In my last post looking at the roots of underground comix, I discussed how, in the 1950s, the moral panic resulting from psychiatrist Frederic Wertham’s campaign against comic books helped inspire the Comics Code Authority. The Code sapped much of comics’ creative energy by forcing artists and writers to work within draconian limits set by … Continue reading “Engaged Levity”: Mad and the Underground Comix
Category: Comics
“A Bad Time to Be Weird”: Comics at the Dawn of the Comix
In September 1971, Playboy interviewed cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whose work had been a regular feature in that magazine (and the Village Voice) since the mid-1950s. While Feiffer didn’t say much about recent developments in comics, readers leafing through their copy would have encountered a trio of comic characters who were familiar to anyone reading the … Continue reading “A Bad Time to Be Weird”: Comics at the Dawn of the Comix
“Mocking Constituted Authorities with Bitterness and Fury”: The Comix and Underground Newspapers
This is the second of a series of posts where I’m digging into the history of 1960s/1970s underground comix: it’s a history I’ve always been curious about on its own terms, but I’m also exploring underground comix in order to better understand how Doonesbury reflected and drew upon critical developments in comics happening around the … Continue reading “Mocking Constituted Authorities with Bitterness and Fury”: The Comix and Underground Newspapers
Doonesbury and the Comix, Part One: “Pigs and Nixon” (The Politics of the Undergrounds)
Around the time of Doonesbury’s October 1970 debut, the Christmas edition of Playboy was on newsstands. The interview that month was with the poet Robert Graves, who predicted that a new culture of sexual liberation that “violates the moral principles on which the state is founded” would lead to “a sharp increase in homosexuality and … Continue reading Doonesbury and the Comix, Part One: “Pigs and Nixon” (The Politics of the Undergrounds)
“A Story about a Year Someone Was Sick”: Two Comics about Cancer.
It’s not often that a comics panel will make me put a book down to catch my breath. Our Cancer Year, a 1994 comics memoir by Harvey Pekar, Joyce Brabner and Frank Stack, chronicles Pekar and Brabner’s lives as Pekar, a legend in the history of underground and independent comics, was being treated for lymphoma. … Continue reading “A Story about a Year Someone Was Sick”: Two Comics about Cancer.
Reading Doonesbury 