of humor, and The Rag provided a primary forum for two of the most important of the Sixties underground graphic artists – Gilbert Shelton, whose iconic Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comix would be republished in papers all over the world, and Jim Franklin, whose surrealist armadillos helped create what writer Hermes Nye called "the Great Armadillo Cult." Austin, long a haven for bohemians and iconoclasts, was also the center of a very active left political community based at the University of Texas campus and was a major player in the massive Sixties drug and music culture – incubating talents like Janis Joplin and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and some of the pioneering psychedelic poster and comix artists. And The Rag united those communities into a potent political force. Underground press and LNS Thorne Dreyer heralded the coming of The Rag ("from deep in the bowels of reaction... where apathy and dullness thrive") in a letter addressed to the founding members of the Underground Press Syndicate. This colorful dispatch — dated October 5, 1966 — is included as a historical document in Conflicts in American History, a 13-volume encyclopedia published in 2010. On March 26, 1967, Dreyer and Carol Neiman attended the first national convergence of underground papers at Stinson Beach, California. Historian Abe Peck wrote that "at Stinson Beach, the paper that most prefigured those to come [The Rag] was represented... by several writers, including the increasingly important Thorne Dreyer." Dreyer also participated in a historic meeting of the United States Student Press Association (USSPA) in Minneapolis in August 1967 at the invitation of its newly elected director, Marshall Bloom. At the meeting Bloom was purged from USSPA because of his radical politics (and, some thought, because of what John McMillian refers to as Bloom's "effeminate demeanor"). Bloom and colleague Ray Mungo then founded Liberation News Service (LNS). The underground press started out with a handful of papers on the East and West Coasts, but soon spread like wildfire and, according to historian McMillian, author of the 2011 book Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, the papers' combined readership eventually reached into the millions. Rolling Stone's John Burks quoted Thorne Dreyer as saying that the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) was organized "to create the illusion of a giant coordinated network of freaky papers poised for the kill." But, as McMillian and others