The Church of the SubGenius claims to have been founded in the 1950s by the "world's greatest salesman" J. R. "Bob" Dobbs. "Bob" Dobbs is depicted as a cartoon of a Ward Cleaver-like man smoking a pipe, an image originally seen in one of the many "can you draw this" ads commonly found in the back of comic books in the 1950s and 60s.[citation needed] The church really started with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1 in 1979. It found acceptance in underground pop-culture circles and has been embraced on college campuses, in the underground music scene, and on the Internet.[citation needed]
Because of its similarities to the tenets of Discordianism, The Church of the SubGenius is often described as a syncretic offshoot of that belief. However, its members state that the organization developed on its own with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1[citation needed] (also known as The World Ends Tomorrow And You May Die!) by Reverend Ivan Stang, a pseudonym for Doug Smith (his real name, now based in the Cleveland, Ohio area), and Dr. Philo Drummond, the original SubGenius Foundation. The original group, using such pseudonyms as "Puzzling Evidence", "Dr. Howl," "Susie the Floozie", "Palmer Vreedeez", and "Pope Sternodox", forwarded their literature to a number of underground pop-culture figures such as R. Crumb, Paul Mavrides, Harry S. Robins aka Dr. Hal, the New Wave rock group Devo, and Erik Lindgren (producer and president of indie label Arf! Arf! Records in Boston), who embraced it and incorporated it into their work. Crumb's promotion of the Church through his comic book series Weirdo brought many new members into the fold, including artists, musicians, and writers. Their efforts resulted in the publication of the Book of the SubGenius in 1983, followed by Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob" in 1990, Revelation X: The "Bob" Apocryphon in 1994 and The SubGenius Psychlopaedia of Slack: The Bobliographon in 2006. In the late 1980s, the video ARISE! was produced by Cordt Holland and Ivan Stang, and narrated by "Dr. Hal" (Harry S. Robins), then distributed by Polygram. The popularization of the Internet in the mid-1990s brought a new surge of interest in the Church, resulting in dozens of home-made, elaborately decorated web sites and two Usenet newsgroups, alt.slack and alt.binaries.slack.
Such high-profile names as Paul Reubens ("Pee-wee Herman", who placed a picture of "Bob" in every episode of Pee-wee's Playhouse), Magic Mose & his Royal Rockers, featuring 'Blind Sam' (who actually gave a free advertisement to the Church on the back of one of their EP's), David Byrne, Voodoo Loons, Mark Mothersbaugh, Penn Jillette, Robert Anton Wilson, science fiction authors Rudy Rucker and John Shirley, and actor Bruce Campbell have become SubGenius ministers.[citation needed] Composer Frank Zappa said in his autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book that he agreed with many of the beliefs of the church, but refrained from joining as a full member.[6] Comic book author Warren Ellis has stated the influence of the Church on his writings, though as of 2007 he has not yet admitted if he actually sent the $30 membership fee. Patrick Volkerding, the founder and maintainer of Slackware Linux, is also a SubGenius affiliate, and he has confirmed the Church and "Bob" inspired the name for Slackware.[7]
It is claimed waggishly in church doctrine that Dobbs inspired L. Ron Hubbard to create his own cult when he remarked to him that the general public may be pink, "but their money is green"[8] Ivan Stang also claims that in 1986, an official SubGenius ordainment for Hubbard was paid for and mailed to his address—only two weeks before the Scientology founder's death. However, Hubbard and Scientology's history goes much farther back in time than the Sub-Genius Church, which more likely used similar Scientology double-talk as a parodic springboard for the double-talk in the Mid-80s first edit of its groundbreaking "Arise" video, and other Sub-genius productions, and possibly even in the pre-Sub-Genius film work of Ivan Stang, which displays the beginning and development of much double-talk syntax used so effectively in later Sub-Genius videos.[citation needed]
The Church claims that true SubGeniuses are not actually human, but rather are descendants of the Yeti. According to Revelation X: The 'Bob' Apocryphon (published in 1994), SubGenii are actually the mutant offspring of a forbidden sexual union that took place millions of years ago between a resident of Atlantis and a human; at that time, humans were little more than a slave race. The resulting offspring was the catalyst that led to the fall of Atlantis. SubGenii often refer to one another as "Yeti" (or yetinsyny), though this origin story is generally not well known outside of the Church itself. (The term yetinsyny was appropriated from the artist Stanisław Szukalski, whose Behold! the Protong posited that Communists and other people Szukalski disliked were descendant f