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.