East Village Other

The East Village Other (often abbreviated as EVO), is an American underground newspaper in New York City, New York, issued biweekly during the 1960s. It was described by The New York Times as “a New York newspaper so countercultural that it made The Village Voice look like a church circular.”

Published by Walter Bowart, EVO was among the first countercultural newspapers to emerge, following the Los Angeles Free Press, which had begun publishing a few months earlier. It was an important publication for the underground comix movement, featuring comic strips by artists including Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton and Art Spiegelman before underground comic books emerged from San Francisco with the first issue of Zap Comix.

The East Village Other was co-founded October 1965 by Walter Bowart, Ishmael Reed (who named the newspaper), Allen Katzman, Dan Rattiner, Sherry Needham and John Wilcock. It began as a monthly and then went biweekly.

EVO was one of the founding members of the Underground Press Syndicate, a network that allowed member papers to freely reprint each other’s contents.

The paper’s design, in its first years, was characterized by Dadaistic montages and absurdist, non-sequitur headlines. Later, the paper evolved a more colorful psychedelic layout that became a distinguishing characteristic of the underground papers of the time.

Starting in 1969, Coca Crystal would write about politics, women’s issues and personal events for the East Village Other, many of which earned her the title “slumgoddess”.

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UPDATE 10-11-2016

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