SOURCE: "Underground Comics," in Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, Bonanza Books, 1971, pp. 165-80.

[In the following excerpt, Daniels studies the origins and development of underground comic books and surveys the major figures who published in this genre during the late 1960s and early 1970s.]

[Underground] comics, which have existed in one form or another for as long as the medium itself, have come into new prominence through the concentrated efforts of a handful of dedicated practitioners. The underground publications are indisputably the most controversial comics ever to be produced, and what makes them controversial is their totally uninhibited treatment of sex. The newest wave of such comics, which has made the "underground" designation particularly its own, is distinguished as well by a defiance of convention, a defiance which, embracing a variety of social issues as well as warm bodies, has distinctly political overtones.

Underground comics fall into three distinct groups, representing with some overlap three eras in American culture. The first is the small, pocket-sized pamphlet devoted steadfastly to the theme of sexual intercourse, and referred to by various designations including "eight-pagers" (the least colorful but most accurate of the names) and "Tiajuana bibles" (an attempt to identify a point of origin, which identification may actually be completely spurious). While no accurate documentation of this clandestine enterprise will ever be possible, internal evidence suggests that at least a few of these eight-pagers were in print during the twenties, thus giving them a claim to the title of the first comic books. They were definitely in vogue by the thirties, and continued to crop up for several decades before going into a decline which now has given them a current standing as antique items.

The second type which might be considered underground has never been described by a generic term, although they might be called "kinky comics." Again the prevalent topic is sex, but the emphasis has turned away from documentation of copulation. The feature of these comic books—printed without color, half-size, and sold for several dollars apiece—is the depiction of various forms of sadistic or masochistic behavior. Considering the possible range of these deviations, the variations employed are not very extensive, consisting generally of some mild flagellation and bondage, using every possible male and female combination. The material in most instances is presented with a distinct emphasis on comedy and cooperation to lighten the ostensibly grim nature of the subject matter. In contrast to the eight-pagers, bodily exposure in the kinky comics is kept within strictly defined limitations, without depictions of the legally questionable genital areas. Consequently, although the topics under consideration in the kinky comics may represent for some the ultimate in erotic appeal, the breasts and buttocks they traditionally bare are not specifically censorable, and so these comics are available over the counter at retail outlets in most major American cities. The date of their first appearance is fuzzy, but elements of their style and content seem to suggest that they came into their own during the forties, after the standard comic book form had been firmly established.

There is not much to be gained from a study of kinky comics. Distinguished by an extremely narrow range of subject matter, their settings and characters are as abstract and vaguely realized as any ever presented. A few artists who demonstrated a considerable technique emerged from this school; the most widely known are Stanton, Eneg, and Willie. But the monotony of the plotting, and the ludicrous ease with which characters fall into their perverted poses, make them the least impressive of underground 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.