It was sometime in 1974, and I was extremely nervous because I’d just affixed my signature to a mail-order form confirming — despite the fact that I had four more revolutions around the sun to go — that I was at least 18 years of age. I was already down the road to becoming a serious history and politics buff, partly due to reading about the mid-1950s U.S. Senate hearings that largely attributed postwar spates of juvenile delinquency to the deleterious effects of horror and true-crime comic books on impressionable young minds. That bureaucratized moral panic decimated the industry for over a decade, giving me a naif’s understanding of the machinations of government censorship — at least when it came to four-color blood and gore — and I worried that mailing in 50¢ for Junkwaffel #1 (1971, The Print Mint) would bring jack-booted postal inspectors kicking down my door to arrest me for lying on the form.
But such simple impediments deterred only half-hearted degenerates. Rather than indulge in ’70s America’s smorgasbord of illegal mind-altering/-numbing/-expanding/-frying drugs, I falsified that statement in order to partake of the underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode’s brain-bollixing permutations of violence ’n’ sex, abominations he drew with such a preternatural understanding of body language, they might have been the envy of Disney’s most graceful animators.
Bode — pronounced “BO-dee,” hence the “long e” macron used in his written signature: “Bodē” — was a narrative and graphics genius (and an adventurous, not to say haphazard, speller and grammarian and a dispenser of ersatz ellipses), whose fame was high among the outrage cognoscenti of those days, a notoriety that would expand exponentially after he died, in San Francisco, on July 18, 1975 (at age 33, same as Jesus) after a round of autoerotic asphyxiation gone sideways (not exactly how Jesus died). Bode’s passing was unexpected, if not entirely improbable. As pieced together in a magisterial biographical essay by the comics scholar Bob Levin (“See My Light Come Shining,” The Comics Journal Special Edition, February 2005), the young, workaholic, and ever more business-savvy cartoonist was on a quest to literally transcend this side of the veil’s corporeal bonds — and to eventually publish a successful daily newspaper strip.
[Bode’s] blue eyes were lined and mascaraed. A white triangle was painted on his forehead.
“No phone calls today, Mark,” he said to his 12-year-old son, visiting from New York. “I’m doing my God thing.”
“You look beautiful,” Mark said.
His father smiled.
“You see, Mark, I really am a high priest.”
Much that Bode was — a spelunker of the id, an epicurean of sexual desire, a psychonaut of the cosmos — is bound up in that passage; in contrast, his mercantile flipside comes across in this quote from Bernie Wrightson, a rising comic book artist who met Bode in 1969 and shared his fascination with depicting extravagant violence.
“He had a wide range of philosophical and religious interests, but he was no zealot. He seemed to gather and assimilate information only in order to enrich his work. He was preoccupied with landing the next job, with securing good accounts. He was very intense and very confident. He envisioned himself becoming the Walt Disney of underground comics.
“We used to joke about Vaughnbode-land with rides that ended in horrible deaths.”
For sure, the Big D was Bode’s overriding theme, whether an astronaut burning up in the atmosphere to land as cinders upon a lad sitting amid nature, who asks the emptiness around him, “Smog?,” or a pair of Bode’s anthropomorphized lizards who are bleeding to death in Vietnam calling each other “dirty Commie” and “stinkin’ Marine” as butterflies pop out in twirling columns from their mouths, the American opining, “Ya’ know, I never died before. I is scared” while the expiring Viet Cong soldier murmurs, “I wonder where the butterflies go….”
Bode was born on July 22, 1941, in Utica, New York, to a father with pretensions as a poet and a mother who tried her best to protect their four children from the patriarch’s drunken rages. Vaughn’s fascination with comics began early, and by his own and later researchers’ count he created upwards of 1,500 characters, including Cheech Wizard, a chronically horny, mellifluously crude trickster whose arms, if any, were concealed under a flaccid, star-bedecked yellow conical hat that reached to his waist, from which depended a bulbous package between skinny legs clad in red tights. The first sketches of Cheech appeared when Bode was a 16-year-old dreaming of the day he would be a newspaper comic strip auteur whose bold — but relatively innocuous — Sunday color pages would pay the bills while his id rampaged and fornicated through storylines that could never hope to see a weekend comics sections. But his weird side was winning out, perhaps driven by the fact that he was having little success shopping his boldly designed but hopelessly off-kilter comic strips around the syndication offices in New York. And so he willfully followed his heart (and groin), and by the early ’70s, Cheech, in all his uninhibited, anti-authority glory, was reigning on the pages of multiple slick magazines, including the wildly popular National Lampoon.
“Man, will blow himself up and leave a world sterilized by his genius.”
Betwixt those poles of youthful agony (“Nothing means nothing and life is certainly an analogy to the Null,” Bode wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day, 1963) and such outsize success as a cartoonist (by the early ’70s, he was represented by the Bantam Lecture Bureau) came a funhouse-mirror warp of conventional American existence. Bode wanted to marry a pretty girl from his high school; her parents were appalled. He joined the military but received an early honorable discharge due to a psychiatric condition. He labored on commercial contracts (a 32-page comic for the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, “Powermowerman and Power Mower Safety,” helped pay some bills in the years after Barbara’s parents relented, in 1961, and her and Vaughn’s son, Mark, was born, in 1963). Then came a G.I. Bill stint at Syracuse University, where he pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. It was at college, living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, that Bode’s freak flag fully unfurled. In one six-page strip, “The Masked Lizard,” the titular reptile, after a botched orbital sacrifice on his home planet, lands on Earth and grows up in SU’s sewer system, where he is eventually recruited by the U.S. government to eliminate “all forms of socially or politically undesirable characters. [The C.I.A. swears] that his loyalty will not go unoticed [sic], that indeed he one day shall become a full flegged [sic] citizen of these United States!! That in itself doesn’t particularly impress him, but it’s something nice for lizards.” [Editor’s note: From here on in we’ll dispense with sic-ing up the text; Bode was as Bode does.]
Similar to Wile E. Coyote’s immortality, “our saintly hero” survives shootings, multiple grenades exploding in his mouth, and other bodily outrages, only to be buried alive by assassins, after which “one might have heard the muffled singing of our entombed agent….Amen..” Even at this early stage, Bode was entwining his insouciant fatalism — that shrugging “nice thing for lizards,” the flamboyant ultra-violence, humming tunes in the face of eternity — with an inbred, absurd sense of humor.
The final element of his mature work came percolating up from the Sixties sexual revolution. While Mick Jagger was crooning
Under my thumb
Is a squirming dog who’s just had her day
Under my thumb
A girl who has just changed her ways
to adoring audiences, during the Rolling Stones’ 1969 U.S. tour, “Bode Broads” were servicing Cheech and his friends in the pages of Cavilier, which the artist himself described as a “skin magazine,” perused mostly by “the raincoat crowd.” Bode’s pneumatic fantasy objects were so insatiable that even Cheech at one point attempts to push away a woman sporting flower petals painted around her distended nipples, declaiming, “My God, dis is becoming a nightmare! I has been captured by a acute nymphomaniac!” Cheech’s snake-oil patois was typical of Bode’s characters, that singsong “a acute” akin to another Cheech assessment of a pulchritudinous panel mate: “Boy, it makes my juicer hard as a nun’s buns.” Myriad sex positions and below-the-belt blows — Bode characters were prone to getting karate-kicked in the balls — are all conveyed through boldly simplified layouts that dynamically complement gracefully contoured physical permutations.
In the splendiferously violent “Cobalt 60,” the eponymous hero, a masked mutant, rides his “grasser,” a kind of thick-legged, reptilian camel, through a post-apocalyptic desert. The opening page muses, with esoteric punctuation, “You know, we speculate, we try to outguess the unpredictable whims of nature and we are seldom right.. But, we can guess with unerring accuracy, the future of homo sapiens. That creature made in the image of God himself!.. Man, is the great destroyer, the insatiable taker.. Man, will blow himself up and leave a world sterilized by his genius.”
Cobalt is at war with “the ‘Radios,’ a remnant of long past civilizations.” Gun battles unfold against stark black-ink backgrounds; gray stone arches frame wounded combatants who cartwheel spastically down gravelly slopes; heads splatter like those exploding apples in Harold Edgerton’s stop-motion photos; detached eyeballs return the reader’s startled gaze. With cinematic verve, Cobalt ducks wild shots and rolls into position to fire heavy-caliber rounds that sever limbs and send entrails flying. At the end, only the Radio convoy’s leader is left, one arm hanging by a shred of flesh: “I…I see…” he stammers. “You…you wish..to be human like us… But…you are a monster..” Cobalt raises his pistol and jabs a finger at his expiring foe — Bode was a deft delineator of the complex articulations of wrists, hands, and fingers — and retorts, in typically chunky hand-wrought typography, “You are the murderers, you are the monsters.. the Radio are trying to exterminate all mutant races. GENOCIDE!”
“CLICK” goes the hammer of his revolver, then “PUNCH!” and “PLOOSH” sound effects accompany the bullet’s severing of the leader’s head. Cobalt stumbles away, the dead man’s arms spasming in the air as if seeking his missing head, as Cobalt grasps his own white-masked face and mutters, “..I….am…a…………..”
Maybe the creator was seeking that answer even more desperately than his agonized character. By 1973, Bode’s marriage had foundered on his numerous sexual exploits outside the bonds of matrimony, including a Cheech-like grand slam of bedding four different women in four cities over four days. He had also experimented with taking female hormones, perhaps on a quest to put himself on the receiving end of his era’s male chauvinist excesses. A 1973 Cheech Wizard comic included a piece titled “Bodē,” a painted strip that ran sideways through the lower third of the book under the subhead “Schizophrenia.” The author/artist dedicated this quasi-flipbook to
• Light
• Consciousness
• Transparency
• Defenselessness
• Ego Death
• Pansexualism
• Yin Yang
• Tao
• Love
• You
Bode depicts himself with long, flouncy brown flower-strewn hair and wearing a tight, midnight-blue (perhaps leather) thigh-split gown, knee-high boots, and rust-red leggings. He dances on the lunar surface — “Hop-skippin, down dusty moon hills, my head is light as light. EEEEYA I AM ME AN I AM ALIVE!” Beyond the crossdressing, highlights painted across his chest imply soft swells, though he’d quit the hormones after six weeks because he’d decided that he preferred hard-ons to breasts. Bode’s doppelgänger squats, pirouettes, leaps, and high-kicks with all the energy of his violently balletic characters, before settling down to proclaim, “Dear Friend, I was once the sadest fukin’ tadpole you ever saw…I was so untogether I thought I was together! Misty misery on my sore-torn head, I was the walking, living dead.” Certainly, his dedication to “Transparency” and “Defenselessness” comes shining through when he continues, “How do you tell your world: your mother, your wife, your son, your friends. How do you tell them all you are…How do you tell yourself you got warps all through yer God damn head?”
Bode had to get his whole body into the work — not just brain, eyes, and fingers, but liver, lights, and scrotum as well.
He adds that he was “Auto-sexual, heterosexual, homosexual, masso-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, Omni-sexual. Problem with me was, I didn’t just want to be any one thing anymore. I wanted to be a whole spectrum of human things: man, woman, child, artist, student lover, warrior, my poor head!”
Bode’s struggles with the void rang out in some of his most affecting tales. “Machines” appeared in that first Junkwaffel, and the “null” he’d written about roughly a decade earlier can be felt in the lone human character, a soldier with a “LOVE DIV.” shoulder patch, who eats canned beans and rats in a subterranean shelter that resounds with hollow booms from above. As dust and debris fall on his head, he muses, “Wonder what year this is?..I think it’s 2,005…Can’t be sure though…Ever since the 4th World War things went nuts…machines that think!.. Machines that build themselves an’ think!…” Aboveground, “Mother,” a mountain-size artillery complex with cannons for nipples, is crying because a squadron of sentient drones has killed one of her mobile children. Launching her heaviest ordnance to avenge her child, she overshoots another flying wave whose commander radios his mechanical cohorts: “Ahh, listen, we gotta get this big broad, fellas…so we’ll give her the old ‘Suicide From the Sky Bit’…You with me, patriots?…..” An underling replies, “It’s kill and be killed, Charlie,” a response that sends the robo-leader into ecstasy: “Oblivion here we come!” A few panels on, Mother disappears under a blooming mushroom cloud accompanied by a huge, ragged-edged sound effect: “KNULL!”
A year later comes another near-future dystopia, as human legions march in lockstep up and down ramps like something out of Piranesi’s 18th-century labyrinths. In “The Rudolf,” the title character attempts to shake them out of their somnambulent existence by literally grabbing the front of one of the drone’s bodysuits and yelling, “YOU IS IN DANGER! Pay attention! I is tryin’ to save you from dis giant carniverous society!!” The worker bee replies, “Why don’t you have your number on?..” In despair, Rudolf leans on an elevated walkway’s railing as workers in hoods and goggles, climbing ladders, ignore him, until he shouts, “Hey people!! Da time has come to regain our independence, our free will!! HURRAH, are you with me?!!” All he receives is another query about his missing number. So, unkempt hair flaring, he climbs into a tower, grumbles, “I gonna revolt all by myself…” and begins taking potshots out the window with his rifle. A policeman with a bullhorn demands, “Come out with your demented hands up!!” “NEVER!!” he retorts, adding, “I RUDOLF, will topple this sick, inhuman, cancerous society!!…” A fusillade of responding fire zigzags through the following panels, increasingly obscuring the hero as he sits, spread-legged on the floor, and murmurs, “…I think….”
Done in delicate pencil lines that, through lively shading, counterintuitively amp up the tension, this wry tale ends with Rudolf, head hanging, covered in a pile of plaster dust studded with holes, implying that even more rounds had found their marks in his flesh. “VOOOT VOOOT Time to go home and go to bed” bray loudspeakers, as two managers stand on a balcony overlooking the end-of-day routine for the thousandth or millionth time. One of them mentions, “I heard we had a little disturbance down on M street Mr. J….Nothing serious I hope.”
“Um?” is the reply, “No, nothing serious. Just some routine police business.. ..Something about somebody not wearing his number or something.”
Another pencil-only masterpiece appeared in Junkwaffel #4 and is a prime example of Bode’s “Pictography” format, in which dialogue and captions are placed outside the panels, allowing each drawing to stand as a finished, self-contained vision. This showcasing of the artwork creates a dual track of narrative intensity — images glide with cinematic propulsion while the text fills in backstory and existential reverie. In this second “Cobalt 60” tale, our antihero surveys his sterile environs from the high back of a grasser, riding past a skull and ribcage blurred by drifting sand in the foreground. It is a beautiful composition, one that can take or leave the omniscient narrator’s existential musing outside the frame edges: “‘Bones,’ he yells. ‘Who were you bones?..’ But only wind…moaning over a rusty rifle.. ..a chasm of time between him and his answer…”
Following only the pictures, we see Cobalt confront a young human, who ends up dying in the sand, his curled hand and soft features echoing the layout, if not the desiccated forms, of that skull and ribs already seen on the facing page. Meanwhile, the text informs us that Cobalt had, before shooting the youth, learned from him that a “seed” was being hidden within the heavy stone walls of some nearby ruins. Astounded that perhaps the last fertile woman on earth is within his grasp, Cobalt sneaks into the Radio priests’ redoubt and, in a fever of hate, kills the nubile young human. She lies dead, mutilated by his bullets, a surviving priest moaning and rocking on the dirty floor as Cobalt exits “like a zombie and stumbles away from his horrible play…he is elated…he is sick…he is a monster in a world made by the thing he destroyed.”
Vaughn Bode didn’t live to see his creations as literal outlaws, but then again, in his heart, that’s what they’d always been, or they would never be so vivid on the page.
If the first “Cobalt 60” installment had been rife with ecological concern in the decade that saw the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, this follow-up tale was the epitome of an age when even the most progressive of movements was still virulently sexist. The “seed” existed for one reason — to bring forth babies. And while the growing women’s movement was fighting official chauvinism with nationwide organizing to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, Bode, along with R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and many other male underground cartoonists, was happy to view women as the always willing receptacles of men’s lust.
Sure, a decade earlier Bode had tried to peddle Sunday strips that eschewed his most violent and salacious impulses, but he was unable to tamp down his innate tendencies. On my workroom wall, I have a Sunday-strip-proportioned, 1970-ish Junkwaffel poster in which a lizard in a biplane gets lost in a cloud bank and is flash-frozen into “Da’ biggest, weirdest hailstone I ever saw wif my own two eyes…” Not exactly a sidesplitter, though maybe in the post–Far Side and Zippy the Pinhead world of ’80s newspaper comic surreality, the kicker might have resonated: “Let’s put a tent over it an charge a nickel a look..” Still, the humor was just too attenuated without the carnal charge of Bode’s underground desires. He really couldn’t sell out; he had to get his whole body into the work — not just brain, eyes, and fingers, but liver, lights, and scrotum as well.
And when one looks at the seriousness of Bode’s most intense work, such as “Cobalt 60,” “Machines,” and his lizards wreaking undemocratic slaughter in post–My Lai massacre Vietnam, perhaps, knowing the truth of that old advertising adage “sex sells,” he did sell out. He knew he could count on that “raincoat” crowd to ogle his full-color “Deadbone Erotica” strips in slick men’s mags, which paid much higher rates than the cheap newsprint underground comix could bring. And when the Bantam Lecture Bureau sent him out to do his “Cartoon Concerts,” he understood that the counterculture crowds would be looking for those outrageous Deadbone laughs. In a bit such as “Climbing Abroad,” two lizards end up on the nipple of a literally mountainous woman before entering the “cave” of her navel, and then realize they’ll need machetes to hack their way through the thicket covering her lower regions. From the darkened stage, Bode voiced all of the characters, synchronizing them with the color panels projected at movie-screen scale. He would knock the audience dead with riffs such as “Whorse Soldiers,” in which two servicemen searching for a downed pilot ride on the shoulders of a pair of Amazonian women. In the last panel, the officer pulls rank: “Sergeant, you got to stand guard duty while I go..ahh, ‘bed-down’ da whorses for da night…” to which the non-com replies, “…But…it only 2:30 in da afternoon.”
Bode drew with the efficient directness of a Saturday morning cartoon animator, even as he ruminated like the Marquis de Sade. Perhaps that’s why, when I moved to New York in the mid-’80s, I was not terribly surprised to see something akin to a buxom “Bode Broad” spray-painted on a subway car. By that time, the MTA was well into a program of cleaning up their rolling stock and putting better security around the trainyards, but the graffiti wave of the late ’70s had left its mark in the 1984 book Subway Art, photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s paean to the artists of the night who would surreptitiously bomb trains and then revel in seeing their murals rumbling around the city’s elevated subway lines. Cheech Wizard — that beer-swilling, weed-smoking provocateur with lotsa lip who, when informed that he was under arrest, gazed up from beneath the arm of a curvacious prostitute to inquire, “On what charge, you baga’ bullshit?” — was a go-to character for many graffiti artists, and for much of that mid-’70s to ’80s decade, his yellow hat could be seen zipping through the boroughs like an ersatz superhero. Cheech was joined by spray-painted takes on Bode’s lizards, broads, and, in one poignant mobile mural by the graffiti maestro Dondi, which he titled “Children of the Grave Again, Part 3,” a tousled youth’s openhanded gesture exuded the innocence of Bode’s original page on MTA steel. When I saw the spread in Subway Art, I vaguely recalled the lyrically drawn kid, and so looked up the Bode strip and was reminded that it was a cautionary tale about a reptilian preacher attempting to entice the openhearted lad to give up life so as to more quickly enter heaven. Not surprisingly meeting resistance, the holy man “gunches” the boy to death with his “guncher” club before helping himself to the victim’s meager possessions. Heavy-handed? Certainly the guncher was, but the history of old-time religion is bloody enough that both the strip and Dondi’s full-car mural still resonate with elegiac power.
Vaughn Bode didn’t live to see his creations as literal outlaws, but then again, in his heart, that’s what they’d always been, or they would never be so vivid on the page. Bode’s was a take-no-prisoners world, informed as much by the ongoing savagery in Vietnam as by the carnage of World War II, which he parodied, from the German perspective, in a book he self-published in 1963, Das Kampf. The mordant gag panels focus on the futility of the foot soldier always at the mercy of not only well-armed enemies but also incompetent commanders. One drawing of an infantryman going hand-over-hand on an exposed section of rope is accompanied by the caption “War is being ordered to do something real stupid and not being able to complain afterward ’cause you get killed…”
In the years after I’d falsified that underground comix order form, I’d bought more of Bode’s comics, as well as his book Zooks, the “Big comic strip book about the first lizard in orbit.” Big it certainly is, with each heavy-stock page measuring 8” x 22.5”. In proportion and attitude, Zooks certainly seems another of Bode’s attempts to hit it big in the mainstream market, but sans his compelling themes of Thanatos and Eros, the jokes, including one where the lizard can’t get his helmet over his “fat flap” of a mouth, land wanly. Still, Bode’s unerring pen line conveys the raw power of a rocket launch and the scorched earth of a botched takeoff, something that feels eerily prescient in our days of SpaceX’s trial-by-error business model.
Somewhere along the line, I heard that Bode was no longer living, and someone told me that Zooks would be worth a lot of money one day. The $205 I just saw on eBay has maybe kept up with inflation, compared to whatever I paid for it in the early ’80s. But I’ve never been a very good collector — I like to paw through the pages and enjoy the art rather than imagine what treasures are sealed under plains of Mylar. And when I do fold back those stapled spines to peer more closely at one of Bode’s fluidly dynamic phantasmagorias of, say, elegantly limp bodies floating amid the zero-gravity disaster at the end of 1971’s Sunpot, the art still holds up, while the artist’s life remains a bright comet streaking across an idiosyncratic cosmos.
In a 2010 Times interview, Bode’s son Mark, now in his sixties, said of his father, “I am mortal and he is immortal, and the two of us work well together.”
Mark has labored diligently to keep his father’s legacy before the public, and has also expanded on such original storylines as “Cobalt 60.” Collaborating with scenarist Larry Todd, who’d also done joint projects with Vaughn back in the day, the younger Bode created a four-issue update in which Cobalt struggles against not just the Radio overlords but also such factions as the Gene Police, the Holy Molders, and levitating scavengers known as Big Eyes. The series is fun and colorfully slapstick, and the son has copied the father’s style faithfully, but, lacking Vaughn’s glory or death edge-walking in both life and art, the new version never approaches the abyss Vaughn endlessly traded gazes with.
Although Bode placed his characters in fantastical settings, they were always grounded in the blood, dirt, bone, and jism of reality. Cobalt 60 and his blasted realm would eventually appear on the big screen, renamed and uncredited, in Ralph Bakshi’s groundbreaking animated feature Wizards, which came out two years after Vaughn’s death. (Decades later, Bakshi copped to his appropriation of the hooded character, which he renamed Necron 99, a.k.a. Peace, by sending an apology and some original art to Mark.) And one can definitely wonder if James Cameron, rooting amidst the more outré wings of American sci-fi for ideas that would coalesce into the “Terminator” franchise that kicked off in 1984, might have read “Machines” or “The Rudolf” in earlier days. Certainly Ridley Scott was aware of Piranesi when he was designing the “1984” Apple Macintosh ad, broadcast during the 1984 Super Bowl, but had he ever perused Junkwaffel #2 and nodded his head at Rudolf’s futile battle with Big Brother, filing it away for some future project that would twist the concept around? (Not that a personal computer has ever saved any worker from a boss’s demanding emails…)
So perhaps it’s time for a full-dress biopic (Timothée Chalamet, are you listening?), in which Vaughn dies, just as he did in 1975 — but we’re only halfway through the movie and that’s when things really heat up, when he comes back as the Cartoon Messiah (a term he used for Cheech) and/or “THE CARTOON GOOROO” (which he called himself) and brings at least 33 more years of cosmic visions to enthrall exponentially more folks. And not just artists who admire convincingly elastic figure drawing or thrillingly lithe graffiti-ready contours or the most off-color of four-color chicanery, but inquisitive legions ripe to be entranced by a Bode redux. The soundtrack could stretch from the Doors to Public Enemy to Beck to Lady Gaga, just for starters — and of course would have to include the Beastie Boys’ 1994 “Sure Shot”:
Well, I’m like Lee Perry, I’m very on
Rock the microphone, and then I’m gone
I’m like Vaughn Bode, I’m a Cheech Wizard
Never quittin’, so won’t you listen
No doubt consciously crude and sometimes misogynistic or cruel, at times righteously provocative but also often exposed, defenseless, and heartbreakingly empathetic, Vaughn Bode contained multitudes. He said it himself: “I wanted to be a whole spectrum of human things.” ……Amen….. ❖
