Dirty Pictures

April 15, 2022
A free-wheeling, frank account of the rise and fall of the underground comic scene. Doherty, a senior editor at Reason magazine and author of This Is Burning Man, serves up a tale of underground comix, "the 'x' to mark them as distinct from the mainstream comics to which they were in opposition." Perhaps the best known of their creators is cartoonist R. Crumb, who, despite what today are considered "problematic" depictions of gender and race, has evolved into an artist taken seriously enough to exhibit at major museums. Doherty's pioneering players share the idea that just as music and film were breaking free of conventions in the countercultural era of the 1960s, so comix, "born of smartass rebel kids," could become revolutionary vehicles for the mores and attitudes of the day. A major difference was that music and film had big corporations behind them, while comix were largely homegrown, underfunded affairs. Crumb, through the pages of Zap! and other seat-of-the-pants magazines, became internationally famous. So did Art Spiegelman, who early on "realized he could not make himself draw something he wasn't intellectually or emotionally drawn to for the rest of his life" and who began to imagine a Holocaust-era tale of cats and mice half a century ago, well before Maus brought him to mainstream attention. Doherty pokes into every corner of the scene, recounting how the always entrepreneurial Stan Lee tried to co-opt it with a Marvel sort-of-comix book and noting that where only a few male artists are remembered today, plenty of women such as Trina Robbins made great art and deserve more attention. While the author closes with a grim recitation of artists and publishers who fell victim to drugs, alcohol, or the various ailments of old age, he observes that comix exert cultural influence today. Lively, well researched, and full of telling anecdotes; just the thing for comix aficionados and collectors.

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April 25, 2022
“Underground comix were born of smartass rebel kids... yearning to push back vigorously against the limits of what their culture considered acceptable,” asserts critic Doherty (This Is Burning Man) in his illuminating history of the counterculture comics movement and its founding fathers. Spelled with an x to distinguish the format from its mainstream counterparts (“to which they were in opposition”), the comix of such legendary artists as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman were vastly different, but they were connected by a near obsession with Mad magazine and an artistic disillusionment that drew them to subvert the medium with illustrations both lurid and profane. Combining interviews with meticulous research, Doherty highlights how their publications, “distributed by hippie entrepreneurs,” touched upon taboo topics like sex, drugs, and homosexuality, as well as the seemingly mundane, to expose culture’s “absurd and the sinister” side—sometimes with grace, other times with shocking and offensive material that lead to legal issues (Crumb, Doherty notes, “was inadvertently responsible for getting booksellers dragged to prison”). As Doherty entertainingly traces the movement’s rise—from its humble beginnings in the 1960s to its uphill battle to be recognized as an art form—he captures how it perfectly reflected the rapidly changing norms of the baby boomer generation and its enduring impact on pop culture today. Comix fans and artists should make room on their shelves for this one.