Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosenkranz. Fantagraphics Books, 2002.
Hysteria in Remission, by Robert Williams. Fantagraphics Books, 2002.
The underground comix of the 1960s and early ‘70s are among the most influential art movements ever to originate in the United States. Those cheaply printed comic books used a new distribution systemincluding a network of hippie emporia known as “head shops”to create a new audience for confrontational art that avails itself of the familiar forms of mass culture.
Often overlooked in art historical accounts of the period, the underground comix presented a radical alternative to the ideas that dominated post-war art discourse, ideas that emphasize abstraction and the purely formal properties of traditional art media. Minimalism and Pop Artcelebrated for providing a critique of that sort of formalismappear timid by comparison. The comix were instrumental in re-introducing narrative and overt social commentary to challenging visual art. Though notorious for their scurrilous and misogynistic male fantasies, comix were also an important site of feminist art in the early 1970s. A history that aims to place underground comix within the larger sphere of the visual arts has, so far as I am aware, yet to be set down in a book.
What we do have is Rebel Visions, by Patrick Rosenkranz, a chronological account of the underground comix movement based on interviews with many of the major players, compiled by Rosenkranz over three decades. More oral history than critical analysis, it is an indispensable sourcebook for anyone interested in the underground comix milieu.
After a few introductory platitudes about “that memorable decade,” Rosenkranz begins his story in 1963. Rebel Visions suffers from some organizational confusionthe illustrations do not adhere to the chronology of the book, and many artists are introduced in sidebars that have little connection to the main text. The chronological set-up of the book may, at first, test the patience of readers unfamiliar with underground comix, as we pass through a series of vignettes about the early lives of people who later influence the movement: University of Nebraska undergraduate S. Clay Wilson gets kicked out of ROTC and becomes an Army medic; 19-year-old surfer Rick Griffin has his face mutilated in a near-fatal car crash; hot-rod enthusiast and aspiring artist Robert Williams moves to Los Angeles from Albuquerque and enrolls at LA City College, where the art faculty dismissively label him an “illustrator,” which, he reports, “just upset the hell out of me.”
Reading further, the relevance of those biographical anecdotes becomes clear. Wilson, like Williams, reacted against the narrow-mindedness of his university art faculty“They called my stuff ‘illustrational,’ or ‘narrative,’ which was the bugaboo.” Inspired by gory army training films, Wilson’s answer to the refined sensibilities of the fine art mavens was a series of jaw-droppingly lurid comics set in a sleazy world of motorcycle gangs, beer-swilling pirates and skanky wenches who gleefully engage in extreme brutalityamputations, rapes, eye-gouging and the likerendered with feverish gusto. Griffin’s near-death crash spurred a lifelong fascination with mysticism and spirituality. He became a preeminent designer of psychedelic concert posters and an innovator of the kind of cryptic letterforms now associated with graffiti taggers. Griffin’s ornate comix united surfing imagery, mystical symbols and giddy bursts of speech-cum-design“oxo wow mom!” By 1971, Griffin made comix thatsomewhat incongruouslymarshaled those characteristics in the service of an evangelical Christian message. Robert Williams’ fury at the arbiters of fine art led him to become one of the most pointedly taboo-smashing of comix artists. His comix graft high-toned language and big ideasone contained a cut-out model of the universeto unapologetically scabrous iconography.
Probably the best-known underground title is Zap Comix, the first issue of which was printed in early 1968 as a showcase for the work of Robert Crumb. Crumb’s adorably roly-poly cartoon style (reminiscent of old-time newspaper strips like Mutt and Jeff) was applied to irreverent stories of the anxiety-plagued “Whiteman” and the dubious guru “Mr. Natural.” Three pages of jazzy, non-narrative “Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” feature talking eyeballs and a whistling vagina. A faux advertisement shows a stereotypical cartoon African as the product pitchman for “Canned Nigger Hearts,” and the back cover encourages youngsters to “turn on” to mind-altering drugs. While satiric and psychedelic comics were appearing in underground newspapers by this time, nobody had seen a comic book like this one. Rebel Visions contains many testimonials to the electrifying effect of Zap #1 on other cartoonists.
Crumb became the dominant figure in comix, but Crumb’s contribution is only part of the story. Subsequent issues of Zap included other artists alongside or in collaboration with CrumbGriffin, Wilson, and Williams among themand clusters of comix artists sprang up in Chicago, New York, and Texas, as well as at the movement’s center, San Francisco. The initial comix-reading subculture was largely under thirty, both urban and suburban, reaching deep into the hinterlands. The early issues of Zap, which remain in print today, have each sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
Rosenkranz provides a fine-grained account of developments that led to the dramatic success of Zap. Work by a number of iconoclastic young cartoonistsmost of them inspired in the 1950s by EC horror comics (such as “Tales from the Crypt”) and the early Mad magazine (a comic book that satirized other comic books)began to appear in subcultural venues in the early 1960s. Griffin’s “Murphy” strip in Surfer magazine is an example of this, as is Williams’ advertising and t-shirt design for custom car maestro Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Other “flipped out” comics were appearing in campus humor magazines, such as the Berkeley Pelican, the Occidental College Fang (edited by cartoonist-turned-filmmaker Terry Gilliam), and The Ranger at the University of Texas, edited by Gilbert Shelton, who created his own comic superhero, “Wonder Wart-Hog.” Shelton publishedin an edition of “about fifty” that was printed covertly on the photocopier at the UT law library The Adventures of Jesus, arguably the first “underground” comic book, by a young professor of art named Frank Stack who was credited only as “F.S.” Another mildly blasphemous early comic, “God Nose” by “Jaxon,” was also printed in Texas in 1964.
Tales of clandestine printing and author pseudonyms recur in Rebel Visions, as do reports of under-the-counter sales, police raids, lawsuits, and court cases. “Underground” was not merely a marketing label.
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During the early 1960s, the most sexually explicit pictures that were widely available in the US were the photos of nudes in Playboy magazine and its imitators, none of which dared to represent a tuft of pubic hair, never mind sexual penetration. (National Geographic was also known to uncover naked “primitives” in the course of their anthropological mandate, and there was some discrete trade in publications devoted to “art photography” or the health benefits of nudism.) Mainstream publications did not print “four-letter-words” in those days, and most printers would have declined such an assignment in any case. Movie producers rarely defied the film industry’s official morals code, which had been in effect since 1934. Known as the Hays Code, it forbade all manner of expression that “will lower the moral standards of those who see it,” and included a long list of specific prohibitions. The law, the Flag, or religion can never be ridiculed; “pointed profanities” such as “damn,” “hell,” and “s.o.b.” are forbidden by the code, as is any scene of nudity, illegal drug traffic, child birth, “excessive and lustful kissing,” “sex perversion,” or miscegenation. Comic books, marketed as a medium for children and adolescents, operated under an even stricter code that had been put in place in 1954, after the US Senate called a formal inquiry into the corrupting effects of comics on America’s youth.
By the time underground comix became widespread1968 and ‘69the rigid social mores reflected in those codes of public expression had begun to bend. But the old standards of propriety still dominated the contemporary media-world, and the comix artists and their readers had grown up in the environment of the early sixties, which included fresh memories of “blacklists” and other manifestations of the rampant anti-communism that chilled political dissent during the 1950s. Thus, by all accounts the initial flush of comix was stunning, as if some great dike that stifled a forty-year supply of the nation’s suppressed thoughts burst under pressure and flooded the pages of innocuous children’s books with ejaculating penises, hairy vulvas, carnage, gore, racist caricatures, drug-addled mental states, shameful confessions, exotic sexual couplings, seditious sloganeering and obscenities galore. This torrent of taboos was employed to mock anything or anyone representative of “the establishment”: police, church, school, family, delayed gratification, abstract art. Sometimes the traditional value under attack was the notion of rationality itself; the comix artists introduced American youth to a sort of anti-sense that the early-century Dadaists might have recognized, via juxtapositions of word and image that, although locked into the format of a sequential narrative, refuse to resolve into any conventionally decipherable meaning.
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“In the late-1960s, what was considered rational was starting to be in real question,” Robert Williams writes in the introduction to Hysteria In Remission, a well-designed book that reprints virtually all of Williams’ comix in a large-scale format. Williams refers to the “rational” justifications that authorities offered for oppressive anti-drug policies and the extensive war in Vietnam. He points out that the earliest comix operated according to “two philosophies. First, the visually loaded, surreal-panel content, with no concern for responsible story line. Rather, a psychotic meandering through a not-as-yet explored never-never land that wasn’t for children.” Williams puts his own comix in this category, and also cites the work of Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, Zap artist and poster designer Victor Moscoso, “and sometimes Robert Crumb.”
Williams contrasts that pictorially-oriented aspect of the underground comix with a more traditionally narrative approach: “The second philosophy was a more rational use of classic comic book story lines, in the tradition of Carl Barks (Uncle Scrooge) and C.C. Beck (Captain Marvel). These were thoroughbred cartoon writers like Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez and Crumb, who produced well thought-out graphic literature.”
For his part, Williams developed a cartoon technique of dizzying virtuosity. He is the Paganini of the “zipline”his comics teem with objects emitting something or another: gleams, tears, fumes, flames, vibrant ribbons of motion. The drawings are often so intensely packed with flourishes that they become difficult to look at, like blazing sunlight reflected off chrome, an effect that Williams often depicts. Many of the “visually loaded” comixnot only those by Williamsconvey a sense of overabundance, as if to suggest that conventional pictures and letterforms cannot contain the force of lived experience.
“Clumpy Morphus,” a one-page piece by Williams from 1970, is typical of the first of his philosophies. With a banner title at the top and a panel grid below, it sets up a conventional comic strip narrative structure, even if the characters are deviant; the cartoon protagonist has big clown shoes and a head like a jester’s cap, and his huge clown pants appear to brim with steaming excrement. As the story begins, the authorities arrive. The “secret law” demands to know what Clumpy’s got in his pants and with a “plop!,” a cornucopia of feces completely obscures the orderly comic grid. From within the shitball, a hellish incarnation of the military-industrial complex aims its weapons at the reader. Clumpy is now piloting a futuristic bomber jet. In the distant background, an unseen character feebly asks, “But what does this all mean?”
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The comix clearly owe a debt to surrealism, particularly to the surrealist notion that irrational and socially repressed imagery has the potential to liberate the individual from stultifying habits of thought. Comix are also indebtedat least in the minds of some of their creatorsto the then-new psychedelic drug LSD, which they saw as an agent for just that sort of liberation. In the history of comix, R. Crumb’s legendary “fuzzy acid” trip in November 1965 is the mythological equivalent of Moses receiving the tablets. Crumb reportedly became discombobulated for several months by drugs a girlfriend had given him, revolutionizing his art. “The whole time I was in this fuzzy state of mind, the separation, the barrier between the conscious and the subconscious was broken open somehow,” Crumb wrote in 1988. “A grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carnival of disassociated images kept sputtering to the surface. It was during that fuzzy period that I recorded in my sketchbook all the main characters I would be using in my comics for the next ten years: Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Schuman the Human, the Snoid, Eggs Ackley, The Vulture Demonesses, Shabno the Shoe-Horn Dog, this one, that one. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, like a religious vision that changes ones life, but in my case it was a psychotic manifestation of some grimy part of America’s collective unconscious.”
The comix artists also share the surrealists’ fixation on sex. For Rebel Visions, Rosenkranz has selected many illustrations that emphasize penisespenises that are chopped off and eaten, exploding penises, and penises that cause others to explode. It’s a fair choice, as so many of the fantasies and anxieties of young men center around that organ, and the great majority of the comix artists, especially at the movement’s beginning, were young men.
Inspired by the audacity of Wilson and Williams, Crumb started to produce comix that plumbed realms of his psyche that he had previously held off-limits. Crumb’s loveable drawing style was employed to vent sexual rage; in one strip, Crumbraised a Catholicgets a hard-on after decapitating a nun. Soon, a sort of smuttier-than-thou arms race was on among the artists, who reveled in pulling out all the stops in aggressively pornographic titles like “Snatch,” “Jiz,” and “Felch.” While admired by some as a liberating form of satire that allowed repressed truths to be confronted in the full light of consciousness, othersincluding a few comix artistsfound this trend personally and politically appalling.
Cartoonist Trina Robbins, for one, was aghast to see comix laden with “graphic rape scenes and every other degradation toward women the writers/artists could think of,” she wrote in 1988. “Entrails, usually female, were scattered all over the landscape in a phenomenon of violence toward women that I believe has never been equaled in any other medium.” 1
With the women’s liberation movement emerging in the early seventies, the comix became a forcing bed for feminist art. Robbins edited an all-women comix anthology, It Ain’t Me Babe, in 1970. It featured seven artists. More women artists soon surfaced in San Francisco, many of them producing comix that addressed sexuality and the status of women in the counterculture. By 1972, the Wimmen’s Comix Collective was formed. The long-running anthologies “Wimmen’s Comix” and “Tits & Clits” both first appeared that year, and an increasing number of other comix featured women artists, including Willy Mendes, Shary Flenniken and Aline Kominsky.
These women’s comix were widely distributed in the 1970s, yet they have been little noted by academic art historians, even those who specialize in feminist art. For example, The Power of Feminist Art, a 318-page survey of American feminist art in the 1970s (published in 1994), makes no mention of the comix or any of the underground artists. These artists have been documented by Robbins herself, who in her subsequent career as an “herstorian” has authored pioneering books about women in comics and cartooning.
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By 1973, the underground comix movementflourishing a year earlierwas starting to collapse. Rosenkranz suggests several causes. The success of comix led to a market glut of artistically inferior imitators, while production costs and cover prices escalated. Local ordinances prohibiting the sale of drug paraphernalia began to force head shops out of business. Miller vs. California, a Supreme Court decision affirming “community standards” as a basis for judging obscenity, would make distribution more difficult still. “Oppression from the political right was soon matched by censorship from the radical left,” according to Rosenkranz; the freewheeling underground newspapers that had once promoted these cartoonists were becoming increasingly polemical and intolerant of comix that did not conform to their ideological program.
Underground cartoonists Bill Griffith (the artist behind “Zippy the Pinhead”) and Art Spiegelman (later known for his groundbreaking book Maus) attempted to revivify the movement in 1975 by jointly editing Arcade, a magazine-sized anthology with superior production values that could be sold on newsstands. While artistically successful, Arcade folded in 1976 after seven quarterly issues, its publisher financially drained. Rosenkranz describes Arcade as “the movement’s last great gesture.”
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The fact that the underground comix were in large part a self-conscious visual art movement is often lost in discussions of comix. Robert Crumb is a famous autodidact who, along with his brother Charles, grew up isolated and obsessed with comic books. But Crumb’s story is the exceptionmany of the other underground artists began as painters, and most of those had post-secondary fine art training and were aware of current tendencies in the visual arts. “All of us had some form of formal fine arts background,” Williams writes, speaking of the early underground artists, “and almost all of us found the academic art world pretentious and graphically stifling. Nowhere in American art curricula was representational art accepted.”
For those artists, modernist formalismabstract painting in particularenforced the socially repressive climate of America in the early sixties. Williams proposes an alternative to the modernist artistic canon in a didactic 1989 piece devoted to his own “graphic influences.” A cartoon Williams, posed at his easel, stands on the stump of a tree with roots that intersect a sort of expanded field of representational art, in a cross-subcultural soil where cartoonist Basil Wolverton, pulp illustrator Virgil Finlay, and anonymous carnival midway painters share the same billing as Picasso and Turner.
The artist Mike Kelley has been outspoken about the importance of underground comix within the history of recent art. “The underground cartoonists were fine artists,” Kelley insists in a 2002 interview in Artforum. “Their works were, both ideologically and formally, so much in contradiction to the tradition of mainstream cartooning that they could not be seen otherwise.” 2
Kelley points out that “their adoption of the comic-book form as a presentational form links them to other radical avant-garde movements of the ‘60s, such as Happenings and Earth Art, which also sought an escape from the confines of the gallery system.” The comix managed to penetrate far beyond the usual precincts of the art world, inspiring an uncountable number of future artists. “Robert Crumb was a god to me,” Kelley recalls. “Without the influence of Crumb I might never have become an artist, since I had never been confronted with ‘radical’ or avant-garde art before seeing underground comic books.”
Underground comix set the precedent for the field of serious-themed comic books (and “graphic novels”) that has emerged in recent decades, as well as ‘zines and “punk” graphics. Their influence extends deeply into American cartoons and comedy: the satirical tone of the comix is echoed (albeit with the shocking imagery and revolutionary politics combed out) in popular television programs like The Simpsons and South Park. Simpsons creator Matt Groening began his career as an “alternative” newspaper comic strip artist, inspired by Crumb.
The most conspicuous reflection of the comix in the realm of visual art is the widespread use of cartoon imageryoften connected with writingto address “adult” concerns. Raymond Pettibon, Sue Williams, Jim Shaw, Carroll Dunham, Paul McCarthy and other artists come to mind, including Robert Williams himself, who has developed his systematic attack on “good taste” into a high-profile career as a self-described “lowbrow” painter. The roiling psychoscapes painted by Lari Pittman or Tom Knechtel seem to have some roots in the comix, as dofor better or worsepractically the whole herd of taboo-brandishing “bad boy” and “bad girl” artists that were at the center of several museum shows in the ‘90s.
The influence of the comix on art extends to work that doesn’t look anything like a comic. Much post-60s artthe conceptualists’ combinations of image and text, the autobiographical performances and “body art,” the politically confrontational installation art, and the many attempts to create alternative institutions and distribution networksowes a least a small nod toward the comix.
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A utopian aspect permeates the whole enterprise of underground comix, regardless of whether some of the comix seem crude or silly now. That utopia reflects a characteristically American combination of ideals: for fifty cents, anyone could own a work of art andperhaps more importantlya palpable model of uninhibited free expression.
While perusing these new collections of decades-old comix, readers sympathetic to those ideals might feel a tingle at the back of their necks. One of Crumb’s best known comic stories, “Joe Blow,” appeared in Zap #4, a 1969 comic that was the subject of many obscenity busts. Crumb satirizes the kind of idealized image of the healthy American family presented by TV shows like “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father Knows Best.” Crumb’s version of the prototypical family happily resolves their problems by way of explicitly drawn sex romps between the parents and their kids. Zap #4 was condemned by at least one court, but the momentum of the comix overcame the effect of such judgments: Zap #4 has been sold for decades without incident. Toward the end of Rebel Visions, Rosenkranz interviews Don Donahue, the publisher of many early comix including Zap #1 and Snatch. “Probably no one would publish that ‘Joe Blow’ thing now,“ Donahue says, speaking in 1998. “That particular story is kind of a classic, a piece of nostalgia. You couldn’t really get away with that stuff now… It’s pretty scary. It could be construed as kiddy porn. Things that were perfectly legal to own then are dangerous to own now.”
Brian Tucker is an artist, writer and teacher. He is the former managing editor of X-TRA. He lives in Los Angeles.
FOOTNOTES
1. Trina Robbins, untitled memoir, Blab!, #3, Kitchen Sink Press: Northampton, Massachusetts, 1988.
2. All Mike Kelley quotes are from “Obscured Visions: ‘Eye Infection’,” Artforum, March 2002, p.116.
All other quotes are from Rebel Visions or Hysteria in Remission.
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