Address to New York City Public School Students (1968)

[Bruce] Elwell prepared a comic strip, “Address to New York Public School Students,” [created] in the vein of the comic-strips detourned by the [European] situationists. He composed these four-page comics with images borrowed from three anthologies of Pogo.1 The subject of this detournement was the union-led strike of the teachers in New York in the autumn of 1968, of which the Council [for the Liberation of Everyday Life] had made a review in its text “The Newest School Buildings Are Indistinguishable From the Newest Prisons or the Newest Industrial Complexes.”2

“Many exemplary things were happening in the chaos that so unnerved all the bureaucrats.” 3 These detourned comics appeared on 12 November 1968 as a publication of the Situationist International.4 At the same time, Elwell became a member of the SI in his turn.

Text above by Fabrice de San Mateo Toulouse, 12 October 2011, translated by Not Bored! Translator's footnotes below. Text from: https://www.notbored.org/ecrits-preface.html

• 1A favorite of Robert Chasse and Elwell. In the opinion of Elwell, Pogo was the only voice of opposition that appeared regularly in the American bourgeois press in the 1950s and early 1960s.
• 2Libcom note - https://libcom.org/article/new-york-school-crisis-council-liberation-daily-life
• 3Robert Chasse and Bruce Elwell, A Field Study in the Dwindling Force of Cognition Where It Is Least Expected: A Critique of the Situationist International as a Revolutionary Organization (1970). [Translator: rather than translating this text back into English, we have relied upon the original version.]
• 4Translator: these comics were first published by the Council for the Liberation of Everyday Life on 22 September 1968. http://www.notbored.org/newest.html.