If Not Superheroes, What? Part IX: Underground Comics

Many comics genres have come - and sometimes expired - from the comics scene, leaving behind material which sometimes-subtle criteria can identify as belonging to one type or another in spite of many elements held in common. For instance, the crime, horror, and science fiction comics of the fifties, particularly under the EC Comics model, shared certain common characteristics of form including karmic rewards, twist endings, and the multi-story anthology format. One form, however, tried very hard to offer something different, and, for a short moment in comics, actually delivered on this promise.

Economic and legal concerns sometimes meant that this form must operate with a set of standards that did not require some elements of the relatively money-lavish mainstream comics forms with which it, in its moment, coexisted. But structurally, stylistically, and conceptually, the underground comics of the late sixties did provide an alternative that few would have mistaken for mainstream content.

Origins of the Form

And, as a form that sometimes took a bellicose rather than an aesthetic approach - though frequently showing considerable finesse in points of style that could do well to improve the mainstream version of comics - the undergrounds often ignored or inverted standards of Code-approved and commercially widespread material.

Three central paths seem to have converged, ultimately, in the underground comics (or, in the vernacular, comix) scene of the late 1960s. We can begin with EC alumnus Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine, which featured satirical material sometimes by talents like Robert Crumb or Terry Gilliam. Hugh Hefner, though seen today as a kind of fossilized artifact of disco-era hedonism, actually enjoyed a kind of countercultural currency at the dawn of the sixties (probably before anyone really used the term counterculture) which made his skin-magazine Playboy a desirable place for cartoonists who fancied themselves as avant-garde to print their pieces. And, though not centered around a single mover, an underground publishing scene had developed on the west coast in the sixties. The underground newspapers, furthermore, provided a place where early one-panel type underground cartoons could appear; cartoonists remember publications like the East Village Other providing an arena for such early explorations, often serving as the necessary resume item to get talents into the actual underground comic books once they began to appear.

These various elements attracted the first generation of underground cartoonists from all points on the map. With the appearance of Zap comics, from California, the concept began to resonate around the country, attracting talent to San Francisco. Bijou Funnies (whose contributors represented Chicago) appeared; Mom's Homemade Comics (whose contributors represented Milwaukee) made the rounds; and an exodus from points as widely separated as New York and Texas converged in California, supplementing local talent. The undergrounds furthermore enjoyed an influx of expatriates of the played-out art-poster scene, which had become somewhat passe, commercial, and stagnant by the standards of the day (most likely, posters had simply lost their countercultural credibility by becoming popular to a wider consumer base).

Regional chauvinism invites some exploration of the cell that arose inn Texas, around a University of Texas publication called the Ranger. This magazine, according to cartoonist Jaxon, ran somewhat like a publication and somewhat like a perpetual party, but eventually a number of contributors found themselves on the sidewalk for crossing some editorial line (and probably more than once); this cluster provided the kernel that would found the Rip Off Press, including Gilbert Shelton (creator of Wonder Wart-Hog and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), Jaxon himself (God Nose Comix), Tony Bell, and Joe. E. Brown, Jr. Jaxon argues that his God Nose Comix most deserves the title of Texas' first underground comic, in that he claims to have printed it in the basement of the Capitol Building while working a straight job there.

The Use of Color

Compared to today's gold-plated formats, with dense and deep coloring rendered on expensive papers and with pricey inks - the product of colorists who sometimes become high-priced celebrities in their own right - one could call the undergrounds' use of color minimal. So minimal, in fact, that they frequently used none in the interior and sometimes only two-color printing on the covers.

The black-and-white approach, while not especially important when considered in isolation, did reflect an important difference in the undergrounds from the high-market-share conventional pieces that readers could get anywhere. A conventional comic enjoyed production by teams of talents. You might have a layout artist, a background artist, a penciler (to render the outlined shapes laid down by the layout artist), an inker, a colorist, a letterer, a writer, and, over all these, an editor attempting to direct traffic. But for undergrounds, what a reader saw on the page tended to come from a single mind and a single hand. Sometimes an underground might have come off some underfunded basement press rather than a color offset rig; sometimes the pieces represented methods of hand assembly more like unto operating a stapler than a saddle stitcher. Wherever the undergrounds could cut overhead, they did.

Given the survival of the newspaper strip, generally not printed in color except on Sundays (and some newspapers didn't have color sections on Sundays at all), plus the often bare-bones approach to the flat color in such comics as went through the four-color printing process, one might note that a comic in 1967 had more elbow room in terms of the question of color at all.

And, as anyone who has compared finished color comics to the original ink work (or the pencil work that ink rendering completed) might observe, a most of the form and tone can come from the monochromatic aspects of the art. Indeed, some pieces clearly implicate that the artist(s) created them based on a standard where one might not anticipate the addition of color at all; the heavy lines and dense black areas of work from 1967 undergrounds or dawn-of-the-eighties independents (like Cerebus) show a black-and-white feel that added color might not necessarily improve.

The Role of Story

Based on a standard shaped by the likes of legendary storytellers (for instance, Will Eisner), we might make the assumption that story occupied a central place in all significant forms of comics. If so, we casually dismiss the underground phenomenon as altogether insignificant, for sometimes the material did not dabble in story at all - sometimes an underground sequence simply connected a series of visual images with no connecting plot.

Especially when the works experimented with a more psychedelic approach - in this case, trying to simulate certain drug experiences via pen, ink, panels, and borders, and all that these might contain - a work might never even dabble in anything like linearity, causality, or focus. In such cases, one could resort to the moniker "linear art," reserving criticism of the evident pomposity of the term; "linear expressionism" might, in some ways, come closer to the concept.

Some pieces mainly aimed to interpret or simulate psychedelic-induced hallucinations, through vehicles of abrupt or unclear transition, or alternately, orderly transitions between disconnected elements. How do we impose a story structure on something such as a landscape where a fifty-foot man decides to make love to a house after both appear in the middle of the desert (two panels of one piece of Zap Comics #5, 1970)?

In other cases, a piece might deviate from what we now deem a worthy story to present a one-pager framing some kind of atrocious joke or pun; underground artists taking this approach often began with the notion that the stranger the setting and components, and the saltier the language and detail, the more turn-of-the-twentieth century corn could evoke the desired groan-reaction.

None of this need suggest a complete absence of story from underground works. Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Skip Williamson, and many of the primary names in the underground canon did, indeed, work in material that reflected some kind of attachment to concrete reality and causality. However, where this approach chafed, they felt free to abandon it to pursue something else. This often left results difficult to explain to consumers of a more conventional comics.

Standards of Art

Some underground cartoonists had a feel for line, form, shape, and storytelling. Their work tends to survive the test of time a bit better than others; for instance, Crumb's "Mister Natural" stories or Skip Williamson's "Snappy Sammy Smoot" read well today. Sometimes, however, the underground artists lacked or ignored the principles of conventionally-defined "good" art.

Undergrounds provided a field for artists who opted to revel in idiosyncratic kinds of primitivism - Kim Deitsch and Aline Kaminsky come to mind here. Sometimes the art seemed eccentric in ways difficult to label, such as early Bill Griffith (who the public would later know in relation to the "Zippy, the Pinhead" phenomenon), and others ignored convention in order to explore psychedelic approaches in their work.

However, we can't altogether disregard the quality of the art in undergrounds. A number of its luminaries had a remarkably robust approach. For instance, Gilbert Shelton's use of expression, body language, lighting, and pacing, all suggest a talent who opted for undergrounds because the conventional medium would have overly confined him, not because he couldn't hack it in the mainstream.

Forward-Looking and Nostalgic Approaches

Underground comics could dabble in primitivism, futurism, retro-chic, or (occasionally) echo some aspects of contemporary styles. Retro approaches allowed the artist to increase the impact of material clearly unprintable in comics of the eras whose styles a penciler might emulate; for instance, Bobby London's dabbling in Herrimanesque and Segaresque approaches made treatment of aspects of the late-sixties California street scene come off rather more ludicrous. This allowed a strange fusion of hero-worship and iconoclasm.

In spite of claims to stand on a cutting edge of comics-as-a-medium, the undergrounds frequently took stylistic approaches that one might better describe as reactionary than avant-garde. The work of Robert Crumb stands as a case in point; much of his approach evoked themes of the cartooning of the thirties. Similarly, although the work of Gilbert Shelton always remained well outside the acceptable limits of what the Comics Code Authority prescribed and proscribed, his humor remained accessible to everyman; some unfairly describe his gags as "conventional" in spite of the excellence of delivery that reliably attached to his work.

Other talents often worked in derivative styles; for instance, Bobby London, one of the principal designers of the visual feel of the "Sonic, the Hedgehog" games, once experimented with an Elzie Segar style, then moved towards a more Herriman-like approach for pieces like "Dirty Duck."

In general, though, undergrounds used convention of style as a means of throwing contrast to the unconventionality of content. For instance, a cartoon about a series of heads done in the style of Segar's "Popeye" increases the shock value of (say) characters arguing about yeast infections. Similarly, a Herriman-like style can increase the shock value of events that occur in a strip to the extent that they represent happenings that Herriman most certainly would not have included in a piece of his own.

Pushing the Envelope (Sometimes)

If one had to pick a unifying theme for underground comics, picking flouting the censors might stand against most contests. The content explored territories generally forbidden both by custom and by express dictum (of the onetime bogeyman, that now-defanged Comics Code Authority).

The undergrounds explored drugs, sex, profanity, sometimes violence; they attacked subject matter in a way conventional comics dared not. Even material not expressly pornographic dealt with topics that would not appear in a DC or Marvel book - for example, Justin Green's treatments of (what he saw as) the psychological consequences of a guilt-riddled Catholic upbringing.

God Nose comics, on the other hand, attacked the icons of Christian faith head-on by presenting a hapless and bespectacled Deity frequently baffled by His creations; and Foolbert Sturgeon's Jesus Comics dealt with the culture shock of an innocent and well-intentioned Messiah coping with the incomprehensible world of the sixties.

Sometimes, however, no particular humor or point seemed to attach to an underground comics creator's work. For instance, I continue to find Bill Griffith's work (such as his Zippy the Pinhead either incoherent or incomprehensible, depending on whether the fault lies with Griffith or myself.

Political Theater

Underground comics often provided a venue - and sometimes the venue - for exploring political content. The passion with which an artist or writer held a view did not necessarily indicate that the ideas he intended to express ran as deep as his feelings; and, often, such treatments ran from puerile rationales for decadent hedonism to loving depictions of historical atrocities, both real and imagined.

Thus, one might read parody of current public figures, as in the guest appearances of Lyndon Johnson, Spiro Agnew, and Richard Nixon within Wonder Wart-Hog stories. Or, instead, one might dabble into the historical side of "oppression studies" with William Stout's send-up of American atrocities in the Moro Wars of the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century.

Moving ahead to the positively contemporary, you might even read the escapades of "Hothead Paisan," a male-hating terrorist who bounces between episodes of mutilation and homicide - ranging from gleeful emasculation with knives to the blunt yet effective blowing off of men's heads with rifles - to explorations of misanthropic self-pity in which the main character emotes justifications for her campaign of murder and dismemberment against the male half of the species.

Inasmuch as the underground comic provided a place to say things one normally couldn't say in comics, we need not display too much surprise that the political content of such works tended towards the gauche, the galling, the extreme, or the deliberately hateful. Shock, after all, serves both as tool and as purpose for a variety of underground comics.

The undergrounds, however inclined to a leftwards political bent, nonetheless approached topics and themes that the contrived hypersensitivity of the modern day would incline to reproach. For instance, recurrent depictions we would today label sexist, racist, or just plain vile regularly populated these comics. Consider tales by S. Clay Wilson, one of which where a demon begins to rescue a hostage from a psychotic woman-slayer, gets distracted by the return of the killer's pet hallucination of a giant nude woman, and ends up laughing when the killer slashes open his captive "like a can of beans;" or another such work where ghouls compete for key cuts of the bodies they dig up from the graveyard, only to discover that one ghoul gets sick when picking pieces from the right side of the corpse. Undergrounds played in a domain of overstimulation rather than understatement, one in which an artificially effete reader would suffer considerable exposure to precisely those disturbing elements his kind often bands together to censor.

Pointless Prurience

A number of underground comics deal almost exclusively in single-mindedly erotic content, frequently crassly portrayed and sometimes without redeeming aesthetic merit. That someone would purchase such material does not require explanation; human sexual curiosity and the accompanying drive for titillation in form remain one of the constants throughout diverse periods of human history.

However, one might ask, more out of perplexity than prudishness: "In an age where photographic and literary pornography remains easily obtained and easily distributed - in an age where almost any sex act that geometry allows appears somewhere on a web site, free of charge - why in the world would anyone resort to comics as a main delivery system for such content?"

That question baffles me. I can't really figure out the appeal. For instance, one pornographic comic book, called Cherry, deals with the sexcapades of its eponym, as depicted in a comics style clearly derived from the work of Dan DeCarlo on Archie-franchise books. When, we might ask, did the world first see a consumer of skin magazines who said, "You know, I like this stuff all right, but it would really do it for me if someone made it into a comic book that looked like Archie!"?

The frequent intrusion of sexual content into the old-school undergrounds fails to make works like Cherry of a single piece with them, since the salacious components tended towards the instrumental - as a shock-value delivery vehicle, as a tool for baiting the real and imagined censors, as a method of evoking disgust (a tenured and respectable ingredient of humor). Think as I might, however, I can't recall a Robert Crumb piece that completely centered on sex - the graphic depictions there frequently appeared as a means of delivering the hero into misery or of creating a ludicrous situation or a thoroughly implausible happy ending. Even where such undergrounds earned an X-rating, more happened than the stuff that bought the X.

Not so with the contemporary erotic underground, except for some rare exceptions, often by European cartoonists with a rather different take on sex. Perhaps in an environment where less fear of prohibition or censorship of such material prevails, creators who use sexual content feel less compelled to pack in the porn to the exclusion of style and content.

Volcanic Outpourings of Misogynistic Sentiment

Robert Crumb's work often treats his hostility to the female of the species in quite graphic form, just as it treats his obsession with them in a kind of push-pull that gives the neurotic male characters their edge. Some observers of the underground medium have therefore come to see anger at and contempt for women as the central feature of the form.

Enough grotesquely anti-female material did, indeed, appear in undergrounds to provide polemical bombast adequate to support such a claim, without requiring too much filtering or selective observation. S. Clay Wilson, for instance, frequently dealt in tales that involved rape, murder, and mutilation of women. Many other talents frequently dumbed-down a female presence to pornographic cameos. Typical of a generation of men who had passed their teens in the 1950s, the mostly-male body of cartoonists generally did not see much to women and, in general, portrayed them as flat, shallow, and/or dumb.

In a form which generally lacks ongoing characters (ignoring the works of Crumb and Shelton), one generally doesn't have much room for character development. However, even in stand-alone pieces, the vacuity of female characters relative to male ones becomes evident.

Sometimes, though, the ill-treatment of women travels with an ill-treatment of human beings in general, earning the title misanthropy rather than misogyny. In many pieces, furthermore, females do not figure at all - occasionally, human beings remain peripheral in surviving samples of some of the more psychedelic explorations. We can, therefore, understand the undergrounds to have maintained a misogynistic slant rather than a misogynistic core, with the difference showing in the ability of pieces to dispense with unkind depictions of women without, in any particular, undermining their credibility as undergrounds.

Shock Value as Central Virtue

If, forced to pick a unifying theme behind the underground comics from the variety of material inclined to appear in such pages, an observer could come to a decision based on recurring presence, he might choose shock value. The underground form sought to rattle cages, to violate standards rather than create them, to say the unsayable and depict the undepictable.

Thus, one can see a certain self-limiting factor in the form. If standards relax, the territory in which undergrounds can travel contracts in direct proportion. As less and less actually shocks, as less and less remains in the domain of the unsayable, the underground has only a dwindling space in which to operate. In an age when Code-approved comics can suggest sex acts once capable of attracting prison terms in selected southern states, the underground has no place to fill and no reason to exist.

In terms of the vehicle for providing artists a canvas free of stifling editorial restraint, the independent comic, beginning mostly in the 1980s, assumed the primary aesthetic function of the underground, but by that point the generally impermeable line between underground cartoonists and conventional comics artists didn't really play a significant role. The independent title, in general, might employ new talent (as we might have qualified Jim Valentino during his Normalman days or, perhaps, Dave Sim) or talent established in mainstream material (Howard Chaykin, known earlier for his work in Marvel Comics' Star Wars, and later for the independent book American Flagg).

The Central Architects

To note the names driving the underground comics phenomenon, we need to name both talent - the celebrities of the form - and entrepreneurs - the figures who actually made sure that the books arrived in the hands of consumers. Without the latter, undergrounds might not have happened as a movement; key figures would play a role of obscure footnotes somewhere; and, rather than providing a set of (counter-)cultural icons, the most the material might have left behind would appear in unfocused places in back issues of various magazines such as Playboy, Esquire, and occasional others.

In a sense, a number of talents could wear the title Grandfather of the Undergrounds. Bill Gaines, in his troubles with civically-oriented busybodies - and especially through his bad showing in dealing with a Senate investigation that had written its conclusions before he ever came to testify on the topic of comics - helped show lines clearly existed between the censorial forces of American culture and the comic book, and thereby, without meaning to, provided comics with a sheen of subversion that may have helped spark the underground phenomenon. Again, from EC, we can grant this title to Harvey Kurtzman, whose humor magazine Help! provided exposure to a number of talents who would explore the underground comics medium in later years, including Robert Crumb and filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Even the cliched Hugh Hefner, himself a comics fan fond of the work of the late Jack Cole, contributed to the primordial publishing soup that would spawn an underground comics culture by printing the work of cartoonists who dabbled in a more adult (or at least saltier) approach to comics that would help fuel the underground comix movement. Local independent tabloids would provide some venues; and, as in the case of Gilbert Shelton's Wonder Wart-Hog, hot rod and motorcycle magazines. And, of course, the publishers of underground newspapers that provided an early place for cartoonists in their formative years to lean towards the approach that would bloom in Zap Comics and Bijou Funnies collectively might also bear the mantle of the Grandfathers of Undergrounds.

Once we begin to see the actual underground comics appear, in several localized outpourings, we encounter a number of figures that we might label as Fathers of the Undergrounds, through a parallel metaphor. Don Schenker brought Zap Comix to press through his vehicle of The Print Mint; Ron Turner launched Last Gasp; and each new underground press evoked a new round of networking and the development of others away from the California and New York foci.

The groundwork laid - with production structures and channels of commerce begun - we can then turn to the talents who gave the form its substance. Buried under a dubious kind of hero worship, we find Robert Crumb, who gave and gives the form talent, style, tone, and a certain characteristic sickness of personality; Skip Williamson, who gave it an elegant sense of the absurd; Gilbert Shelton, who could squeeze a funny situation out of a handful of gravel; Spain and S. Clay Wilson, who gave the undergrounds a kind of visual feel that helped define how subsequent artists would approach the rendered page; Bill Griffith, who dabbled in a kind of dense chain of non-sequiturs and contributed Zippy the Pinhead to Americana; Justin Green, who would chronicle the psychological aspects of cultures of guilt and self-loathing; Art Spiegelman, who would earn a reputation for his funny-animal treatment of Nazi death camps in Maus; Bobby London, known now for his role in designing pieces such as Sonic the Hedgehog; Shary Flenniken, who explored themes of the juxtaposition of innocence on a corrupt and cynical world through pieces such as "Trots and Bonnie"; and, of course, more names than one could do justice to in a short study of this scope.

The Remnants

As less and less fits into the mold of what we could call "the unprintable," the territory which an underground comics can explore diminishes. Shock value, after all, has limits; cultures become desensitized to many things, from public displays of nudity to genocide; and, eventually, shock value becomes passe, with its purveyors increasingly seeming desperate for attention. Furthermore, with laws more lenient towards the content of printed matter, the desire to play a martyr's role pays off less and less, or requires greater and greater offenses to start the play rolling.

Even worse, the market may become dumbed-down, caring less about the occasionally pornographic but devilishly insightful or clever tale - such as the better works of Crumb - and more about any kind of delivery system for the salacious thrill. In such cases, one finds the substance jettisoned to make more room for a pornographic payload. And, as such a purification of non-core elements continues, the disdain of the bluenose towards the lewd output of some comics press becomes more plausible.

However, an underground sensibility, despite all factors working against it, persists here and there. Generally moving beyond simple sociopolitical subversion - a theme mostly exhausted through overuse - it approaches the shocking through a kind of aesthetic subversion. Some pieces attempt to dabble in the meatty undergroundness through the vehicle of conventional comics formats; but some worthy pieces approach the central virtues of the form through the daily strip format, appearing generally in entertainment publications of the sort generally distributed as tabloid inserts to newspapers or given away free in racks at restaurants and other businesses.

As one example, Max Cannon's "Red Meat" best fits the underground category, even if mainstreaming of the form has somewhat blunted the subversive impact it once hoped to achieve.

In other cases, though, material pretending to the underground title has managed to appropriate formats and a general not-appropriate-for-minors approach that nonetheless lacks the substance that justified the form in its heyday. Simple delivery vehicles for pen-and-ink pornography sometimes conceal a fatal shallowness behind the "underground" label without ever coming too near anything like an idea or an innovation.

Nonetheless, the human imagination frequently overcomes slothful aesthetic approaches, and the core sensibility erupts here and there despite no-substance, no-talent, no-purpose pieces trying to graft onto themselves some kind of countercultural halo by calling themselves undergrounds.

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Column 255. Completed 26-MAY-2001.