Salute to Nick Bougas

1,200 words

Nick Bougas, creator of the most famous cartoon since Mickey Mouse, is dead.

Nicholas Arthur Bougas was born on March 16, 1955, in Savannah, Georgia. He died peacefully after a long battle with cancer on August 22, 2026, near Atlanta, Georgia. He was 71.

Nick Bougas is most famous as A. Wyatt Mann, the creator of the Happy Merchant, which is an Anti-Defamation League-certified hate symbol, as well as such famous cartoons as “Hey Rabbi, watcha doin’?” (on Jewish hate crimes hoaxes) and “Around Blacks, Never Relax” (if only Irina Zarutska had taken this message to heart). He even added a new term to the English language: “Bix Nood” (verb: “Bix Nooding”), meaning unintelligible African-American babble—and, by extension, Africans in general.

Nick showed great artistic talent as a young child. He took an early interest in caricatures and political cartoons. In his twenties, he developed a reputation as an illustrator for various “underground” publications.

Nick began drawing political cartoons in the 1980s while living in Los Angeles, to push back against the insufferable sanctimony of white liberals about race relations.

A. Wyatt Mann (A White Man) was born in 1988, when Tom Metzger began publishing Bougas’ cartoons in his WAR (White Aryan Resistance) newsletter. They soon became the most popular feature.

Nick belonged to the same transgressive West-coast, far-Right subculture as Jim Goad, Adam Parfrey, Nicholas Schreck, Boyd Rice, and others. In this scene, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Ragnar Redbeard were the preferred philosophers. Anton LaVey and Charles Manson had guru status. Progressivism and liberal egalitarianism were mercilessly mocked. Biological race and sex differences were affirmed. Elitism and eugenics were defended. Historical revisionism about WWII and interwar fascism was widely embraced.

This subculture was not identical to the White Nationalism, neo-Nazism, and skinhead scene of the time, but as Metzger demonstrated, the border was at least open.

In addition to his work with Metzger, Nick was a contributing editor and artist for The Manson File: The Unexpurgated Charles Manson as Revealed in Letters, Photos, Stories, Songs, Art, Testimony, and Documents, ed. Nicholas Schreck (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1988).

When Jim and Debbie Goad began publishing ANSWER Me! in 1991, Nick contributed illustrations. In fact, I discovered Nick Bougas in the Spring of 2000, the same day I discovered Jim Goad, for Nick contributed an eye-meltingly brutal caricature of Andrea Dworkin to issue 4 of ANSWER Me!

In addition to his art, Nick directed a number of documentaries: Death Scenes (1989), hosted by Anton LaVey; Death Scenes 2 (1992); and Death Scenes 3 (1993). Also in 1993, he directed Speak of the Devil, a biographical portrait of Anton LaVey. In 1994, he released The Goddess Bunny, about a disabled transgender tap-dancer named Sandie Crisp, as well as Serial Killers, based on extensive original research. In 1998, Nick released an album of bloopers and gaffes called Celebrities . . . At Their Worst!

Nick was slow to adopt computers and get online. Once he did in the early 2000s, he was astonished to find his old A. Wyatt Mann cartoons everywhere. Eventually, they became staples of the online Right. The Happy Merchant, in particular, is world-famous and has been endlessly adapted and parodied, or maybe the right word is “homaged.” (Is a parody of a parody an homage?) Nick was delighted and began creating better quality versions of his images to make them more easily shared.

There isn’t even a name for the Bougas-Goad-Parfrey subculture. Until I get a better suggestion, I will call it the Zine Right. The Zine Right was a crucial metapolitical precursor of the online Right, to which it contributed ideas, images, and above all an ethos: transgressive, ironic, and humorous.

A transgressive subculture is important for overthrowing the ruling lies of an age. An ironic subculture allows people to try on heretical ideas before buying them and gives them plausible deniability if they get cold feet.

However, now that realism about biological race and sex differences, anti-liberalism, and the Jewish question are going mainstream, a lot of the merely transgressive trappings are being discarded as marginalizing. Beyond that, irony may be useful for exploring heretical ideas, but political change requires commitment and seriousness.

The humor, however, will never get old. The mainstream Right, as well as more conventional forms of the far Right, tend to be humorless. Why wouldn’t they? They’re losing—or they are mourning various Lost Causes. They feel deluged and defeated by the Left.

You can only laugh at something if you have risen above it. If you can’t laugh at the Left, then spiritually they still rule you. And if they rule you spiritually, how can you defeat them politically?

Nick Bougas, Jim Goad, Adam Parfrey, Charles Krafft, and the whole gang had rejected the moral foundations of modern liberalism, so they could look down on it and laugh. The mainstream Right, by contrast, consists basically of people who accept liberal morality and thus feel ashamed of their lack of enthusiasm for liberal policies and outcomes.

That ethos of lordly, mocking contempt for liberalism traveled from Nick’s cartoons, as well as the work of his friends, onto the internet, where they found a vast and growing audience. They also found welcoming forums, where their ideas and images could propagate, mutate, and change the culture. And the rest is history.

Someone needs to write a history of the Zine Right. Honestly, the book should have been started years ago, because now four important players are dead: Adam Parfrey, Charles Krafft, Jim Goad, and Nick Bougas. I would love to publish such a book, as well as any interviews conducted for such a project. Someone needs to begin today.

I got to know Nick Bougas after I became friends with Jim Goad. Jim had the highest regard for Nick. As soon as Jim came onboard at Counter-Currents, he brought Nick along to do cartoons and graphics under the name Phil Eiger Newmann (Feel Like a New Man).

I first met Nick at a Counter-Currents event in Atlanta in 2022. Like so many notorious “haters,” he was intelligent, warm, friendly, and of course witty and charming. Nick knew he was a celebrity on the internet. But he had never been a celebrity in a room full of people, and he clearly enjoyed himself. He brought a stack of Happy Merchant prints, which he graciously signed and simply gave away.

I suggested that Nick actually sell limited edition prints and other (erm) merchandise. The project went through a long period of “development hell” before producing a web archive, awyattmann.com and a limited-edition signed Happy Merchant print, copies of which are still available. Now that Nick is gone, I will make sure the site is updated with all of his work.

Nick was preceded in death by his father, Arthur Nicholas Bougas, also called Nick, and his mother Joyce Bougas, née Caterina. He is survived by his longtime partner Sandra Weinberg, as well as his legions of characters and cartoons, which will continue to be morphed and memed as long as evil and sanctimony are in need of mocking.

Counter-Currents, August 24, 2026