What exactly is COSMIC RELIEF?
A. It’s a generic magazine parody, the first of its type. We’d originally wanted to start a generic religion, with a no-name deity and non-specific rituals and all that, but that turned out to be too much trouble, and besides it had already been done, so we did a generic magazine parody instead, and dressed it up as a high-quality paperback book. Anyway, COSMIC RELIEF is loosely based on all those new-age, positive-lifestyle rags you can pick up in virtually any city in the U.S. and, we bet, in the English-speaking world – you know the kind we’re talking about. It’s a collection of ad parodies and spoof articles, with a “serious” (but not too serious) editorial at the end. COSMIC RELIEF has been described as sort of a MAD-Magazine guide to the new age, but it’s not just about new-age stuff; it also hits on self-help and the silly, trendy side of corporate America. We’ve found there’s a lot of overlap among those various cults.
