Leary andJoanna at Kabul Airport, where they seized the couple and detained them forfour days (in atrocious conditions) before flying them back to America.Returning to the United States after more than two years in exile, Leary wasjailed and held on five million dollars bail, the highest in U.S. history tothat point.

Leary was placed insolitary confinement for ten days at Folsom Prison in California, next to thecell where serial killer Charles Manson was serving out his life sentence. Theoriginal sentence of ten years for possessing two joints in 1968 had nowerupted into the threat of a 95-year sentence for drug possession, escapingprison, and conspiracy to distribute LSD on a global scale. The trumped-upconspiracy charges were eventually dropped, but Leary still faced 20-25 yearsin prison.

It was around thistime that many underground comic artists collaborated on El Perfecto Comics,which donated the proceeds of sales to the Timothy Leary Defense Fund. Thosefunds were sorely needed, but Leary also crafted a way to reduce his legalexpenses and his time in prison. In 1974 he feigned cooperation with the FBI\'sinvestigation of the Weathermen and radical attorneys to reduce his sentence.He would later claim no one was ever prosecuted based on any information hegave to the FBI, a claim that was supported by the Weathermen in an open letterthey sent to \"The Friends of Timothy Leary\": \"The WeatherUnderground, the radical left organization responsible for his escape, was notimpacted by his testimony.\"

While Leary\'stestimony did provide federal agencies with intelligence on radicalorganizations and drug scenes, very little of it was unknown to the government.However, Leary\'s stance with the feds became a controversial issue within thecounterculture. Many of his oldest friends, including Ken Kesey, Paul Krassner,Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Richard Alpert (now known as Ram Dass), wereopenly contemptuous of Harcourt-Smith, believing that she had \"led him byhis dick\" (as Krassner put it) into serving as a traitor against the leftwing. These feelings were emphasized at a rally denouncing Leary organized byKesey at Stanford University.

Leary\'s testimonyearned him a reduced sentence, but he still endured 22 federal, state prisonsand rural jails over three and a half years. He was released from prison onApril 21, 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown. With his wounding of the left wingstill burning in the flesh of old associates, Leary contemplated a return tomainstream academia, but his applications were ignored by universityadministrators. For a while after his prison release, Leary wallowed inalcoholism and fought bitterly with Joanna. He divorced Joanna after she becamepregnant with what may or may not have been his child (she claimed she\'d fuckedanother man on the day of conception; Leary refused to take a paternity test).Leary gathered his meager possessions and moved to Laurel Canyon, where hebegan the final phase of his career as a lecturer and (in his words)\"stand up philosopher.\"

In 1978, Learymarried filmmaker Barbara Blum and helped raise her young son. In the early\'80s, Leary renewed his relationship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy. Both menwere near financial ruin, but they hatched a brilliant plan to change all that.In 1982 they toured the lecture circuit as ex-cons debating the soul ofAmerica. The tour generated great publicity and a lot of money for both men.Leary\'s individual personal appearances, a successful documentary thatchronicled his tour and the release of his autobiography, Flashbacks, enabledLeary to reestablish his financial security.

Leary\'s ambition tomake it really big in Hollywood was quashed by reticent studios and sponsors,but his constant touring helped him maintain a comfortable lifestyle throughoutthe \'80s, while his colorful past also made him a desirable guest at A-listparties. He also attractd a more intellectual crowd which included Robert AntonWilson, David Byrne, science fiction wunderkind William Gibson, and NormanSpinrad.

In the mid \'80s Learyhad also begun to integrate computers, the Internet, and virtual reality intohis aegis of thought. In spite of establishing one of the earliest sites on theWorld Wide Web and his oft-quoted insight that the Internet was \"the LSDof the 1990s,\" Leary essentially remained computer illiterate and requiredassistance in checking his email. In 1989 Leary\'s eldest daughter, Susan,committed suicide after years of mental instability. Relations between the twohad been tenuous for years, with the younger woman often casting her father asa negligent alcoholic and drug fiend responsible for her mother\'s death. Learyhad not spoken to his son Jack on a regular basis since the early 1970s.

After divorcingBarbara Leary in 1992, Leary began to associate with a much younger, artistic,and tech-savy crowd that included his granddaughters, stepson, author DouglasRushkoff, publisher Bob Guccione, Jr., and goddaughter Winona Ryder. He wasfrequently spotted at raves and alternative rock concerts, including amemorable mosh pit experience at an early Smashing Pumpkins concert. Attemptingto maintain the pace of the average twentysomething in his early seventies,Leary began to develop poor eating habits and steadily abused cocaine andprescription medication. This culminated in a likely overdose in late 1993 thatwas misdiagnosed at the time as double pneumonia.

Aging perceptiblyafter his hospitalization, he nonetheless managed to fufill his unceasingschedule of public apperances in 1994 while continuing to frequent the LA clubscene at a slightly decelerated pace. He drank heavily and seemed prone tobouts of senility for the first time in his life, but as one friend pointed outin Robert Greenfield\'s biography of Leary, \"there were always three tofour hours per day of the lucid Tim.\"

In early 1995, Learydiscovered that he was terminally ill with inoperable prostate cancer. Hesubsequently authored an outline for a book called Design for Dying, whichattempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying. \"The mostimportant thing you do in your life is to die\" he claimed, welcoming deathwith the same energetic excitement he had welcomed most other challenges in hislife. Besides Leary\'s extensive advice, Design for Dying includes a guide todeath and dying resources, online tools, and further reading lists.

In Leary\'s finalmonths thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him in hisCalifornia home. Until the final weeks of his illness, he gave many interviewsdiscussing his new philosophy of embracing death. In one of them, Leary statedthis:

\"I love topicsthe establishment says are taboo. When I found out I was terminally ill I wasthrilled. You\'ve got to approach your dying the way you live your life - withcuriosity, with hope, with fascination, with courage and with the help of yourfriends.... Death is life\'s greatest event.\"

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Check out our other Underground Comics inour sister store for an even bigger selection ofcomics. style=\"font-size: 14pt; text-align: left; font-family: Arial; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;\">OUR STORY - While livinginGreenwichVillage in thesixties. There was a little store off Bleecker that specialized in undergroundcomics. Every Friday afternoon after work, I’d go there to see what wasthe latest version just hitting the shelves. With several of my hippy friendsgrooving, and laughing over Comics, we’d sit around that smoke-filled room,sometimes late into the night.Fast forward, some fifty yearslater– my wife and I discovered some old cardboard boxes hiddenbehind junk in the back of our storage locker. It was a dry, cool placeand the hundreds of underground comics that had only been read once, were inbeautiful condition. It felt like we discovered a pot of gold. Wewrote to dozens of book and comic stores with a list of our inventory.They said, there was no interest, no market and offered us little to nothingfor the collection. We explained to them that these were complete sets, firsteditions. To the retail outlets they were worthless, but to us they werepriceless. Now we offer them on E-Bay and the collectors are grabbingthem up, at our more than fair and reasonable prices. Many we haduniversally certified with CGC, so you’ll know we’re trustworthy, reliable andhave the best of service. Just check the response and reviews to knowwe’re honest and responsible. We are happy to answer any questions youmay have and hope you buy them now while they still are available. Firstcome, first serve. Thank you again for your time and interest.