comics, worthy of the term only because there is no other way to classify them, and included here primarily for the sake of the record.

The third and most significant group of underground comics are a far more public phenomenon. While the eight-pagers were without any legitimate circulation or recognition, and the kinky comics have remained generally unknown (due perhaps to the very specific and personal nature of their appeal), the new underground comics have had a sizable effect. They have alternately altered or reinforced the opinions of their readers, they have earned supporters and detractors through widespread publicity, and their dogmatic insistence on totally unrestricted self-expression has had a considerable impact not only on the "overground" comic book but on other arts with an ostensibly more serious purpose than comics. Also, they have come as far as they have in a very short time: this type of underground comic was unknown before 1965, and the first important title, Zap, did not appear until 1968.

The new underground comics are part of a larger movement which is bent on inducing drastic changes in America's state of mind, not to speak of American society. As such, the artists producing them should be considered not only in terms of their individual achievement but as representatives of a philosophy of which they are both a cause and an effect. On the other hand, controversy over the general underground ethic often obscures the variations in viewpoint which exist among even the most prominent creators in the field. More to the point, it is important to note that a deliberate ambiguity exists in the concepts promoted in certain stories, and that any messages which might be gleaned from one piece may be apparently contradicted by the next, even if both are the work of the same hand. If some underground comics are pure propaganda, the best of them are distinguished by an irony denoting skepticism at the notion of any simplistic solution. Such comics are equally likely to overstate their cases for the purpose of shock, a type of exaggeration that the undergrounders use as a major comedy device, gleefully secure in the belief that it will pass over the heads of the uninitiated.

The original shock value comic books, of course, were the eight-pagers, famed in mail-order advertisements (which were actually for fraudulent, censored imitations) as "the kind men like." The authentic items were created and circulated anonymously, and despite their rumored origin south of the border, they have a distinctly American flavor. Strangely enough, they are not entirely without what the courts refer to as "redeeming social content." Indeed, it is possible that these hot items have been thought to represent the depths of depravity not only because of their concentration on sex but because of their sociological and revolutionary implications. These implications, humanistic and anti-authoritarian, make some of the eight-pagers the obvious but unacknowledged predecessors of today's underground press. Simply by defying the ban on the explicit depiction of sexual activities, forbidden despite the fact that they are personally familiar to most readers and conceptually familiar to all but the youngest child, these comics were an avatar of the current growing insistence on the right to present all human activities in works of the imagination without restriction. Moreover, the concept of introducing the sexual element among familiar personages from the headlines and funnies pages often had a liberating effect exclusive of titillation by demonstrating the vacant and emasculated quality of "approved" entertainment.

There seems to be an important difference between the comics that draw on other comics characters and those that draw on public figures. The most widely known of the eight-pagers are those that used characters from the most familiar of comic strips and comic books as the protagonists of erotic adventure.… [This] use of established personalities in activities which their creators would never have sanctioned anticipated by a generation the Mad innovation of the fifties. Yet it would be inaccurate to imply that the eight-pagers examined the themes of the legitimate sources in any thoughtful manner. Operating in a twilight mode halfway between parody and plagiarism, the eight-pagers were clearly less concerned with exploration than with exploitation. The real commentary on the material which they treated was implicit in the contrast between the immaculate originals and the inflammatory imitations. Somewhere between the two extremes of purity and pornography lay the truth about human behavior, and the exaggeration of the eight-pagers, as a response to asexual entertainment, impressed many readers as eminently reasonable.

The other (and earlier) type of eight-pager, involving fantasies concerning actual public figures, had a more specific type of comment wrapped up inside it. One of the recent examples of this form presented Alger Hiss in a number of compromising situations, and the new undergrounders have made a lot of mileage out of the possibilities of presenting their prominent political opponents in scandalous situations. However, the original type of character to move from the headlines into these two-by-four inch comic books were notorious criminals. The Depression created a mystique around such infamous figures, based on their willingness to defy a power structure which seemed to be in a state of near collapse, and on their apparent freedom and financial success during a period of crippling poverty. One example features "Pretty Boy" Floyd in a story called "The Fugitive," which brings the fleeing gunman to the exclusive "Madame Dora's School for Girls," an institution which the context endows with most of the qualities of a prison. He seduces an innocent inmate and lures her off into a life of passion and adventure. The hero's armed aggression is presented as a symbolic equivalent of sexual power, success with the former automatically giving way to success with the latter.

More directly anti-establishment is the attitude presented in a John Dillinger eight-pager, "A Hasty Exit," which elaborates the simpler plot of "The Fugitive" by expanding to include two girls and a police detective. Contrasting personal and official attitudes toward underworld behavior, "A Hasty Exit" is also tied in with certain aspects of the cultural changes wrought by industrial development, most specifically the mass-produced automobile. The auto changed the face of crime, and, even before the advent of the drive-in theatre, increased mobility made Henry Ford the father of the sexual revolution. His most impressive public statement was "history is bunk," and this story serves to undermine the official historical view of gangster morality.

Dillinger, like Floyd, is presented as attractive to women, but the two girls in this piece are far from naive, and they are in fact attracted by his infamy, rather than merely tolerant of it. Their rivalry for his affections begins when the outlaw encounters Evelyn and Nellie under their broken-down car, and casually donates his own stolen vehicle in exchange for their company—a small demonstration of the appeal of illegal affluence. A potential three-way love scene is degenerating into an argument when the law arrives in the form of Captain Tracy, who presumably got his name from the comic book detective, although there is no physical resemblance. The law's incompetence is demonstrated when Evelyn disarms its representative, and its corruption is shown in the last panel where Tracy and Dillinger have discarded their social roles as aggressive antagonists and formed a camaraderie born of similar desires. They share the girls, and Tracy gives the police chief a telephoned report that the criminal has escaped to Mexico. The "revolutionary" note here is that Tracy's devotion to duty is undermined not by force but by passion.

Such material indicates that there was often more to the eight-page comic booklets than has usually been considered. If their commentary was a peripheral issue, it was still discernible in numerous cases.

Finally, one can also say that the eight-pagers doubtless had an educational value in introducing some readers into the mysteries of sexual behavior, which was presented in their pages in a reasonably straightforward and comprehensible manner. At their first appearance, they were probably the only place in America where such information was available on a wide scale. Perhaps it was the recent surge of open discussion of sexual matters which cast the form into oblivion.

The new wave of underground comics, which are undoubtedly the most significant despite their comparatively brief lifespan, progressed through their speedy growth in a manner which reduplicated the progress of the standard comics. They began in newspapers, and gradually branched out into the comic book form. But since the new comics were to be totally free of censorship, they could evolve only in a new kind of newspaper.

The first newspaper to afford an opportunity for such uninhibited comics was New York's East Village Other, which began in 1965. By the spring of 1966, there were at least four other papers in the nation with similar policies: the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Detroit Fifth Estate, and the Michigan Paper. These five became the nucleus of the Underground Press Syndicate, an organization devised to provide free exchange of features among member publications committed to the same radical point-of-view. To fully explore or explain the policies or the politics of the underground press would require a separate book, but certain positions were obvious: opposition to the draft and the war in Vietnam, opposition to drug prohibition, support for oppressed minority groups, demands for sexual freedom including women's liberation, and a general mistrust of government and academic institutions. The newspapers mentioned above were gradually to be joined by dozens of others to become the most readily indentifiable voice of what has been described as the "new left."

The importance of comics to the success of the Underground Press Syndicate was made immediately clear when the announcement of its formation was printed with an illustration by Robert Crumb, who rapidly moved into the spotlight as the underground's most prominent cartoonist. He was probably not the first, however. The earliest continuous comics to appear in the underground press were the work of William Beckman, whose miniscule strip, "Captain High," was a pioneer effort in the pages of the East Village Other. Drawn in a style which suggested that the time taken to read the strip equalled the time taken to create it, "Captain High" was a slight effort which constantly abandoned its tentative grip on continuity to involve its characters in bouts of marijuana smoking. The casual attitude taken toward drugs was somehow more effective in defining the editorial position of the underground press than any number of reasoned or impassioned prose arguments, and the door had been opened for the freewheeling treatment of controversial social issues which was to distinguish underground comics.

The comics became the most continually impressive material available for syndication through the various outlets of the U.P.S. (the initials coincidentally duplicated those of the widespread United Press Syndicate)—and the comics succeeded because they were entertaining. Whatever one may think of the underground views of life and society, it is reasonably clear that they have had their best moments when expressed through the arts rather than rhetoric. What shines through the comics medium is the open-mindedness about human and artistic experience that is the movement's spiritual core, a notion too often obscured by the debilitating dogmatism of narrowly focused debate.

To Robert Crumb must go the credit not only for contributing many of the best underground newspaper comics, but also for making the independent underground comic book a viable form. In addition to his early experience with Help, Crumb had solidified his technique through a job drawing for the American Greeting Card Company, where he specialized in the modern snide style of cheer for a line of cards labeled Hi-Brow. He also began developing his first major character, Fritz the Cat, a funky feline who with successive appearances took on more and more the attributes of the bohemian. Serialized adventures of this character appeared in Cavalier magazine after they had been drawn in a wallpaper sample book, and they were finally collected in a paperbound volume, Fritz the Cat.

What appears to be Fritz's earliest manifestation is a piece dated April 1964 but not published until 1969, in the small pamphlet, R. Crumb's Comics and Stories, clearly named in tribute to the famous Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. Actually, this pamphlet contained only one story, which saw a vagabond Fritz returning to his home with vague stories of worldly success, and ended with him seducing his younger sister after a mid-night swim, an incestuous incident suggested rather than seen. The story ended in a blackout which, in Crumb's future work, would be replaced by unblinking illumination. The more fully realized Fritz pieces in Fritz the Cat include a negligible spy spoof, and two others which are keen depictions of the sources and substance of the developing "hippy" life style. At first a glib yet searching college student, the cat soon drops out to become "Fritz the No-Good," a disillusioned disaffiliate who loses his wife and home and becomes a revolutionary political activist more out of boredom than conviction. He runs into enough trouble to drop out of that, too, and eventually becomes the type of bewildered, downtrodden figure who is everywhere in his creator's work.

Fritz is in a sense the source of many of Crumb's characters; he actually traveled the route that brought the protagonists to the state we find them in at the beginning of their stories. As such, it was perhaps inevitable that he be abandoned to leave the way open for personalities who are at home at the point where he seemed to have reached the bottom (even if his optimism is essentially unimpaired by the fall). Discarding Fritz also indicated a significant change for the artist, who has since concentrated primarily on human characters. Strangely enough, they rarely behave in as normal or naturalistic a manner as their animal forebear. It is indicative of Crumb's reversals that he should depict bestiality as an especial attribute of people rather than beasts.

Crumb wrote and drew the first important underground comic book, Zap, in 1967. Its appearance was delayed when a misguided acquaintance walked off with the original unprinted artwork, which is rumored to have ended up in England. As a result, it was a second volume that was finally released in 1968 as the first Zap. The previous collection of stories was rescued when the artist re-inked Xerox copies of his own missing drawings. The result was an issue numbered Zap zero so as to preserve the correct sequence. These two issues are the only Zap comic books to contain just Crumb's work, although he continued to appear in later issues and has also issued a number of other solo efforts under different titles, including Despair, Motor City, Big Ass, Uneeda, Home Grown Funnies and Mr. Natural. In addition, he has contributed to such titles as Yellow Dog, Bi/ou, San Francisco Comic Book and Slow Death Funnies.

The Zap comic books, printed in black and white with color covers by Don Donahue's Apex Novelty Company, contain the necessary ingredients for tracing many of the important developments in the underground comics field. To date there have been six irregular issues, the "original" zero plus one through five. The inside cover of zero featured what was to become a frequent occurrence in Crumb's comic books: pages offering the author's message in ludicrous self-portrait-style strips. "Mr. Sketchum is at it again!" proclaims the headline, beneath which a smiling figure with a pencil behind his ear stalks a ramshackle studio littered with old copies of both Mad (its last comic book issue) and Humbug. He cheerfully promises readers "the latest in humor! Audacious! Irreverent! Provocative! You Bet!" By Zap 1 the same chap had become "a raving lunatic" who threatened his audience with strange powers and warned that they were putty in his hands. The title was "Definitely a Case of Derangement!" Two years later, the Despair comic book saw the same figure cackling at the desperate plight of others, confessing that from childhood he had been afflicted with a "Morbid Sense of Humor." No longer content to be simply manipulating reactions, he had become a proponent of "psychological sadism … with you, the reader, as victim!!" These statements, tongue in cheek though in some respects they are, offer about as complete a sketch of the cartoonist as he is likely to provide; he remains an elusive subject for interviewers, reluctant to discuss his work or its implications.

The same elusiveness infuses his stories, which gain much of their humor from the manner in which they teeter on the brink of a distinct and possibly even profound significance, only to retreat into obscurity or nonsense at the moment when revelation seems at hand. A case in point is "Meatball," the lead story in Zap zero, which transformed round hunks of hamburger into a source of spiritual awareness. Dropping out of the sky onto the heads of a chosen few, the inexplicable meatball brings equally inexplicable relief to all it touches, becoming in the story a somehow convincing symbol of transcendence while still retaining the physical properties which make it such an unlikely choice for a source of the sublime. In the last panel the meatball comes alive, winking and waving a greeting to its converts and to those who wait in vain for its approach. (Part of the irony of the piece lies in the contrast between its use of "meatball" and the use that had been crystallized by the article in Mad No. 32 of radio personality Jean Shepherd, "Night People versus Creeping Meatballism." In this article, the term was used to describe the kind of materialistic mindlessness which the Crumb meatball cures.)

Crumb's range of targets is indicated by the last story in the same Zap. Having explored the possibilities of transforming humanity through miracles of the mind, he moved into "The City of the Future," where scientific development has alleviated all human suffering. Here the cartoonist mocks the pronouncements which assure the public that technology will make life perfect within a decade or two. Such absurd devices as soft plastic buildings and vehicles (to avoid accidents) appear side by side with such dream creations as android slaves and machines that give the individual complete fantasy existences. Yet the pitfalls of the completely controlled society come to the fore at the end of the piece, when the clowns organized "just to keep us on our toes" take on a sinister cast as they deliver a pie in the face of an elderly golfer, the pie poisoned to bring about compulsory euthanasia used as a population-control measure.

The same issue presented some of Crumb's regularly featured characters, including the "snoids," grotesque, snickering little creatures who pop up at the perfect moment to increase embarrassment. Also featured was his most fascinating and enigmatic creation, Mr. Natural, an ancient wiseman who wavers between inspiration and charlatanry. Some brief early appearances featured the sage with a black, shaggy beard, but it soon became the fluffy white one which gives "Natch" some of the physical qualities of Santa Claus, although he is less likely to give gifts than to receive them. His relationship with his followers suggests that he is some sort of confidence man, surviving on contributions for which he offers nothing in return except the opportunity to search fruitlessly for truth in his presence. There is no doubt, however, that he is happier and more competent than those who seek him out. His attitude toward life is based on a wide range of adventures recounted in a prose biography in the Mr. Natural comic book. Bootlegger, medicine man, magician, musician, migrant, and taxi driver in Afghanistan, the crusty old philosopher embodies much of the history of the bohemian movement in the United States and abroad. On a few occasions he has proved himself capable of performing something that could pass for a miracle. He does have strange powers, then, but they are "natural," the result of his own personality and experience, and thus impossible to transmit to followers through the sort of simplistic formula they demand. The result is that attempts to uncover his secret finally drive the wiseman to wisecracks and sometimes even to slapstick violence, as on the cover of Mr. Natural, where his hobnailed boots are delivering a swift kick in the pants to his disciple, Flakey Foont.

Flakey, Mr. Natural's most consistent foil, is a neurotic young man whose fervent desire for enlightenment leads him into confrontations with the guru which seem to teach him nothing. "Why do I keep thinking you can tell me anything?" he asks. Yet he will not quit, perhaps because his efforts to defy the sage end in complete futility. This was never more apparent than in Zap 5, where he determined to spend the rest of his life in a bathtub.

This bizarre bit of behavior might have been more readily accepted from another Crumb creation, Shuman the Human, a bald truth-seeker even more desperate than Flakey. Shuman has had his head reduced to minute proportions for his effrontery in demanding a confrontation with God; he has also suffered a nervous breakdown when Mr. Natural frustrated his attempt to became an eastern mystic. His ability for self-pity and self-deception point up the value of Mr. Natural's attitude.

Other important personalities developed in Crumb's early comic book period include "Whiteman," a business executive obsessed with the need to maintain his inhibitions while striving for success, and mocked by a group of relaxed blacks who then invited him to join in their celebration. The artist's treatment of blacks is based on the stereotype common to an out-dated tradition, but it seems certain that this is less a reflection of prejudice than it is a commentary on the prejudice he sees around him. The point was emphasized by the introduction, in Zap 2, of "Angelfood McSpade," a voluptuous native of Africa whose existence is an endless series of exploitations by white lechers.

The pages of Zap 2 were opened to three other artists besides Crumb—Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, and S. Clay Wilson. Griffin and Moscoso have very similar styles and techniques, almost indistinguishable at first glance. They are the most careful draftsman of the underground cartoonists; the straight lines of their panel borders are one feature which sets them apart from their more casual cohorts. Their "stories" are comics only in a very limited sense. They generally abandon both plot and text to concentrate on conglomerations of abstract shapes and symbols which change from panel to panel in progressions based solely on the visual value of the material. Both have a fondness for Disney characters, mice and ducks who are reduced, especially in Moscoso's work, to their component parts and then rearranged with other objects like light bulbs and empty, shaded speech balloons. The effect of disintegration and reintegration provides the only subject matter, and apparently is intended to suggest the visual effect of psychedelic drugs. While Moscoso's objects seem to be chosen arbitrarily, Griffin's material reflects an interest in the occult, and some of his best pieces are full of arcane symbols like sphinxes, scarabs, and flaming hearts. Originally a poster artist, Griffin is most impressive in single pages which rely less on linear development than on direct relationships between component parts. His most coherent piece, "Bombs Away," reflects the doctrine of Karma in its tale of a duck and a mouse converting a pig into a sausage while a bomb drops from the sky onto their home.

The drawings of Griffin and Moscoso have been a relatively isolated phenomenon; the only other comics with similar concerns are the attractive but unintelligible productions of John Thompson. The debut of S. Clay Wilson, on the other hand, was to have immediate and powerful repercussions. He is, for better or worse, the cartoonist and writer who defies more taboos than any other in the history of comics. He has shocked and amazed every reader who encounters his work not only because of the subject matter but because of the repellent but fascinating drawing style in which it is presented. While Crumb's great popularity is doubtless increased because of a certain roundness and cuteness in even his most reprehensible characters, Wilson's figures are as hideous as his considerable skill can make them. Yet his work has had a direct and acknowledged influence on Crumb and all the other underground cartoonists, by making them aware of how much further they could go in challenging conventions of taste and judgment. Wilson's fantasies of depraved sex and violence made everything that preceded him, even in the underground, seem tame indeed. He makes the eight-pagers look romantic, and the kinky comics look chummy.

Zap 2 featured three of his stories. One saw the contents of an unflushed toilet bowl flung into the faces of three characters, another featured a sailor whose oversized sex organ was amputated and eaten. Each of these pieces was only a page in length, with the ultimate outrage ending the story the way a punch line ends a humorous strip. The indignities which Wilson gleefully inflicts on his protagonists are so incredible that they actually do become jokes; it is because they are intolerable that they are absurd, and thus, in the last analysis, they are funny. The technique of exaggerating and exposing morbid fears is one which Wilson's comics have developed to the point where their crudity becomes cathartic.

Wilson has a number of thematic concerns. The third story in the same issue of Zap, "The Hog Ridin' Fools,"—a longer story than the others—explored one of the artist's favorite subjects: the world of contemporary motorcycle gangs. In this comparatively restrained effort, the "Fools" have the misfortune to tangle with the Checkered Demon, one of the rare Wilson characters who survives long enough to appear in more than one story. Various sorts of demons populate Wilson's tales, using their supernatural powers as a sort of moral force to restore order among survivors of his typically bloody battles. In addition to the bikers, Wilson has a fondness for depicting eighteenth century pirates. There are similarities between these groups, which have been emphasized in a series of "time warp" tales in which the two types are mysteriously juxtaposed, resulting in predictable mayhem. More staggering are pieces that depict the battle of the sexes in its most debased form, involving mortal combat between gangs of equally vicious men and women.

While the Zap comic books and Wilson's conflicts poured out of the West Coast, a New York cartoonist was creating a different sort of conflict in the pages of the East Village Other. This was Manuel Rodrigues, who works under the name "Spain." Wilson's violence has its sources in the domain of abnormal psychology, Spain's comes from the arena of political ideology. His major creation is Trashman, a radical revolutionary struggling against a repressive government in an indistinct period of the future. The Trashman series, which Spain produced and in which he kept a reasonably organized plot line in progress for over a year, constitutes the most sustained effort yet attempted in the field of underground comics. When the best strips were reprinted in a tabloid-size comic book by the Berkeley Tribe, the total effect suggested some of the qualities of an epic. In late 1970, years after the character's initial appearance, Spain produced an origin story for the Subvert comic book. The story made it clear that the civilization that produced Trashman was the result of an atomic war which had created a new ruling class, only partially in control of the population, and afflicted with a megalomania which found expression in mass slaughter, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. The hero, originally auto mechanic Harry Barnes, became a rebel after his wife was murdered by government agents. He received instruction from mysterious cloaked figures, gaining mastery of obscure skills described as "parasciences." Despite such hints of supernatural guidance, the bearded, black-clad Trashman is clearly a mortal, with magical powers apparently limited to the ability to interpret instructions from such unlikely sources as cracks in the sidewalk. Although the science-fiction elements make it possible to view the series as simply a work of imagination, there is little doubt that it is intended to reflect contemporary reality. Indeed, certain events over the past few years have shown the accuracy of Spain's implied predictions as the new radicals have moved away from a philosophy of peace and love toward the kind of militant confrontation embodied by Trashman and his band of urban guerrillas. Politics aside, Spain is closer to the traditional action comic book style than any of his colleagues. His backgrounds and battle scenes are often reminiscent of the work of Jack Kirby, and his theme is in the tradition of Blackhawk.

More recently, Spain has returned to the present with a new protagonist, Manning, a vicious plainclothes police detective who prefers force to reason. Crude, corrupt, and not very bright, Manning represents the radical's concept of the policeman as a "pig." His favorite investigative technique involves administering a brutal beating or a few bullet wounds to whoever happens to be on the scene when he arrives. Probably the rottenest cop ever to be imagined, Manning finally surpasses belief, although his presence in comics is an important indication of the extent to which certain groups, whose attitudes are exposed in the underground press, view "law and order" as a threat to their security. Spain frequently manages to include sordid sex scenes amidst the carnage his characters create (Trashman is one of very few comics heroes to catch a venereal disease), but his real importance is in his portrayal of the violence seething within contemporary society.

Another important contributor to the East Village Other is Kim Deitch, who dreamed up a number of weird personalities during a long stint as one of the paper's leading cartoonists. His most memorable creations are Sunshine Girl, whose round body is topped by a daisy-shaped head, and Uncle Ed, the India rubber man and acrobat of love. Deitch was eventually to become editor of the Other's comic supplement, Gothic Blimp Works, which was inaugurated in 1969 under the editorship of Vaughn Bode, a cartoonist with a fondness for drawing reptiles.

This tabloid-sized publication, which lasted only a few issues, featured most of the top underground artists, and set itself apart from other productions in the field by including a few pages in color. The color separations were the work of Trina Robbins, who has gained a reputation as the foremost female creator of underground comics. She had some success in Gothic Blimp Works with Panthea, a creature half lady and half lion who was transported from Africa with painful results. The somewhat submerged concern for feminist principles which this series suggested was to emerge in 1970, when Trina became the principal contributor to It Ain 't Me Babe, the first comic book devoted exclusively to Women's Liberation. The cover, which featured renderings of Sheena, Wonder Woman, and Mary Marvel, suggested how much comic book fantasies have done to provide images suitable to a new view of women and her place in the world.

Possibly the most widely syndicated of all underground cartoonists is Gilbert Shelton. After years of producing first the Wonder Warthog series for Help! and then Drag Cartoons, Shelton moved into high gear in 1968 with the Feds 'n' Heads comic book, which established his position as second only to Crumb in the ranks of the radical cartoonists. The Hog was to be gradually abandoned, perhaps because his predilection for crime-fighting made him too much of a "pig" for the new audience. He did exhibit some tolerance when, after accidently knocking a hole in the house of four shocked pot smokers, he remarked, "You folks go back to what you were doing, and I'll be back in a minute to fix your wall."

This sympathy for the drug culture was to take its most impressive form in the adventures of Shelton's new heroes, Those Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, who have become a regular feature of the Los Angeles Free Press. Living by the motto "Grass will carry you through times of no money better than money will carry you through times of no grass," those three long-haired clowns have become the most consistently humorous characters in underground comics. Fat Freddy, Phineas and Freewheelin' Frank demonstrate the pleasures and pains of life on the outskirts of society in a manner reminiscent of the great silent film comedians. Most of these stories are a single page in length, and they appear regularly throughout the Underground Press Syndicate as well as in various comic books. Their longest adventure to date is "The Freak Brothers Pull a Heist," from the second Shelton comic book, Radical America, a special issue of a journal ordinarily devoted to revolutionary prose. The ingenuity employed to feed the ravenous pothead Fat Freddy provides an amusing commentary on the gullibility of a public conditioned by television giveaways and similar mass media nonsense.

Shelton has also produced at least two classic pieces that do not involve the Freak Brothers. One is a poetic tale of a farmer who liberates his chickens in a psychedelic frenzy; the other is "Believe It or Leave It" from Zap 5. The latter presents radical complaints concerning policies of the American government, thinly disguised as descriptions of conditions in foreign lands, the argument being presented in vividly contrasting pictures and captions.

Just as the underground comics have their own newspapers, so they have their own presses and, as has been seen, their own comic book titles. An important feature of Shelton's career is his involvement with San Francisco's Rip-Off Press, a cartoonists' cooperative which prints many of the important underground comic books. Until recently, most of the rest came out of Berkeley's Print Mint, operated by Don Schenker. He has distributed the Zap comic books, the tabloid Yellow Dog (recently converted to standard comic book format) and even the Chicago-originating Bijou Funnies.

Next to Zap, Bijou is the most consistently impressive title currently being produced. Crumb and Shelton have been regular contributors, but the Bijou staff also includes two artists, Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson, with important individual achievements. Lynch, the editor, has a low-key, slightly archaic style which works to good advantage in his tales of "Nard 'n' Pat," which features a dimwitted, straight-laced man with a radical pet cat. Williamson's principal hero is a nattily attired, genial halfwit named Snappy Sammy Smoot. Williamson has also created a series of half-sarcastic views of armed rebellion under the title "Class War Comix."

The underground cartoonists have produced a few comic books with specific themes. Most notorious are the one issue of Jiz and the two issues of Snatch, titles devoted exclusively to sex, and printed in a smaller size, perhaps in tribute to the old eight-pagers. For some reason, these remarkably graphic entries seem to have had less trouble with the law than Zap 4, which has been seized by the authorities in several cities, apparently because of a Crumb piece called "Joe Blow," in which parents seduce their children. Since several of Crumb's stories in Snatch and elsewhere show more physical details, it seems that it is the incestuous theme that is intolerable, rather than any specific word or picture.

The untrammeled underground comics may represent the coming trend, or they may be only a temporary aberration. Regardless, there is a sense in which they can be considered part of a larger comic book tradition, a tradition in which realism gives way to exaggeration, and even exaggeration gives way to pure fantasy. The world of comic books is inhabited by supernatural monsters and pseudo-scientific heroes, by animals who act like human beings and human beings who act like animals. Such subjects, because they have a slight relationship to the mundane events of ordinary existence, have caused comic books to be treated condescendingly even by those who can overcome the traditionalist's suspicion of a mixed medium which combines the visual and the verbal.

In the last analysis, however, it must be recognized that the incredible subject matter is not a weakness, but rather the greatest strength of the medium. The surface irrelevance masks a deeper significance. The best comic books probe the subconscious, creating concepts and characters of mythic proportions. Free from the burden of respectability, comic books have provided, for creator and consumer alike, an opportunity to explore the wild dream and desires which seem to have no place in our predominantly rationalistic and materialistic society. In so doing, comic books have won themselves a small but significant place as a key to the American character.

Joseph Witek

SOURCE: "The Underground Roots of Fact-Based Comics," in Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, University Press of Mississippi, 1989, pp. 48-57.

[In the following essay, Witek discusses the underground comic books of the late 1960s and 1970s as a reaction against the 1954 Comics Code, focusing on the publications Skull and Slow Death Comix.]

E.C.'s Mad magazine was able to evade the strictures of the Comics Code only because in 1955 publisher William M. Gaines shifted the format of his biting parodies of American media and social customs from a standardsized color comic book to a black-and-white magazine. Otherwise the grip of the Code was ironclad; by the late 1950s few comic books were sold in America without the distinctive Comics Code Authority seal of approval. The Comics Code Authority is an independent board established in 1954 by the comic-book industry to review the editorial content of comic books and ensure that they abide by the provisions of the Comics Code, self-proclaimed the "most stringent code in existence for any communications media." The Comics Code established rigid and sweeping rules for the content of comic books: "Guidelines of the authority prohibit displays of corrupt authority, successful crimes, happy criminals, the triumph of evil over good, violence, concealed weapons, the death of a policeman, sensual females, divorce, illicit sexual relations, narcotics or drug addiction, physical afflictions, poor grammar, and the use of the words 'crime,' 'horror,' and 'terror' in the title of a magazine or a story." The nearly universal adoption of the Comics Code is perhaps the single most influential event in the history of the American comic book medium; it efficiently squelched the few postwar comic books that were groping toward a sophisticated audience, and in effect it decreed that all comic books would become the ill-crafted pap toward which most American comics tended anyway. The Comics Code functioned perfectly as an economic instrument of social censorship; magazine distributors, fearful of parental protests, simply refused to handle non-Code-approved books, and dozens of small comic-book publishers folded when they failed to replace their ersatz-E.C. horror and suspense comics with products which were both socially respectable and commercially viable on the newsstands.

Sex, violence, and anarchy in the comics did not disappear after the introduction of the Comics Code, of course; Dr. Wertham, whose inflammatory Seduction of the Innocent mobilized the public indignation which spawned the Code, was nonplussed to find in the post-Code comics the same dangerous themes as ever, now, as one writer says, "[disguised] in a hypocritical aura of good taste where the ghastly effects of heartless cruelty were never realistically depicted. Murder looked more like a game than ever under the new self-awarded seal of approval" [Les Daniels, Comix].

But despite the chaos peeking through the new bourgeois clothes, comic books were sorely limited in their narrative and thematic possibilities. The Code's ostensible intent was the protection of young and impressionable readers from graphic violence and celebrations of crime, but its provisions work mainly to quell the vitality of the comics and to ratify authoritarian social control. Along with its rules against "violations of good taste or decency," the Code intones: "Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall not be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority." The Code's insistence that "good" must always triumph over "evil" fossilized the comics' tendency toward oversimplified conflicts and led to thematic and generic stagnation; it stripped away even the vestiges of plot suspense from the crime and adventure comics, and it damned in one phrase the soul of the horror genre, which requires at least the possibility of evil triumphing over good. Not until the introduction of the psychologically torn "hero-villain" in the Marvel superhero comics of the middle 1960s would a semblance of moral ambiguity return to mainstream comic books; the overt conflicts remained as stereotyped as ever, but soap-opera self-doubt eventually replaced melodramatic self-righteousness as the dominant tone of the comic-book hero.

The final effect of the Comics Code was to force comic books to depict a world that was either a denatured view of American social reality (a la Archie and Jughead) or an overtly fantastic never-never land of superpowered Manichean fisticuffs. Historical narratives in comic book form became nearly impossible; the ban on "all scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, [and] masochism" can be taken to rule out nearly everything in the history of Western civilization except inspirational biographies and patriotic exemplum. Of course, the rule forbidding "disrespect for established authority" made political satire nearly impossible.

To bash the Comics Code is easy enough: its patent (and successful) attempt to eliminate specific "undesirable" comics publishers is reprehensible; its naive assumption of the unproblematic nature of terms like "good" and "evil" and "excessive violence" would be laughable were its effects not so repressive of free speech; the bland and tedious comic books it mandated are a literary stigma from which the medium has been hard-pressed to recover. But it is important to remember that the Comics Code was not imposed on the industry by the government. In fact, its provisions make hash of the First Amendment and could stand no legal test. But the Code's rules are not laws; they are self-imposed industry guidelines, and as such they simply codified the existing editorial leanings of most American comics. E.C.'s powerfully written war comics failed because of lagging newsstand sales, not because of the meddling of the Comics Code, and while the Code killed off the most sophisticated American comic books, for many other comics the Code simply meant business as usual. The Code officially ruled out overtly mature treatments of adult themes in American comic books, but few such books had existed before the Code anyway, and to blame only the Comics Code Authority for the lack of serious literature in comics form is badly to underestimate the puerility of the comic book publishers and of the mainstream comics audience.

The Code did serve to articulate in an unusually direct and peremptory form the bourgeois artistic (read "moral") standards of postwar America. The bureaucratically enforced wholesomeness of American comic books (parodied unmercifully by their bastard offspring Mad) made the medium a specially circumscribed cultural space in which the terms of social rebellion were strictly defined: a comic book which violated the supposedly universal "standards of good taste" was simply not suffered to exist. As a result, when America's rebelling youth of the 1960s set about breaching their culture's established taboos, the comics medium offered a particularly fruitful ground for iconoclasm. Besides the much-heralded innovations in popular music, the most influential and distinctive artistic achievements of the 1960s counterculture were the uninhibited and socially defiant underground comic books, which distinguished themselves from their Code-approved counterparts by adopting the soubriquet "comix." Underground comix were cheaply and independently published black-and-white comics which flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s as outlets for the graphic fantasies and social protests of the youth counterculture.

To celebrate sex and drugs, as the counterculture did, was offensive to Middle America; to do it in the supposedly simon-pure comic-book form made the violation doubly piquant. The comix often paid homage to their comic-book ancestors by aping the unmistakable cover format and typography of the now-banned E.C. comics and by parodying the ubiquitous Seal of the Comics Code Authority; the interest of the comix in slaughtering sacred cows is clearly seen in the title of the long-running underground anthology Dr. Wirtham's Comix and Stories, which lampoons both anti-comic-book crusader Fredric Wertham and that hoary exemplar of good taste in comics Walt Disney's Comics and Stories.

The comix creators cultivated an outlaw image, and their works systematically flung down and danced upon every American standard of good taste, artistic competence, political coherence, and sexual restraint; in so doing they created works in the sequential art medium of unparalleled vigor, virtuosity, and spontaneity—after the underground comix, the Comics Code would never be the same. But comix were a short-lived phenomenon. By the middle 1970s unfavorable court decisions closed most of the drug paraphernalia shops ("head shops") which were the main retail distribution outlets for underground comix, the institution of "community standards" tests for obscenity restricted the areas where comix were allowed, and much of the counterculture's political and artistic energy had dissipated. Major comix artists still work in a format which may be called "underground," but surviving undergrounds retain only a shadow of their former vitality and transgressive force.

The underground comix were too idiosyncratic in approach and too multifarious in subject matter to be adequately summarized here. In fact, their diversity was one of the revolutionary things about them, since they did not have to appeal to the widest possible audience, as did the Comics Code comics. They were a crucial phase in the development of sequential art as a means of artistic expression, and the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and 1970s formed the matrix from which emerged in the 1980s comic books that, unlike the iconoclastic comix, make a new and unprecedented bid for acceptance as literature. Jack Jackson was one of the earliest and most prolific contributors to the comix; Art Spiegelman began his career as a comic-book artist and editor in the undergrounds; Harvey Pekar's earliest work appeared in underground comix, and Pekar's most prominent collaborator on American Splendor is Robert Crumb, the greatest talent of the underground movement and one of the major figures in comic-book history.

The underground comix were the first significant group of comic books in America aimed at an entirely adult audience, and the comix proved to a whole generation of readers who had been raised on the vapid Code-approved comics that the sequential art medium is a powerful narrative form capable of enormous range and flexibility. The comix blazed the way for the present-day historical and autobiographical comic books by developing both a group of artists who could write fact-based narratives in comic-book form and an audience prepared to read them.

But while comics such as American Splendor, Maus, and Comanche Moon would not exist had there been no underground comix, they are not themselves undergrounds, and the difference lies in their attitude toward mainstream America; such writers as Jackson, Spiegelman, and Pekar now actively court a general reading audience. As the words "underground" and "counterculture" suggest, the comix set themselves up in opposition to the dominant culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of their energy comes from their persistent efforts to offend the sensibilities of bourgeois America. The comics of the 1950s, with their gory horror and crime extravaganzas, are as nothing, mere innocuous yarns of genteel taste and impeccable morality, compared with such underground classics as S. Clay Wilson's gross and hilarious "Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates," Jim Osborne's tale of drug-induced murder and disembowelment, "Kid Kill!" from Thrilling Murder Comics, and Robert Crumb's nightmare/fantasy of castration in "The Adventures of R. Crumb Himself from Tales from the Leather Nun.

Still, the adversarial stance of the undergrounds imposed its own limitations. Works of art which set out to offend most of the public are, if successful, reduced to preaching to the converted, and the unrestrained satire of the undergrounds did at times descend to sophomoric in-group smugness. Then too the thrill of breaking taboos palls with repetition as iconoclasm itself becomes a rote stylistic gesture. By the late 1970s what had been the underground comix movement was, like the counterculture at large, fragmented and dispersed in its energies. The characteristic psychedelic graphics of the comix had been coopted by American commercial designers; some of the less offensive satirists were absorbed into more respectable outlets for their work such as Mad's spiritual heir, the National Lampoon; and the end of America's involvement in the Vietnam War found the culture as a whole weary of the political and social confrontation on which the underground comix had thrived.

As a widespread cultural and artistic force the undergrounds lasted barely a decade. But their legacy continues, not only in the work of such established artists as R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and Kim Deitch, who still create vital comic-book work, but also in a growing number of comic-book creators who take from the undergrounds new visions of possibility for comic-book narratives but without that antagonism toward a general audience which so often led to the self-ghettoization of the underground comix.

While all of the undergrounds made an implicit political statement in flaunting the Comics Code, many comix did and still do make overt political critiques of contemporary American society. Naturally enough, given the long tradition of comic books as a humorous form, the primary mode of ideological expression in the comix was satire, Juvenalian with a vengeance, and usually as salacious, scatological, and libelous as possible. For example, the cover of Yellow Dog no. 17 features a grinning, cigar-smoking devil, squatting hindquarters-on, defecating a suburban American landscape; in Uncle Sam Takes LSD, Uncle Sam similarly relieves himself of the head of Richard Nixon. Faced in their daily lives with the twin terrors of nuclear anxiety and the Vietnam War, the comix creators appropriated the horror genre to political and social satire.

Writers and artists such as Greg Irons, Tom Veitch, Dave Sheridan, William Stout, Rand Holmes, and Richard Corben used the conventions of horror comic books to satiric effect in comix that included The Legion of Charlies, which posits a military coup of the United States by the combined forces of Charlie Manson's murderous "family" and Lt. Calley's Charlie Company from the My Lai massacre. Politics and gore are inseparable in stories such as "You Got a Point There, Pop!" from Deviant Slice Comix no. 2, a tale of "the last war between men and women" featuring the black Amazon warrior "Ruth O'Leary of the fighting Fifty-first"; O'Leary informs her male captive that "the roots of the physical struggle between the sexes lies [sic] in the SEXISM and IDEOLOGICAL SUPREMISM of the masculine ego" just before she fries and eats his testicles.

Among the longest running of the horror/satire anthologies were Skull Comix and Slow Death Comix. Skull was not as overtly political as its more didactic and issue-oriented counterpart Slow Death, but the two comix shared many of the same contributors, and both took much of their tone and graphic format from the pre-Code E.C. horror comics. For example, advertising blurbs for Skull announced it as a comic "in the great old EC horror tradition," the front cover of Skull no. 1 sports an E.C. stamp ("An Exorpsychic Comic"), and on its inside cover the underground version of one of E.C.'s trademark "horror hosts," a grinning skull, welcomes his readers:

Hi kids! Ever wonder what happened to those great old HORROR comix that used to scare the shit out of ya way back in the 50's? Well, they all disappeared, an' it wasn't BLACK MAGIC what done 'em in, either! Those comix are GONE! Until NOW, that is! Things bein' as they are these days, a few of us ol' characters decided it was time to revive th' HORROR comix … in keepin' with th' times, y'understand! … so here goes—Skull Comix gonna lay it on yer skull.… But ya better buy this FAST (or better yet, steal it)—cause ya never know when they'll have another great comic book cleanup!

Here the suppression of comic books by the Comics Code is implicitly equated with contemporary political oppression, "things bein' as they are these days," and the paranoia about "another great comic book cleanup" further connects the underground comix project to the unfettered comics of the early 1950s. The salutation "Hi, kids!" is clearly figurative, since the cover reads "ADULTS ONLY, KIDS!" The comix were hardly protective of tender sensibilities (R. Crumb was especially scathing about the American cult of childhood), but like most underground comix, Skull and Slow Death tried to protect themselves from confiscation and censorship by openly proclaiming their "adult" nature.

Slow Death too was inspired by E.C. comics, but its emphasis on environmental issues made the E.C. science fiction comics rather than the horror comics its natural forebears; Slow Death nos. 6 and 7 both mimicked the cover format of E.C.'s Weird Science-Fantasy, with its trademark rocket-ship sidebar. For almost a decade Slow Death hammered away at the problems of overpopulation, environmental pollution, the extinction of animal species, and nuclear safety by means of stories which wed the conventions of science fiction and horror comics to social satire and didactic essays in sequential art form. For example, Greg Irons's "Our Friend Mr. Atom" in Slow Death no. 9 incorporates lists of facts about nuclear bombs and atomic energy in a discussion of geopolitics and cultural attitudes about nuclear arms; the story includes one panel in which a studio audience chuckles and applauds as a Johnny Carson-like talk-show host quips, "There are now enough atomic weapons to destroy the world 600 times over;" in another scene a Donald Duck-like Everyman figure has a huge atomic bomb hammered up his rectum.

In some underground comix which used facts as part of their stories, the simple presentation of the horrifying data of pollution, corruption, and military insanity seemed to make the satiric point without using narrative at all. For example, Greg Irons's "Murder, Inc." from Slow Death no. 10 ("Special Cancer and Medical Issue"), includes a two-page spread which both embodies and comments upon the twin poles of sensationalism and didacticism characteristic of the use of facts in the undergrounds (and in historically based comic books in general). Most of the two pages are taken up by large blocks of closely spaced print, one headed "Fun Facts about the Medical Industrial Complex," the other entitled "More Fun Facts … The Doctors & the AMA." Across the top of both sections of print runs a comic strip in which a jackass and a baboon dressed as surgeons alternately butcher their comatose patient and attack each other over a botched drug deal. A rakish cigarette-smoking death's-head explains the relation between the two sections: "Now here at Last Gasp we realize that not all of you go for dry, informative, educational-type comic strips. All you sex and violence freaks can just SKIP the following fine print and groove on th' little cartoon here while the rest of you scholarly types read on." Here in "Murder, Inc." the uneasy solution of sober fact and brutal satire in the comix separates out into its component parts.

The educational impulse, with its implicit appeal to empirical authority, works against the visceral impact of the burlesque horror in the comix, which attacks authority by means of ruthless exaggeration and repulsive images. Satiric horror was an effective mode for recreating the anxiety and ugliness of modern industrial culture, but its penchant for shocking overstatement made it less effective in teaching about the particulars of a historical and political situation. Didactic and horror comix still exist, though now in separate venues. The present-day spiritual heirs to Skull and Slow Death are Kitchen Sink Press's Death Rattle, which published the work of horror stal-warts like William Stout and Rand Holmes, and the Educomics series, published by Leonard Rifas, which puts out informational comic books on topics such as nuclear power (All-Atomic Comics, The Anti-Nuclear Handbook) and corporate greed (Corporate Crime Comics, Net Profit).

Besides their philosophical connections with the E.C. comics, the relevance of the now-defunct Skull and Slow Death Comix to the present discussion of true stories in the comics is that both comix were the most consistent underground sources for sequential art stories which combined the conventions of horror comics with factual data and history. They were likewise the principal outlets for the work of the artist whom one comics observer has called "the comics' foremost history teacher," the Texas-born Jack Jackson.

Bob Abel

SOURCE: "Up from the Underground: Notes on the New Comix," in Mass Culture Revisited, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1971, pp. 423-43.

[In the following essay, Abel interviews underground artists like Art Spiegelman, and notes when underground comic books first came to the attention of Middle America.]

For the great majority of Americans, probably the first news of underground comics—or comix, to speak a properly underground English—came with the arrival of a late 1970 issue of Playboy which signalled the advent of "The International Comix Conspiracy." The blurb for the article, which was by Jacob Brackman, was no less sweeping: "obscene, anarchistic, sophomoric, subversive, apocalyptic, the underground cartoonists and their creations attack all that Middle America holds dear." Moreover, since Playboy is a liberal magazine—pubic hair was being liberated from the tyranny of the air brush around this same time—its readers could feel secure from the hostile scrutiny of the underground artists.

Now the Playboy audience, large though it may be, is dwarfed by the prime-time evening television audience, and so a great many Americans doubtless first learned of underground comix while watching CBS-TV's Sixty Minutes program on the underground press movement in January 1971. Although the program did not dwell on the strips for any length, it did mention them as a regular feature of many of the underground papers.

However, lest future cultural anthropologists be ill-advised on the matter, be it here noted that it was on the 15th of December 1968—roughly two years earlier—that underground comix officially came of age. On that date, The National Insider, whose editorial attributes include being "informative," "provocative," and "fearless," not to speak of "entertaining," exposed—the favorite headline verb of this scandal sheet par excellence—the "Latest 'Art' Trend—Hippie Sex Comics." Inside the Insider, along with stories on Barbra Streisand ("Color Barbra Sexless") and the civilized world's latest sexual hangup ("Big Breasts Scare Men Stiffi"), the tabloid's puritanical readers were apprised that most of the comic strips found in underground newspapers will "make you sick."

A highly indignant article predicting that "If the sick, sick comics continue in Underground newspapers, we will soon see the end of the movement" was surrounded on three sides by specimens of the offending strips, and it is interesting to note that the Insider had no compunction about reproducing strips with nasty words in them, nor did it bother about the niceties of running copyright notices or even crediting the material. Oh, well, one editor's sense of legality is another editor's freedom of choice, and the significant thing is that, given this scolding by The National Insider, which clearly enough leans toward (and on) a moral imperative, underground comix had surely arrived.

The National Insider notwithstanding, no one has ever accused American culture of being too generously predictable. Thus, while the journey of comix from the easily smudged pages of the Insider to the smart walls of the Whitney Museum in Manhattan and other prestigious strongholds of Real Art would seem to be a highly unlikely one—even along those routes so recently charted by the counter-culture—it is nonetheless a fact that by mid-1970 underground comix had already proved intriguing enough to the straight culture for museums to be including them in major shows and for major publishing houses to be readying collections of the work of several artists. Robert Crumb, the best-known artist in the field has had his drawings exhibited, among other places, as part of the Whitney's powerful "Human Concern/Personal Torment" show during the fall of 1969 and both the Viking Press and Ballantine Books have published his work in oversized paperbound editions. (Ballantine now publishes both R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat and R. Crumb's Head Comix, which Viking originally issued.) In addition, Bantam Books and Dell Books, two of the nation's paperback giants, had by early 1971 committed themselves to underground comix collections, and so the Great American Reading Public was about to be tested on whether it would accept in the home these new subversives out to crease its middle brow. On the other hand, these soft-cover volumes, written by young people with young people in mind, could be sales triumphs simply if enough young people bought them—which if nothing else would keep the whole movement nicely incestuous.

Of course what this may also prove is that whatever American culture does not reject outright, it somehow manages to assimilate. Prior to their modest integration into the straight culture, the creators of underground comix—whatever their degree of professionalism as artists and writers—were characterized chiefly by their unwillingness even to try and produce work that might be acceptable either to newspaper syndicates or the publishers of comic books. So, logically enough, underground comix got that way because the first medium in which they appeared for the edification and entertainment—not to speak of titillation—of large numbers of readers was the underground newspaper. Later on, there was a small population explosion of comix magazines, usually sold in paperback galleries—Zap, Feds 'n Heads, Yellow Dog, and Bijou Funnies were the important pioneering titles, followed in profusion by (are you ready, Middle America?) Radical America Komics, Big Ass, Hydrogen Bomb, God Nose, Armadillo, Conspiracy Capers, Captain Guts, Mom's Homemade Comics, The Adventures of Jesus, Slow Death, Despair, women's libuplifting It Ain't Me, Babe, and perhaps thirty other titles—but the original impetus to the movement was definitely through the underground papers.

For example, some late 1960s issues of Seattle's The Helix were little more than comix and ads, and any one strip originating in an underground paper might appear, via syndication, in scores of other papers. The East Village Other, flagship of the underground press movement, was a virtual fountainhead for comix as it attracted a regular group of artists to its pages. These included: of course, Robert Crumb, who is at once the Lenny Bruce and W. C. Fields and Marx Brothers of the field; Spain Rodrigues, whose creation, Trashman, features a Chelike, street-fighting "agent" of the 6th Internat'1" who usually won't take leave of his machine gun even to indulge in some nonpartisan sex 'n violence, although some of the other characters in the strip have no such compunctions; Kim Deitch, whose choice of weekly titles for his page in the paper—Kryptic Kapers, Cul de Sac Comics, Scarey Comix—do not do justice to a truly uninhibited imagination (Waldo is a super-hip Felix the Cat and Uncle Ed [The India Rubber Man] is a dirty old man worthy of Nabokov); Art Spiegelman, whose Adventures of Jolly Off the Masturbating Fiend, raise the world's least honored but also least expensive sport to new heights; Roger Brand, whose title character, Straw-brick, would have made Candide look like a functioning super-hero and whose collective neuroses ("WHY was I born different … ?") would have turned Freud to a different line of work; and Vaughn Bode, a highly gifted, astonishingly prolific artist whose mind turns to fantasy worlds both long ago and long off—machines battle mutants in a world of post-atomic madness, a caveman ponders the wonders of the universe with his best friend (a spear), and talking lizards are warriors in the most bestial human tradition unless confronted with nubile maidens chock full of humanistic sexual responses—and whose draftsmanship already far exceeds most workers in the comics field, whether underground-bound or nationally syndicated.

On the other side of Middle America, another band of drawing renegades were initiating underground comix in their own fashion. (It used to be that San Francisco reflected New York; now there is a cross-cultural, crosscontinental transference.) In the Bay City, the peripatetic Robert Crumb—who by virtue of his very large talent, constant output, and widespread syndication throughout the underground press had become the Johnny Apple-seed of underground comix—created Zap Comix at the same time he was contributing the anti-heroic, pro-hedonistic adventures of Fritz the Cat to Cavalier Magazine (then a very lively and provocative magazine of the Playboy genre) and also producing deliberately porno-graphic comix books (Reader's Digest-sized at that) which unfortunately were more distinguished for their arrests record than for their contents. Crumb soon became associated with the Print Mint, a Berkeley hostel for underground culture. Its owner, Don Shenker, became at age forty the Instant Grand Old Man of Underground Comix. He not only distributed subsequent Zaps but published a tabloid comix paper called Yellow Dog (later to switch to comic-book format) that ran not only strips but contributors' sketches and drawings as well, and this latter was some of the more interesting work in the field. [Shenker wrote me at the end of 1968]:

Yellow Dog got started because, partly, interest in posters lagged. We were in the poster business from its inception and when it waned, I turned to comix because the almost violent young public desire which produced the poster boom needed in some way to keep being turned on. For the second part, the artists were present. Here in the Bay Area. Joe Beck (who, I suppose, you might call the father of "underground" comix; he started with the University of California Pelican back in the days of the FSM), John Thompson and, finally, the giant of them all, R. Crumb. Yellow Dog is a pun and switch of many other things. An American title, out of The Yellow Kid of Pulitzer, out of a nitty gritty dog pissing upon the deepest symbol of the American subconsciousness, Capt. Ahab, who searched and still searches for the White Whale (who, too, pissed on all his black masses and soul-selling.) If Melville was right when he said, about Moby Dick, I have written a naughty book, then Yellow Dog was designed to be a naughty paper.

Underground comix definitely represent a reaction away from the current comix the same way a loving child leaves home or rots. In the movies the kid sees this chick with her face painted and her tits all trussed up so's they'll look pointy and "sexxy." Well, if you consider this (somewhat like D. H. Lawrence did) with a mind either turned on or fresh in some other way, it's pornographic, and the little books you buy about Popeye and Dick Tracy—"hot books"—are, at least, honest, direct, and done with considerable talent. All of the artists in Zap, Dog, etc., pay homage to the old comix you used to buy for 120. Harvey Kurtzman is their idol, but they are not tongue-tied before him. They feel his equals. Both Crumb and Gil Shelton (Feds 'n Heads) both worked with him before he went to Playboy. He himself admires them. But from our correspondence, Kurtzman must, I feel, think of himself now as an old man.

Kurtzman's "prime target in his original Mad Comics," Shenker subsequently pointed out in an article written for The Daily Californian's Weekly Magazine, "was the institutionalization of the funnies … Where there had been a marvelous, disgruntled quality to the pronouncements of cartoonists, a delightfully anti-usual air, a sourly fantastic and individualistic series of styles and manners before the war, there began to appear a shift. Comics … became propagandistic. In short, establishmentarian." Well, it may be argued, I suppose, that the characters of the comic strips had been mobilized in a Great Cause—the defense of democracy and the defeat of fascism—but it is certainly true that after the war the new strips tended toward adventure or soap opera rather than the human comedy. For almost a decade after the war, Beetle Bailey, Pogo, and Peanuts were the sole distinguished exceptions to the "realistic" turn the postwar strips had taken.

For their part, the contributors to Yellow Dog owed no allegiance to comic-strip tradition—except to kid it—and toward American institutions there was scarcely a bugle call except for an occasional cacophonic rendition of Taps. Crumb of course was a regular participant—kidding God and man, kidding the State versus man, kidding man versus man, kidding the estate of man, kidding self-knowledge as religion, kidding sex and sexiness, spiritual acne and angst, to mention but a few of his comic concerns—as was Gilbert Shelton, who ranks perhaps next to Crumb as the seminal figure of the movement. An dmigre from Austin, Texas, Shelton had spent much of the past decade either as student or satirist, or both, and his Wonder Wart-Hog—"the hog of steel"—is unquestionably the ugliest undergrowth super-hero of recent centuries, and properly so. More recently he has concentrated on the Freak Brothers, now appearing under the banner of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, not super-heroes but super-"heads" who always keep a huge stash of dope and sometimes get to enjoy it without governmental interdiction. Not necessarily a strip for the "high"-minded only, Shelton's creation may well represent the comic apotheosis of the drug culture in America. Like Crumb, and a few others in the comix field, Shelton can generally be expected to tell a funny story and there exists in his work a sense of broad comedy that is itself a kind of maturity, and evidence that an artist not only is enjoying what he is doing, but is reasonably certain of his achievement.

This is not to say, for a moment, that Crumb and Shelton were the only talents associated with Yellow Dog worth a bit of critical howling about, one way or the other. Joel Beck, a former Berkeley student who had already published two books—The Profit, a mixed bag of clever and under-realized satire, and Lenny of Laredo, good fun, a bit obvious, but, happily, no part of the Lenny Bruce industry that emerged after the comedian's death—continued his acerbic spoofs of American society in the comix paper (first of its kind, it was followed by Gothic Blimp Works, originally edited by Vaughn Bode, then by East Village Other editors, but now defunct). Ron White, who appears a Beck disciple, did a nice turn on the comic-strip medium itself (and its Pleistocene Era rules) via his B. Bear character whose specialty is getting arrested "for appearing in a comic strip without a morality card." And John Thompson's The Spiritual Stag Film, never to be an art director's delight, was nonetheless refreshingly irreverent because of its ofttimes sly and/or cranky lead character, Sam God, who concedes without too much rancor that "all prayers have two parts: one: butter him up [and] two: ask for something." There was also frequently arresting visual material by a variety of artists, including Franz Cilensek and Buckwheat Florida, Jr.—who owns the grandest name in underground comix—which suffered somewhat because of the newsprint on which Yellow Dog was then printed (and on which the capricious canine, with undisguised glee, always pisses).

There are also four other artists who contributed to the early issues of Zap and Yellow Dog whose work—if one is going to apply serious standards to underground comix—requires more extensive analysis. Three of them are demonstrably among the half-dozen or so finest draftsmen in the field. The exception to this is S. Clay Wilson, a transplanted Kansan who is easily the most violent artist in the comix field, and so all enjoy distinction.

Robert Crumb has credited Wilson with inaugurating the "sex revolution" in comix, and this is a little bit like Washington crediting Jefferson for the whole Revolution bit. Still, no one in the comix field has utilized sex and bloodshed to such a degree as has Wilson—and what Crumb refers to is Wilson's apparent refusal from the beginning to accede to any self-censorship. His plots are usually short on narrative and his visual center-piece is frequently an orgiastic clash between various adversaries (pirates, both sides mostly homosexual; motorcycle gangs, both sides in part homosexual; monsters and people, the sexual climate confusing, but predictably violent; pirates and their modern counterparts, Hell's Angels, with a time warp providing the drama) that culminates in a literal or metaphorical ship's hold of sperm and gore. Wilson's work is generally too non-stop violent to be very pornographic, sometimes too pornographic to be entertaining, and depressingly restrictive in terms of the characters he depicts—all are physically repulsive and treacherous if not evil incarnate. Yet there is a raw power and compelling quality to his work—in particular the group clashes—and a legitimate exploitation of the grim strain of violence in American life that make him an artist if not worthy of the associations with Hieronymus Bosch that have cropped up in some writings about him—then at least one well worth a continuing critical attention. If nothing else, it makes for good reading—and can be just as deliciously cultist as the writing about films these days.

For example, in the Summer 1970 (No. 12) issue of Funnyworld, an excellent comics fanzine—fan magazine devoted to a certain field, in this instance comic strips and books and animated cartoons—Bob Follett, a veteran observer of the comic art field, responded to the sharp criticism of Wilson made by Mike Barrier, Funnyworld's editor, in a previous issue. "I can't really write a rebuttal to your comments on Wilson," he wrote, doing just that. "Your argument used the premise that there are subjects and styles which should be closed to the cartoonist for reasons of propriety. Wilson fails, in your opinion, because his characters, draped in an abundance of warts and a paucity of clothing, are invariably involved in pastimes that will never make it to the late late show."

Follett goes on to say that this sort of criticism is useless to the underground comix reader "since he generally doesn't share your aversions," and an examination of Wilson's techniques and achievements as a cartoonist—not "the moral suitability of his subjects"—is a more legitimate measure of his work. "Wilson's pluses are as magnificent as his failings," Follett continues his auteuristic style-before-substance argument. "I would imagine that he fails as a cartoonist in the normal sense. There is little if any coherence to a Wilson's 'story line.' Wilson produces images—vivid, vivid images … the major fault in Wilson's work and one which may relegate him forever to the group of also-rans—given the absence of a story line and limiting himself to 'meth' freaks, motorcycle bandits, dyke queens, and tide monsters—give or take a wall-eyed professor of two—Wilson can only come up with a certain very finite number of combinations for his drawings. The 'meth' freaks can only meet so many 'Screaming Gypsy Bandits' before the work loses its charm. But Wilson will answer this question for us in the next couple of years."

Writing in that same issue, Barrier, who publishes Funnyworld—now a magazine grown from its mimeographed days to one professional in looks as well as contents—as a sidelight to his columnist job at the Arkansas Gazette, returned to his criticism of Wilson in an article which deals, among other things, with what he feels is a sex obsession among underground cartoonists. "There can be no valid 'moral' objection to Wilson's work," he wrote, apparently utilizing editor's prerogative in responding to material elsewhere in the magazine, "even though every imaginable sexual practice takes place in his strips. No girl is ever going to be seduced in an underground comic book. My basic complaint about Wilson's work is that it is moral, in the narrowest, nastiest sense. I said back in Funnyworld No. 10 that S. Clay Wilson impressed me as an uptight little old lady in disguise. By that I mean that he seemed to share an attitude common to many little old ladies, that sex—and, by implication, life itself—is dirty and disgusting. It is in his strips, certainly. His people are all warts, moles, sweat, flab, and body hair (he can make any part of the human anatomy unappealing) and all freaks in one way or another. However there's no indication that 'normal people' would come out looking any better. He looks at humans as a Houyhnhnm might. Wilson refuses to see human beings as a whole; rather, he seizes on physical imperfections and magnifies them. This may be preferable to what happens in syndicate comic strips and traditional comic books, where everyone seems to have been photographed through those Doris Day gauzes, but it's still a distorted and limited way of looking at things."

Now whereas Wilson—and it may be fairly argued, I think, that his distortions of behavior as well as physiognomy are precisely what make his work distinctive (and of course could make it ultimately repetitious and boring)—is among the best known, and easily the most controversial artist in the field, another West Coast artist, Andy Martin, is hardly known, apart from readers of Yellow Dog, yet his is a talent that is all the more remarkable for being unique in the field. Martin does not draw comix—he draws political cartoons utilizing the strip form. His line is extremely fine—one is reminded of Lyonel Feininger, the artist who also drew comic strips in the first part of the century, and certain German expressionists—and it is applied to truly savage caricature that builds its effects through distorted bodies with recognizable faces and arresting compositions within the individual panels. His is an inside-out Alice in Wonderlandish trip—picture Alice high on LSD—sounding as though it must be written, though the dialogue is sparse, simultaneously by Thomas Pynchon, Paul Krassner, Timothy Leary, the late Dr. Eric Berne, and Jean Shepherd, with walk-ons by Norman Mailer and Jules Feiffer. Yet it is more the surreal art that makes Martin's work so different. There is nothing like it in comix, comics, or political cartooning in this country.

For example, an early Yellow Dog cover depicted Lyndon Johnson defecating on top of a toilet bowl that bore the features of the 1968 Democratic candidate for President—surely a vulgar comic conceit—but the meaning behind the image made this a powerful cartoon and one that many readers might find more telling than, say, a caricature of Johnson by David Levine or one by England's Gerald Scarfe, whose distortions always go for the jugular and thus have become somewhat predictable. Martin's satiric world is one in convoluted progress: His Hop-Frogian Bible, "Featuring Dr. Caligari as gynecologist," and dealing with the adventures of Prof. Murayev, Mr. Pueno, Ave, Trippeta, Ahab, and of course Hop-Frog himself (partial cast of characters at that) practically requires a magnifying glass to read because so much is going on. But it is worth the effort because what's there is a visual looney tune deliberately playing against our notions of expectation and order. It is at once chaotic and richly entertaining: Nothing is resolved except our desire to see what happens next. And in that regard, the observations of Don Shenker, who, after all, published Martin, are particularly relevant. Shenker points out that Martin's characters "dwell in a machinistic landscape: they are twisted and crippled by the horror of steel bulkheads which end in vanishing points. Also they are extraordinarily literate. It is not enough that they leer and wring their hands in expectation of imminent catastrophe, but they fly to and fro about it, packing machines like 'fallacy filters' and screaming, 'Dissect the political animal!"' Martin, Shenker adds, agonizes over his work and I doubt if his total published output would consume one issue of Yellow Dog, but he is an artist whose promise is not merely looming—it is here with us now, exciting and significant—and whose future work should provide additional reason for our admiration.

The question of what is and what is not estimable in the comix field now logically leads us to consider the cases of Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, whose published fantasies are much admired in the field and much emulated. Picture the entire Walt Disney Studios high on something or other and you perhaps may then be able to conjure up a vision of Griffin's and Moscoso's work, which seems at once so private—seemingly drawn while on drugs and probably best enjoyed in the same state—and yet so adroitly drawn that it represents a wing of underground comix that is both fascinating and more or less inaccessible. Here I omit Moscoso's delightful ongoing orgy in Zap No. 4, in which comic strip and movie cartoon characters as well as a variety of other creatures—most notably Mr. Peanuts of candybar fame—participate for several pages in what must be comix' most densely-populated orgy to date, but it is hardly a generalization to regard these two gentlemen as deliberate (though not necessarily self-conscious) proponents of something avant-garde in the comix field. And, as I say, they have their followers.

For what it is worth, and I do not mean to be snide when I say that I am not at all certain what it is worth, I offer Jacob Brackman's explanation in Playboy as to what Griffin and Moscoso are up to:

Much as experimental playwrights pare theater back to basics, Griffin and Moscoso break down comics into their fundamental integers, toy with reassembling them in slow motion, at odd moments freezing transformations midway. Griffin uses words nonsensically. Moscoso hardly uses them at all. Both are fascinated with speech and thought balloons, floating exclamation points, idea bulbs—all of which gain a third dimension, open to reveal their innards, interact with characters and landscapes. The continual flux of their worlds, in which every element is equally animate, achieves the obliviousness of pure play—suggesting true liberation from the old necessity for significance, from any obligation to one's readers.

Anyone familiar with the bulk of Brackman's writing knows him to be a writer of intelligence, but one has to question the true significance of a comic artist's not wishing to communicate. And if "pure play" is a virtue, it should be fun to witness. Saul Steinberg, for instance, makes no concessions to easy comprehension of his work and the greatest accomplishments in comic strips have been creations that manage to communicate on a multitude of levels. It's a silly business to over-intellectualize the funnies, but Krazy Kat provided more visual pleasure than just the business of seeing Krazy get hit in the head with a brick thrown by Ignatz (George Herriman's shifting backgrounds, best seen in the Sunday colored pages, and his use of phonetic language were both things of joy), and Walt Kelly's Pogo has provided some of the more salient political satire of the past two decades. Being syndicated and being "something else"—both in the usual and hip senses of the term—is what divides the best of popular art from the packaged goods. Brackman rightly observes that Griffin and Moscoso share with other underground artists a fascination with comic strips' past, but theirs is a psychedelic vision, and not a shared vision, and I fail to see—which may be my failing, of course—that it affords much pleasure. Neither artist is under any obligation to do other kinds of drawing, but one suspects that they will find their present mode of expression rather constricting and it will surely be interesting to see where their sense of playfulness may lead them. This observer, at least, would welcome a de-Disneyized comic world in which Snow White ravishes the Seven Dwarfs, and Minnie Mouse and Donald Duck are guilty of miscegenation.

Turning away from the San Francisco area, which is unquestionably the hot center of underground comix these days, we head eastward toward the Bijou Publishing Empire, which appears on no map of Chicago. Bijou Funnies, one of the best of the underground comix magazines, is the co-conception of a pair of energetic artists, Skip Williamson and Jay Lynch, whose comix capers are the core of Bijou Funnies. The magazine itself represents the happy end product of a lifetime interest in comic art. Throughout their teens both Lynch and Williamson had edited and contributed to numerous fanzines and their mimeographed columns of disputation, worship, and scholarship, and it is worth a lengthy examination of the role of fanzines in leading artists to the comix field for the simple reason that so many underground artists have followed this route. Moreover, for purposes of authenticity, we may look to Lynch himself, who offers a highly personable and informative story of his (and Williamson's) odyssey into the underground.

Lynch writes (and his letter is reproduced more or less in the free-form style in which it was written):

In 1960, when normal teens were going to sock hops and doing th' stroll and stuff, Skip Williamson, Artie Spiegelman and I were involved in producing cartoons for what was and still is known as "fandom." I was living with my parents in Miami, Fla., and was going to high school. Skip was living in Canton, Missouri, and going to high school. Artie was living in Rego Park, N.Y., and going to junior high school. Then somehow the three of us started doing cartoons for fanzines. Fanzines are little mimeographed or hectographed magazines that deal with a specific topic. There are science fiction fanzines, classical music fanzines, there are even fanzines that just ramble on for entire issues about how they went about putting out each issue of the previous fanzine. We were into what was called satire fandom. We did cartoons for satire fanzines, which would try to imitate old Mad comics. The first satire fanzine we were exposed to was Smudge, which was edited by Joe Pilati, who is now a columnist for the Village Voice. Smudge had a circulation of eighty. Soon other satire fanzines began to appear. Wild and Jack High were two of the ones to come out immediately after Smudge. Wild lasted ten issues, more than any satire fanzine of the early sixties. After a while Skip started his own fanzine called Squire and Spiegelman started one called Blase. We all contributed to each other's fanzines, and everything went along pretty much the same till 1963. So for three years the three of us were into fandom. Robert Crumb was doing a fanzine called Foo around this time, but none of us paid much attention to it. Robert was into what was known as funny animal fandom. Walt Bowart of the East Village Other (formerly editor and publisher) was doing a science fiction fanzine in the early sixties. Harvey Ovshinsky, who now edits The Fifth Estate, which is Detroit's underground newspaper, did a fanzine then called Transylvanian Newsletter. Harvey was into monster fandom. Fanzines were not only the original underground press, but many underground cartoonists started out in fandom as well. Trina, a girl cartoonist who does these art nouveau comics for E. V.O. was into what is called femmefandom. Trina was a femfan. Femfans just put out magazines about how neet it is to be a girl.

Fanzines were good because doing stuff for fanzines taught me to discipline myself. For three years I turned out at least ten pages a month of comic strips.

It wasn't, of course, merely the discipline of fanzine cartooning which profited Lynch and the others, but also the camaraderie of the thing.

Recalls Lynch:

In 1961, Spiegelman and his parents visited Miami. I got together with Artie and we talked about what the cartoonists we admired were up to and stuff. I used to correspond with Skip and Artie, and it was very good that we did this. We'd share all the knowledge that we were gaining by writing each other and telling the other guy what was happening. Artie would write to tell me of a new comic book that came out. He'd send the address, and I'd mail away for a copy. If it weren't for this correspondence network we had I'd have missed a lot of good stuff. We really dug the work of Jack Davis, Basil Wolverton, Wally Wood, all the old comic book guys.

In 1962 I contributed to Cracked, an imitation of Mad; PREP; a teen age mag for which I did a regular comic strip about an Archie-type guy called Hoagie. Hoagie was hip and neet and sharp. He had a hot rod with twelve cams and he could do the twist. I also did some cartoons for Zig Zag Libre, a Cuban exile newspaper in Miami. Everybody must have a cause, so I began to identify with the Cuban exiles. Nobody would print integration cartoons then, especially in Miami.

At some point in the narrative, Lynch has moved to Chicago, a move which augers all kinds of big-time possibilities. [Lynch continues:]

Canton, Missouri, where Skip lived, is only 250 miles from Chicago, Skip came to visit me, and I went to visit Skip, and soon we were planning stupendous feats of cartooning together. The first thing we did was to visit the cartoon editor at Playboy, a fruitless pursuit which we had repeated every six months for several years. Playboy doesn't use new cartoonists. The cartoon editor has all these really nice cartoons on the wall of her office—great stuff by dynamic new guys—but, alas, they'll never see print. 1963 was a year when Playboy was going through a fantastic rate of growth—not wanting to risk their reputations, they decided to use only the cartoonists which they'd been using before. Playboy hasn't had a new cartoonist for six years. [Author's note: This communication from Lynch reached me in early 19691. Eventually Skip and I got sick of going to Playboy—we realized that there was no hope of getting into the magazine at this point.

Skip and I took to sending gag cartoons through the mail to magazines in other cities. I appeared in Harvey Kurtzman's Help then, and Skip did, too. Soon we had stuff in The Realist and many other mags, but it got to the point where more stuff was lost by the various editors than was printed.

Now the year is 1965. College mags were going out and underground newspapers were starting up. The first underground comic strip that I saw was a thing called 'Captain High' in an early issue of the East Village Other. This was about a guy who would take LSD and turn into a super hero. It was really crude. The art was poor. Soon Gilbert Shelton had a thing in EVO called 'Clang Honk.' By this time I had started doing surrealist comic strips. I don't know why. I hadn't taken acid yet. I hadn't seen anybody else doing surrealist strips, but everybody started doing them in '65. For me it was a Bob Dylan influence—I was trying to do the same thing in comic strips that Dylan was doing in music. Some early surrealist strips that Skip and I did are in the Chicago Mirror. We did them two years before the Mirror, came out, though. The early surrealist strips that I did were printed in Nexus, a San Francisco literary magazine, and in Oyez, the literary magazine at Culver Stockton College which Skip edited. I was working nights as a short order cook in a restaurant. Soon I started doing cartoons for the Chicago Seed, the local flower kids' newspaper. In 1966 I took LSD and didn't draw anything but paisleys for the Seed for six months.

So now it's 1967 and Skip, who has moved to Chicago, and I are doing things for the Seed, but the paper is not printing our stuff well. As soon as we give the Seed a cartoon, they photostat it so someone can take home the original art to hang on their wall. Then they make a reduction of the photostat and make an offset negative from that, so by the time it gets printed it's fourth generation instead of second, and it's all blurry and illegible. So Skip and I decide to do our own magazine.

We did the Chicago Mirror, which we published quarterly for three-fourths of a year—1967-68—we called it the Mirror because we couldn't think of anything better. We decided that if a better title came up, we'd just change it. So I wanted to call it Bijou Magazine. Then we realized that we're cartoonists and we really wanted to do a comic book anyway. Zap Comix, Crumb's thing, partially inspired Bi/ou, but not totally, since some of the stuff in Bijou No. 1 was done before Zap came out. It's kind of a spontaneous generation thing—comix are happening all over the place. But without Crumb's breakthrough with the first Zap, nobody would have done any one hundred percent comix magazine. I can't really say that, though—underground comix have always been around. Jack Jaxon in Austin, Texas, did one called God Nose in 1963. It was a great comic book about God and his magical nose.…

The other day Skip said to me, 'You know, if there ever is a revolution, we'll be big folk heroes after it's over.' But the thing is that there is a revolution going on right now! It's a revolution of the mind—of perception and sanity. The sanity of mankind is changing, and a whole new anti-intellectual generation of kids is growing up. Comix books will fill the space that the death of newspapers will leave. Comix will be an integral part of the life of humans in the future. This is why old ladies are down on comic books—they know what it's all about. The very old and the very young know. People's opinions were formed by comic books they read in the first seven years of their lives. Now a new wave of adult comix books comes along and changes their opinions. It's the ultimate medium! No question about it.

On this question, Lynch might get some argument from authorities who have busted bookstores selling underground comix in at least two cities—in particular Zap #4, with its chronicle of good-natured incest among members of the Joe Blow Family—but among comix artists in general there does exist a carryover of youthful interest in comics that has now matured into white heat enthusiasm for the new strips they are now creating.

Vaughn Bode: "I started drawing when I was six, and by the time I was in college I had 1,500 named cartoon characters—recorded in a book. It became a fetish to invent and invent—out-invent everyone on earth … I built my own planets—I believe in those planets—and most of the equipment I use in the strips (fighting machines with the worst of human traits), I've designed," he says, adding with a small smile the information that his "Hypocket Infantry Machines, Model 1940" have "developed a disease—empathy—they cry." Bode does elaborate model sheets for his "machines" before putting them into action, and if all this begins to sound a bit compulsive, he'd probably be the last one to deny it. The important thing, of course, is that the work is so well-drawn, genuinely offbeat and often highly perceptive in its analysis of mankind's foibles. "I need to express myself," says Bode. "The work is me. I can't be at ease—all my emotions go into my work. I think Kim Deitch is the same. I know Crumb is the same."

Peter Bramley (who is both underground cartoonist and above-ground commercial artist):

I've been interested in doing comics, literally, all my life. I think the strongest thing about the cartoon is the vulgarity of the drawing—the whole lack of subtlety is what visually happens … when you see a Japanese or Chinese comic book, you realize you don't need writing.

Art Spiegelman:

You're very aware you're working in the comic book form … We've all gone through a phase of treating comics as art instead of comics—then after a certain phase, you know they're art and treat them like comics again … It w a groovy form—you do the words and the art.

Moreover, as in any other field, there are both the broad general influences and the private jokes, as it were, which really turn on an artist.

Peter Bramley:

I'm into Smokey Stover and Krazy Kat, and I'm into mouses a lot—I really love mouses!

Art Spiegelman: "I'm into Winsor McCay (creator of a fabulously drawn comic strip of yesteryear called Little Nemo in Slumberland) and Jay Lynch is into funny animal comics and Crumb is into Rube Goldberg." (Apparently there is a subdivision of underground comix entirely given to assigning influences to Robert Crumb. The artist himself told an interviewer that he had been influenced by Jules Feiffer, Chester Gould [Dick Tracy], Harold Gray [Little Orphan Annie], Elzie Segar [Popeye] and Harvey Kurtzman. Roger Brand allows Crumb Elzie Segar, adds Billy DeBeck [Barney Google], then insists "it's quite obvious his biggest influence is Basil Wolverton." Mike Barrier observed in Funnyworld No. 12 that Crumb's work "looks 'old-fashioned' but no one agrees on which 'old-fashioned' cartoonists had the most to do with shaping his style. Billy DeBeck, Elzie Segar, Carl Barks, Basil Wolverton, John Stanley … the list is a long one. Anyone whose style seems to reflect that many influences … and yet is clearly in thrall to no one of them … has to be a good cartoonist, and a supreme synthesizer.")

Kim Deitch:

I was a painter—I came to New York to be a painter—and Winsor McCay really snapped my mind. Then, during the winter of '66, I started getting interested in Marvel Comics and my paintings started to look like comics. I just fell into the EVO thing. The first thing I brought there wasn't accepted by Walter Bowart because he wanted something psychedelic, but when I came back with Sunshine Girl, Walter thought it was a real underground character. To me, Sunshine Girl was about the most organic thing possible, but I guess it was a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Interestingly enough, the emergence of underground comix—it is surely propitious timing, as Deitch infers, that the underground papers were there to provide a forum for artists whose material wouldn't stand much chance of exposure in the professional cartoon field—has happened at the same time that professional cartoonists have also been raising fandom to a new level. Some working cartoonists, weary of following the commercial formulas of the marketplace, have been contributing more personal—and frequently more imaginative—efforts to various magazines which exist for just that purpose. Star-Studded Comics, published by two Carrollton, Texas, comics buffs named Howard Keltner and Buddy Saunders, is actually pretty conventional comic book stuff with its Xal-kor, the Human Cat, Doctor Weird, and Powerman, but Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. is, at the least, graphically impressive. More significant to our examination of the underground comix phenomenon, however, are two publications, Graphic Story Magazine and witzend, where both underground artists and professionals have been—let the phrase be forever buried after this one, last, dastardly usage—doing their thing.

Graphic Story Magazine, formerly Fantasy Illustrated, is edited and published by a Los Angeles gentleman named Bill Spicer, and he does nice work. The magazine, printed on heavy stock, serves as a forum for comic book buffs to indulge in scholarly critiques and launch broad-sides at one another, but its more arresting function for the outsider is to publish innovative graphic material. Issue Number Nine, for instance, had an engrossing twenty-one-page rendering of a story by Robert Sheckley, the noted science fiction writer, drawn by Vincent Davis, which found three criminal entrepreneurs searching on a deserted Mars for the ultimate weapon that had destroyed the inhabitants there. It turns out to be a genielike creature—if that is the term for it—with a voracious appetite for protoplasm. End of Mars, it is explained, and end of the explorers from Earth. Graphic Story has also been running the work of George Metzger, whose Kaleida Smith and Master Tyme and Mobius Tripp represent a level of intricacy and sophistication of story that I strongly doubt is matched anywhere in the commercial comic-book field. Metzger's exciting—an interesting head in action. He's also damn hard to read and could stand an art editor who would make his work even more provocative—science fiction come to startling graphic realization.

Issue Number Ten ran featured two Vaugh Bode sections—The Man, an early caveman series, and The Machines, another Bode World War III-plus projection—that seemed to split Graphic Story readers almost diametrically (it's nice they react). The more recent issues of Graphic Story seem to be devoting proportionally more space to long interviews with veteran artists from the comics field, which, while certainly a valuable service, is not likely to have much influence on young cartoonists whose only artistic theory seems to be that radical culture at first borrows freely from the past, then rapidly creates its own cultural antecedents. It would be too bad if Spicer cannot afford both to honor the past and provide a proving ground for the future. But this is observation, not criticism, because without a doubt the work Spicer and the editors of other fanzines are doing will be of more than passing interest to libraries and future historians of comic art.

Witzend is another matter, entirely. True, both magazines, professional as they are, avoid the marketplace entirely and are only available by subscription. Even getting back issues can be a problem. Still, witzend started off with a specific future cast—the cultivation of a sophisticated audience and the utilization of the magazine as a sounding board and preview theater for artists.

Wallace Wood, whose parodies of comic strips are delightfully familiar to anyone who read the first decade of Mad, founded witzend in 1967 as an occasional "public service." Wood wrote in the second issue of witzend that he regards the magazine as a "unique publication comprised of editorless [emphasis added] artistic creations from the minds and hands of some very talented people. It is a place to experiment, as well as to display some previously unpublished work done by professional artists for their own enjoyment. And to establish copyrights on properties which may have commercial possibilities." He also noted that the magazine "does not and will not seek general distribution by diluting any contribution to suit the preconditioned tastes of a mass audience."

Given these bold words, it's only fair to apply them, as a critical frame of reference, to what witzend has published to date. The magazine has featured, among others, Vaughn Bode, Roger Brand, and Art Spiegelman, plus such well-known "pros" as Harvey Kurtzman Mad's Don Martin, Jeff Jones, and Steve Ditko—the latter two comic-book artists—and of course Wood himself. Perhaps the most experimental element, at least in contrast to comics published under the Comics Code, has been a fondness for drawing bare breasts. Since the artists supplying these works of art are good-to-excellent draftsmen, this has not been an unpleasant surprise—there are tons of tits in underground comix, but, taken as a group, the artists are not superior draftsmen and, indeed, would seem to prefer drawing grotesque creatures—and the breasts have helped decorate some interesting science fiction and fantasy material.

However, the best of these strips has been Jones' outer space tale, entitled Alien, in witzend No. Six, which relied on breastworks not at all, instead utilizing extremely fine graphics to tell a story with almost no reliance on dialogue. Alien is an example of the service the magazine can provide its readers, but some of the other professional artists have merely given witzend more extreme versions of what they regularly produce for the comic-book racks. The most controversial of these artists has been Ditko, whose Mr. A. and The Avenging World (this a visual lecture rather than a strip) depict a moral universe strictly divided by an East Berlin Wall of good versus bad. Ditko's work has prompted one reader to cite the artist's "small-minded, arrogant ignorance … this piece is a total failure in its blind hatred," and in witzend No. Seven, Bill Pearson, now editor of the magazine, and artist Tim Brent parodied Mr. A. with their Mr. E., a "crusading moralist and amateur economist of the quid pro quo" whose "rigid, stony facemask [conceals] the rigid, stony face beneath." By my lights, Mr. E. was the most interesting thing in this issue, but the issue was hardly a milestone in witzend's first four years of publishing.

The contributions of underground artists to witzend have also been uneven in roughly the same scale that witzend has been uneven. I enjoyed Brand's Homesick, a time-travel fantasy set in Atlantis and in the here and now, but Bode's brutal salute to war, The Junkwaffel Invasion of Kruppeny Island was cruelly crowded on four pages and far too text-heavy. Ironically enough, the most admirable work to date has been Wood's delightful on-going "fairy tale," Pipsqueak Papers, but the artist is no longer formally associated with the magazine, having sold it, after four issues, to the Wonderful Publishing Company for the vast sum of one dollar. The only proviso to the purchase, apart from the selling price, was that witzend publish at least four more issues in an attempt to achieve artistic, if not financial, solvency.

In 1970 Bill Pearson, who is both editor and publisher, moved his home and the magazine to Arizona, where he hopes to continue publishing it. He recognizes that there must be far more to witzend than merely providing a showcase for unpublished commercial material. On the other hand, he doesn't expect to find salvation emanating solely from the underground activity. "It's a great personal artform," he observes, "and you can do things with it. But not enough of the guys have, yet. You have to have a theme."

Thematic direction, of course, usually implies firm editorial direction, and my equally firm suspicion is that underground comix magazines will most prosper when they either are drawn by one person (Crumb has done several entire magazines) or else are run by a strong editor, one kicking the amateurism and self-indulgence out. But this is precisely not the way most underground comix are being published—usually they are happening, not being published—and the artists are right when they say that the most important aspect to the field is a freedom of expression which would be virtually impossible to attain in the commercial world.

Just as important, this freedom takes many forms. For Jay Lynch, whose Nard n' Pat is one of the most "traditional"-looking strips, the fun and charm (rare commodity in the comix field as yet) of his work may simply be the reversal of roles whereby his human character, the chinless, and feckless, Nard has to play foil to Pat th' Cat, a lascivious-minded "kitty-kat" who places ads in the underground press ("Chicks, howdjya' like ta' share my pad? I'm a groovie cat with a way-out mustache.") and who will good-naturedly seduce the "Avon calling" lady at the ring of a doorbell. Lynch's drawing calls up a host of influences (would you believe Andy Gump?) but his dialogue and writing are more irreverent and far more playful than will be found in all but a few syndicated comic strips. And, like Crumb, his strips often kid the comic strip medium itself, and in general break all the rules with which above-ground art cartoonists have to live.

Lynch's Biyou buddy, Skip Williamson, draws terrific covers and his continuing strip, Snappy Sammy Smoot, is one of the more highly stylized in the field—(there is more cross-hatching in some individual panels than there is artwork in some of the cruder comix strips). But what is even more interesting about Snappy Sammy Smoot is that it manages to be politically radical at the same time it is satirical and funny and looks like nothing else in the field. Sammy is a well-meaning nebbish to whom things happen and this strip and others of Williamson's often take the logic of Establishment dicta to their painfully logical consequences—flower power is no match for police power. However, in a marvelous one-page strip in Bijou No. Three entitled Class War Comics, a hairy revolutionary echoes the "BRA DAP! FOOM!" of his machine gun with this roar: "EAT LEADEN DEATH IMPERIALISTIC REACTIONARY BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MAJORS!!" And in the last panel, he reminds us: "An' when yer smashing th' state, kids … don't fergit t' keep a smile on yer lips an' a song in yer heart!" Williamson may not be working to overthrow "the System" in some secret revolutionary cell (indeed, now that he is a parent he holds down a day job at Playboy, that formerly unhospitable corporation), but his strips slyly, and not so slyly, get a lot of ideas out. "For me," Williamson explains, "it's like an absurd reflection of what happens to me personally. I don't write a script—I work from panel to panel—it's sort of a stream of consciousness comic strip."

Not sex or politics or Mom or any of our hallowed notions but censorship itself may be the only taboo in the comix field, and so for many of the young artists there is a rite of passage equivalent to masturbating in public. Hopefully this is simply a growth point, since most of this work is neither very erotic nor very funny. In any case, S. Clay Wilson and Robert Crumb got there first, although my own feeling about Crumb is that he always tries to be funny and therefore will always manage to produce a kind of smut rather than pornography because there is too much joy and fun in his work to allow prurient interest, his or ours, to become dominant in his work. He has already created the largest and most memorable cast of characters in the field: Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Whiteman (I'm an AMERICAN! … A real hard charger! … A Citizen on the go!"), Schuman the Human, Angel Food McSpade, Edgar and Mary Jane Crump, Lenore Goldberg (and her Girl Commandos), plus that epitome of slobdom, Bo Bo Bolinski. His comedy, taken as a body of work, has been the most ebullient force in the comix field. As Don Shenker has written of him, "Nothing is sacred except talent; that is life. Nothing is forbidden except not exercising talent/life," and when I spoke to Crumb some months back and mentioned that Snatch Comics ("Are you tired of sex books that promise but never deliver? Tired of looking for the good stuff? Search no further, Bud!") had seemed to zap (yes! an underground pun) all taboos in a single outing, his response was spontaneous: "If taboos were broken by Snatch Comics—groovy? Then we can move on to something else. There are millions of other ideas— I've got so many ideas for comix I wish I had more time to draw!" Similarly, Art Spiegelman, whose work has been both lyrically psychedelic and cheerfully scatological, points out that an artist's kicks derived from violating taboos can be simply another form of conformity. "Professionals think it's a big thing to draw a bare tit," he says. "I'll only transgress them [taboos] when I've something to say. Originally I was going to take a book by Dave Breger called How to Draw and Sell Cartoons and violate each taboo he listed. Sex, nudity, religion, motherhood, the whole lot. Hell, then I decided not to bother."

Vaughn Bode is an artist whose industry and commitment to comix represents a slightly astonishing level of dedication. He believes that the freedom allowed him by Cavalier, where his Deadbone Erotica strips are a regular three-page feature, has helped him to grow not only as an artist, but as a human being as well. "As I have changed, so have the creatures in Deadbone (or vice versa!), since I don't know where I end and where the creatures begin," he said recently. "When I first started the series, I was so inhibited that I couldn't draw women, even though I'd taken years of life drawing at school, and now, look at the chicks! Even my lizards were sexless, but now they're all hung. It's been very good therapy for me—very cathartic." Bode's catharsis aside, his work has clearly improved. There is less of the "disda" dialogue and text-heavy strips of which Mike Barrier has rightly complained in Funnyworld, and his women do look delicious. There is more attempt at political and social satire, this reflecting his need to have his work "endure and not become dated." Perhaps reflecting his lack of admiration for most professional comics toilers, he now labels his work "pictography"—picture-writing ("I write and then illustrate what I write"). Whether or not this is more pretentious than portentous, there is simply no doubting his sincerity. "I would like to be a good part of the underground thing and mold it for the future," says Bode, speaking with a strange mixture of boyishness and intensity which somehow does come out as a kind of super-sincerity. "What they're all trying to do, I'm sure, is express themselves, and this is the only place they can do it. There are so many facets to what they're trying to do—their work is maybe going to have rejuvenated cartooning in this country, loosened it up—they're going to be important people."

Naturally enough, the progress and future importance of comix do rest with its artists, but much also rests with the future of America. There are no nice, benevolent cops in comix, no Presidents en route to sanity, no authority figures who aren't the enemy—representatives of a nation in which reality imitates satire, as witnessed by the front pages of our newspapers, a nation at once in a high state of stasis and frenetic angst. The American Dream has become polluted by real life, has become a psychedelic nightmare, and at least some of the underground artists recognize, as Don Shenker has pointed out, that the language itself "has been fragmented into a host of rhetorics, most of them authoritarian and totalitarian. Americans are talked at, talked down to, and not with." In his view, the underground comix "undermine by simply being true." Just as the best of the posters have done, he observes, "so are the underground comix providing the place in life and the language which is spoken there, depicting the new country to which so many of us have an earnest desire to be deported. Comix, posters—these are the media of the new poetry, and this is why the police bust them."

If Shenker is right, and unless he is speaking of "dropping out," it is difficult to fault his rhetoric, we may reasonably anticipate more suppression of comix as the artists mature and really begin doing that important subversive work of which Shenker and Bode and others speak. But it is still too early to tell if this is going to happen. Thus far the only arrests have been made because the police were afraid someone would get horny by looking at a comix book. The only trend discernible at this writing is a depressing number of "horror comix" that usually just extend what is already admissible in the commercial titles. On the other hand, there are intriguing new artists, for example, Dave Sheridan, Greg Irons, Fred Schrier, "Foolbert Sturgeon" (pseudonym for a college professor who is the creator of The New Adventures of Jesus and Jesus Meets the Armed Forces), and Jack Jaxon. The last two are making a return debut, as it were, since they each produced one of the earliest comix while living in Texas. The work of these artists is provocative both in terms of graphics and writing. Also, a number of new comix publishing enterprises have been formed (usually in San Francisco) for the dual purpose of maintaining artistic freedom and getting a larger hunk of the cover price, so presumably outlets for comix are expanding into more bookstores, "head shops," and other underground chambers of commerce. This should mean wider distribution for comix and an increased ability to defend themselves should any kind of suppression occur. But whether or not they will become a vital part of America's radical youth subculture and politics strictly remains to be seen. If no girl has ever been seduced by an underground comix book, it may be too much to hope for something along those lines for our political system.

Still, underground comix are exciting because some of them have been clever and funny and have made telling points about America in a new way, and because the times have called them forth. Thus, if it is true, as has been observed, that America without its comic strips would not be America, then America with its new comix would be a much more somber America. I think we're witnessing the mere beginnings of a cultural kick with real kick in it.

Imagine.…

S. Clay Wilson becoming political, versus the American involvement in Latin America!

Vaughn Bode intercepting our egocentric probes of outer space!!

Gilbert Shelton outwitting the entire Narcotics Bureau by implanting an entire kilo of grass in Bugs Bunny's ears!!!

Jay Lynch's Pat th' Cat practicing whatever Masters and Johnson have preached!!!!

Robert Crumb versus Spiro Agnew!!!!!

Robert Crumb versus Spiro Agnew!!!!!?

I like—no, I'm afraid I relish—the match-up. After all, it'll only be satire imitating reality once again.