Raymond Martin (publisher)

Raymond Martin (born March 18,  1953 ) is a German publisher and founder of Volksverlag , one of the oldest and best-known German comic publishers.

Life

Raymond Martin was born in the early 1950s as the second illegitimate child of a Berlin factory worker. He first made a name in 1971 by himself, as the press ( Der Spiegel over the No. 33/1971 cover story.) Hippie - municipality in the Frankish Kucha reported, which had been founded by Martin and friends 1970th

The commune in Kucha saw itself as a German branch of the American yippie movement and tried to live as autonomously as possible on a farm. In addition to own farming, the underground comic magazine U-Comix, founded by Martin in 1969, and the “underground people's paper ” Päng , the best newspaper in the world , were published in Kucha from 1970 to 1976 . Soon also (unlicensed) reprints or self-initiated translations of the books by Timothy Leary , as well as a multitude of underground comics of all kinds. The label UPN (Indefinable Products from Nuremberg) was created for in-house products . Martin and Kommunarden moved to another farm in the neighboring Jobstgreuth near Linden and operated there as UPN-Volksverlag, Linden (later only Volksverlag ).

In Päng, Martin published articles on biodynamic agriculture , hashish , political, anarchist and personal issues, as well as photos on which he and his changing partners could be seen; he published u. a. in the political-satirical magazine Der Metzger . Until 1976, Päng was published several times a year with an edition of 5000 copies. The editor and his publications quickly caused a sensation in the alternative scene, so that in 1973 Raymond Martin was described in the Stuttgarter Zeitung as “Germany's most beautiful and vain revolutionary” .

Act

In the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Martin had a significant impact on the alternative press landscape with his comics and numerous books on drugs, ecology and issues of consciousness. The plan to re-establish Päng with a circulation of 50,000 copies, however, failed.

Martin's most successful comic magazines became U-Comix , for which he himself was the editor-in-chief, and the German licensed edition of the French magazine Schwermetall . U-Comix was published monthly from 1980. Occasionally the magazine reached print runs of several 10,000 copies. Martin made comic artists such as Robert Crumb , Richard Corben , Moebius and Gilbert Shelton available to the alternative German audience , who have since achieved wide popularity and legendary reputation. In 1984 Raymond Martin was still the alternative counterpoint to the market leader Carlsen Comics at the first comic parlor , a now traditional comic trade fair in Erlangen . However, Raymonds Volksverlag went bankrupt shortly afterwards and was taken over by the Alpha media group.

Raymond Martin is still active as a journalist with Raymond Martin Verlag , where he also took over the rights to numerous earlier publications.

Publications by Raymond Martin have repeatedly been targeted by the Federal Testing Office for Writings Harmful to Young Persons . Partly revealing erotic comics were the stumbling block, partly “socio-ethical confusion” through the propagation of drugs, especially hallucinogenic mushrooms. He succeeded several times in circumventing the indexing by technically but not content-wise altered reprints. In 1991, for example, he reissued an indexed book on intoxicants, divided into four brochures without objection.

Raymond Martin's current projects include maintaining the estate of the painter Mati Klarwein as well as a mail order business for gifts, books and textiles.

Fonts

• I am good. Documentation of an abnormal consciousness. With a foreword by Henryk M. Broder . UPN-Volksverlag, Linden 1975.
• Girls. Photo tape. UPN-Volksverlag, Linden 1980.

literature

• Arthur Brunsloch jr .: The psychopathic joker. In: Werner Pieper (Ed.): Everything seemed possible ... Die Grüne Kraft, Löhrbach 2007, pp. 216–217.

Web links

• Literature by and about Raymond Martin in the catalog of the German National Library