Stu Mead & Frank Gaard: The Immortal Man Bag Journal of Art

Man Bag grew out of the Artpolicecomics magazine project that had been publishing out of the community of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which fell victim in the late 1980s to the culture-wars climate of censorship.

In response, two of the protagonists of Artpolicecomics, Stu Mead (born 1955) and Frank Gaard (born 1944), got together on a new zine, this time deliberately thumbing their noses at political correctness and decency, fixating on “sick sex and decadence” in an underground “men’s magazine focused on deviated sexuality,” as Gaard puts it. Stu Mead & Frank Gaard: The Immortal Man Bag Journal of Art collects all printed editions of the zine, along with Man Bag No. 6, released for the first time. In his introduction, Gaard offers an unvarnished, conversational, infectious history of Man Bag, supplemented with extracts from Stu Mead’s diary.