The International Comix Conspiracy

And then I'll know that all I've learned, my kid assumes / And all my deepest worries must be his cartoons....

--Younger Generation, John Sebastian

From what I can remember of my academic year 1953--1954, Mr. Randazzo's double-sessioned fifth-grade class at P. S. 181 in Little Neck, Long Island, was far from heavy. Nonetheless, I had one educational experience there that totally blew my ten-year-old mind. Warren Reier, my friend that year--my only friend during the several surrounding years--introduced me to Mad comics. Warren was a blond, bespectacled boy who, like me, had been pronounced "morbidly precocious," hated pledging allegiance, hated gym and Little Neck in general. The two of us would often huddle in the very back of Mr. Randazzo's classroom, playing Hangman for an imaginary Schmaltz Herring Cup. Or, near bursting with hilarity, we'd pore over our Mads, forever pointing out new "potzrebies" to each other--weird stuff we'd never noticed before going on in the corners of the frames.

In retrospect, even our herring cup was Mad. At the conclusion of Hangman games, one of us would announce dementedly, "And the winner of the Silver Schmaltz Herring Cup is ... [sudden clutching at the heart, throat or abdomen] aaarrgh!" Probably doesn't crack you up, but in those days, it rarely failed to send us into fits of strangled giggling.

Randazzo, having a rough enough go teaching fractions and state capitals, would get p.o.'d. His irritation, and the incomprehension of our parents--in whose incorrigible blindness Mad seemed just another comic book--intensified our bond. Looking back, I understand that Mad isolated us, and gave us a kind of strength, too. We laughed at different jokes from the rest of the gang at P. S. 181. We were the first to see that cheerleaders were ridiculous and that the smallest tube of tooth paste you could buy was "large." Grossly outnumbered, we had no glimmer of doubt that our material was riotous, theirs dumb. Harvey Kurtzman, who created the early Mads, created our sense of "Humor in a Jugular Vein": mocking, subversive, aggressive.

Back then, the folks who put out Mad, E. C., were also pushing a fairly far-out line of adventure comics--a line that aroused my most intensely ambivalent emotions. E. C. stood for Entertaining Comics or Educational Comics or other brand names--depending upon exigencies that remain mysterious to me. They produced a facsimile of Mad called Panic ("humor in a varicose vein") and lots of "jolting tales of tension" with such titles as Shocksuspensestories, Crypt of Terror, Frontline Combat and Weird Science-Fantasy. Oh, I admired their vitality and graphic flair compared with pat action comics like Captain Marvel, Red Ryder or Wonder Woman. But I admired from a distance--publicly disdaining them as hard core, secretly excited by them and confused by my excitement.

Untypically for a Mad fan-addict, as the publishers called us, I never bought or traded for E. C. jolters. Yet they fascinated me. I would read them on the run, feverishly, at cigar-store racks. Looking back, I realize that the brutal fantasies they dramatized must have been too close to my own for comfort. It was years before images of amputation and those other E. C. stand-bys--decapitation, uncoiled intestines, injury to the eye--welled anywhere near the surface of my daydreams.

The E. C. line passed out of my life, with Warren and Mad, when I left Little Neck in sixth grade. I vaguely understood that E. C. had become the target of a righteous public furor--the result, largely, of a silly best seller called Seduction of the Innocent, in which psychiatrist Fredric Wertham attributed juvenile murder, suicide and maladjustment to the overstimulation of horror comics. Wertham became the chief "expert" witness before a Senate investigating committee, chaired by Estes Kefauver. A Comics Code Authority, controlled by the folks who publish Archie, pressured national distributors into dropping comics that lacked their own censor's Seal of Approval. In effect, the entire E. C. line except Mad, by then a 25-cent magazine, was busted. Anyway, Kurtzman left Mad during that period of upheaval and, without him, Mad stagnated.

Hindsight is easy. Kurtzman, a man who never quite enjoyed his moment, played a gigantic role in modern American culture. (Because the influence he exerted was upon us kids, it passed largely unfelt during the Fifties. In the Sixties, Kurtzman turned to the sexy satire of Playboy's Little Annie Fanny.) Along with the rest of the culture in the early Cold War years, comics began quietly congealing in an establishmentarian mold: Steve Canyon, Terry and the Pirates, Dick Tracy, Dagwood and Blondie.

A few years later, introducing neurosis, Jules Feiffer broke out of this mold. But Feiffer was and is strictly a newspaper comic, a Playboy strip or a large expensive paperback. A Feiffer comic book would have been unthinkable. Comic books were for kids, of course, and Feiffer for grownups. After a few more years, the Evergreen Review strips appeared, also for "grownups": Barbarella and Phoebe Zeitgeist. Sex-ridden, but kinky and repressed. The heroines never got laid.

Although it (continued on page 328) International Comix (continued from page 199) wasn't a bit clear to me at the time why it happened, comics tumbled into a 15-year-long dark age shortly after I moved away from Little Neck. How dim was my awareness of the loss I'd suffered. Looking back, I'm amazed. For I kept reading comic books through all those years--not, I'm sure, as avidly as I might have had they been any good, but without quite realizing that they weren't any good, either. OK, some of them were good, once; but their time was gone, long, long gone. The newspaper strips and Sunday funnies: Gasoline Alley, Moon Mullins, Mutt and Jeff. The ten-cent, spine-stapled comic books: Superman, Archie, Little Lulu. Products of another age.

Classically, cartoon characters lack a past or a future, play out conflicts that never get resolved. The lives of their readers change and end. The lives of new readers develop. But cartoon lives retain all their essential features everlastingly. They had nothing whatever to do with me, with anyone I knew nor with the social changes spinning in my head. Yet somehow I was asleep to these discrepancies. They didn't disturb my reading.

I reminisce to set the stage for my second comic-book satori. After a decade and a half, comics blew my mind again. Except this time around, they were called comix and they pulled out more stops than I'd ever imagined.

No voice today could be quite what Mad's was then, 15 years ago, when I Believe was a hit song and scarcely anyone had noticed the crack in the picture window. Yet even in the current era, with subversion a commonplace down through junior high school, comix still startle. They aren't simply the first interesting comics development in 15 years--collectively, they represent a conceptual breakthrough that, like Mad, like dope, can have momentous impact nobody feels; that can make a difference in how a generation learns to conceive of America. A reference point, an attitudinal acid test, comix are precisely the kind of medium over which young people come together, discover one another.

To the degree that people cherish American Values, they loathe comix. Comix lack the cheerfulness that underlies good citizenship. "My wife's a lousy bitch," grumbles an irrelevant background figure on a bar stool. "Yeah," replies the bartender, "mine, too." Not long ago, it seemed enough to "chide" our national foibles affectionately. Once we felt irritated at split-level smugness, righteous complacency. Now we feel rage; a sense of betrayal and of danger. We know now about the basement arsenals. Authority: Then it was parents and teachers, now it's the Army and police. Then danger meant disapproval--not fitting in, not winning the cheerleader's heart nor the principal's medal--nt gtg a gd jb w mo pa. Archie danger. Now the danger's something close to annihilation. Now millions of people have committed undiscovered narcotics felonies, subscribe to treasonous politics.

The new cartoonists scorn Amerika, fear her. Tremble before the no-knock bust. Or before some vaguer, grander, freedom-thwarting, spirit-crushing conspiracy. "A beautifully heinous plan!" exclaims one of Skip Williamson's villains. "With your twisted scientific genius an' my enormous genitals, th' entire galaxy will soon be ours to (gasp) do with as we will!"

Comix are overrun with sadistic cops, Wallace-loving/long-hair-hating hard-hats, blood-hungry military officers, duplicitous narcs, threatening machines--and gore! Gore, banished from comics since the great Kefauver purge of 1955, gushing forth as if through a ruptured dam. And limitlessly graphic sex. And the two--sex and gore--inevitably conjoined. Genitalia suddenly prey to angry maimings and castrations. (When a lady giggles at Wonder Wart Hog's wilted member, the Hog of Steel inserts his hideous snout instead and blows her all over the city.) Remember the old reversible sort of violence, where the puss who's been pancaked by a steam roller pops back into shape, or the rabbit who's just splattered to the ground from a 1000-foot cliff appears in the next panel wearing a Band-Aid? Gone. Comix are never so naturalistic as when depicting mutilation or dismemberment.

By the time I fully caught on to them, there were already about 15 out, and perhaps twice that many cartoonists (lots more by now). Of these, at least half a dozen were plainly exceptional talents--their work more technically arresting, more relevant, more fun than any published "legitimately." Just as plainly, at least one was an amazing, full-out genius. He will probably turn out to be the greatest comic-book artist who ever lived.

In the spring of 1968, the first issue of All New Zap Comix ("Fair Warning: For Adult Intellectuals Only!") was drawn and published in San Francisco by Robert Crumb, the genius in question. He and his wife sold it on the street corners of Haight-Ashbury. On the cover, a lady with a flowerpot hat says, "I wish somebody would tell me what 'diddy-wah-diddy' means...." Mr. Natural, exuding droplets of agitation, says, "If you don't know by now, lady, don't MESS with it!" Fair Warning.

Whether Zap #1 should properly be considered America's first underground comic book, whether Crumb should be considered the genre's father as well as apotheosis, should be decided by historical quibble thrashers. Zap was preceded by two irreverencies out of Austin, Texas, in the mid-Sixties: The Adventures of Jesus, by "Foolbert Sturgeon" (pseudonymous because he's since become a professor at a Midwestern state university), and God Nose, by Jack Jaxon. A few others might also lay questionable claim to the title. Nonetheless, it was Zap's startling first issue--privately printed, privately hawked--that launched the sudden proliferation of comix across the country. Crumb quickly made a distribution deal for Zap with Berkeley's Print Mint, whose psychedelic-rock-poster business had begun expiring with Hashbury and hippiedom itself. Don Schenker, the 40-year-old owner, started editing and publishing a tabloid comic paper called Yellow Dog, which he converted to the familiar stapled-down-the-spine format after a dozen issues.

No sooner did a few cartoonists hit upon a way to print and circulate their drawings than others started breezing into San Francisco. They discovered one another, promoted one another, turned one another on. Over the next two years, the Print Mint turned out five more issues of Zap (the fourth was #0). Jaxon and Gilbert Shelton started Rip Off Press so they could rip off a bigger share of the profits and avoid being ripped off themselves by middlemen. Rip Off turned into a cooperative, with artists and printers splitting all revenue 50-50. No cons, no censorship, no hassles.

Before long, Gary Arlington, the 32-year-old owner of the Comic Book Store in San Francisco--a buff's paradise crammed from floor to ceiling with comics of all types and periods--started the San Francisco Comic Book Company. "My whole world died in the Fifties," Arlington recalled. "From then on, I didn't get any more hits until Zap." When Zap started moving, Arlington decided to publish himself, Rory Hayes (his man behind the counter), Jim Osborne and others. Crumb arranged for the illicit printing and distribution (mainly through porno outlets) of the notorious Snatch and Jiz. Almost immediately, comix began appearing from half a dozen other cities.

One of the earliest and most durable was Bijou Funnies, out of Chicago. Like many of the new cartoonists, its founders, Jay Lynch (Nard n' Pat) and Skip Williamson (Snappy Sammy Smoot), had edited or contributed to multiple "fanzines." Throughout the decade preceding comix, scores of these mimeographed harbingers appeared in and disappeared from various cities--with a ten-issue longevity record. They featured the work of recidivist graduates of college humor magazines, of enterprising amateurs and of established cartoonists who liked to draw bare breasts--which their regular gigs prohibit--and call them experimental.

Manuel "Spain" Rodriguez grew up in the poor Italian section of Buffalo. He learned to identify with "the lowest strata of society--all the trash, black and white." As a teenager, he hated school, roamed the streets, drew Mafia chiefs, thought of himself as a criminal. During five years as a machinist in a Western Electric plant, he rode with an outlaw motorcycle club called the Road Vultures. Tangles with the law intensified his resentment of authority. He dropped out in 1966 to the East Village, where, while working as a strip and cover artist for the East Village Other, he dreamed up Trashman--an urban street fighter who bears a striking resemblance to Ché Guevara, and to Spain himself.

Trashman fornicates with beautiful women, coolly consumes joints in the 48 seconds before secret police stomp down his doors, makes capitalist oppressors eat leaden death in a futuristic world of repression and ugliness. He's an agent of the "Sixth Int'r'n'l" movement, a ghetto freedom corps that battles fascist mercenaries across monstrous L. A.-inspired strip cities. The ideological disputes never quite get spelled out. No matter. With the spabat spat ftwang taktaktaks from his machine gun exploding through the panel enclosures, Trashman couldn't be less interested in theory. He's out for VENGINCE. Like all the foremost comix artists, Spain is bedeviled by the connections between sex and violence. Naked Penelope Prope looks down from her penthouse balcony, riveted to a scene of hand-to-hand carnage. She holds a telescope in one hand, while with the other, she stimulates herself with an electric vibrator. "A boon to ecstasy," she says of the mayhem below.

S. Clay Wilson grew up in Kansas, where, to the undying chagrin of his parents and teachers, he'd been drawing pirate scum since infancy. At 19, black hair flowing near down to his Levis, he tooled around on a '48 Harley 74. Over the years, his subject matter expanded to embrace knife-wielding motorcycle dykes, underworld greaser-pimps and every inconceivable manner of pervert, roving demon, Meth-'n'-blade freak or sadomonster. His inexplicable time warps find such scurvy lots as the Flyin' Fuckin' A-heads suddenly revving their engines on a 19th Century frigate deck, where they mix it up with Cap'n Piss Gums' foul crew. Wilson's images became absolutely unself-conscious: lush breasts sucked dry by hideous homunculi; Lesbians mainlining hot semen and then sprouting prodigious male organs; salami-sized penises severed by rusty cutlasses, uprooted with coiled whips; feces flung from toilets into the faces of one's family. And wide-screen orgies of apocalyptic depravity--blood, come and beer flowing freely--orgies that only the raunchy and the treacherous survive. Wilson has the scuzziest, most anal-aggressive imagination of any artist since Hieronymus Bosch and an uncanny ear and eye for the idiom, grimaces and slouches of men with no vestige of decency.

When Wilson blew into San Francisco with his portfolio, he first looked up Spain, who was in town at the time checking out colleagues. Someone had sent Wilson a few of Spain's strips, and they blew Wilson's mind. He also got together with Crumb, who was astounded by his uninhibited drawings. They came profoundly to influence him and the entire underground school. "I used to draw stuff like that and I threw it away," Crumb said. "I suddenly realized, why the fuck do I censor myself?" Within several months, nearly all the new cartoonists started decensoring with, as Spain writes, a VENGINCE.

About the time Crumb and his wife took to the street corners with Zap #1, two other San Franciscans, Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, were hatching plans for a comix book of their own. When their financial backing fell through, they decided to throw in with Crumb and fresh-from-Kansas Wilson on Zap #2. This foursome, then, became Zap's nucleus. Griffin and Moscoso share with their colleagues a fascination with the comics' past. One of their favorite tricks is to re-create beloved characters and put them through paces that would turn old fans purple. To the often-busted Zap #4, Moscoso contributed an undulating, topsy-turvy orgy among Daisy Duck, Little Bo Peep, Jiggs & Maggie and numerous turtles and frogs--as well as its celebrated cover: Mr. Peanut dancing in the foreground of a Camels'-pack landscape, transformed into Mr. Penis dancing on the back cover. Of all the underground cartoonists, Griffin and Moscoso are the most accomplished draftsmen, and the least concerned with narrative. Much as experimental playwrights pare theater back to basics, Griffin and Moscoso break down comics into their fundamental integers, toy with reassembling them in slow motion, at odd moments freezing transformations midway. Griffin uses words nonsensically. Moscoso hardly uses them at all. Both are fascinated with speech and thought balloons, floating exclamation points, idea bulbs--all of which gain a third dimension, open to reveal their innards, interact with characters and landscapes. The continual flux of their worlds, in which every element is equally animate, achieves the obliviousness of pure play--suggesting true liberation from the old necessity for significance, from any obligation to one's readers.

Gilbert Shelton, a few years Crumb's senior, had already achieved some notoriety as the creator of Wonder Wart Hog, the smelly, ugly, clumsy, 900-pound "Hog of Steel," who doubles as Philbert Desenex, "deuce reporter" for the Muthalode Morning Mungpie. (I remember "mung" from Little Neck. It is what, when you hang a pregnant ape upside down by her toes and beat her in the stomach with a number-36 baseball bat, comes out of her nose.) The benefits of W. W. H.'s physical superpowers are offset--just because he's super doesn't mean he's perfect--by a dim mind, moral idiocy and an unpredictable sadistic streak. Like all the real superheroes, W. W. H. is a superpatriot. He boasts of having "personally pulled the arms and legs off every Communist in the U. S. A. back in 1964," and he stomps hell out of any long-hairs he gets his cloven hands on.

Although he conceives of himself as "a bourgeois anarchist," Shelton has edited a number of SDS-backed comix. W. W. H.'s Believe It or Leave It is one of the cleverest, most effective specimens of agitprop ever; 20 captions in support of the proposition, "You don't know how good you got it here in America, bub." "SOME governments intimidate the mass media into agreeing with the rulers' political dogma." "Many foreign states have LAWS telling the citizens what they can or cannot EAT, DRINK or SMOKE." "CORRUPT, BIGOTED AND INCOMPETENT JUDGES fill some nations' benches, persecuting the poor while letting moneyed or high military criminals go free!" Each of the 20 accompanying drawings cloaks a domestic transgression in a foreign disguise.

Another continuing Shelton creation, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, began a couple of years back as a strip for the Austin Rag, an underground Texas paper. Three disaffiliates exist, marginally, outside the system, ever fearful of a bust, hustling, turning on and screwing off in a house unfurnished save for a few hookahs and mattresses on the floor. Reclining, Fat Freddie muses: "I'm gonna spend the summer SMOKING dope, EATING dope, DRINKING dope and otherwise altering my consciousness."

After putting together Feds 'n' Heads in Austin, Shelton moved out to San Francisco to join the Zapsters and the burgeoning comix scene there. As art director for the Family Dog--a loose conglomeration of musicians, painters and business freaks--Jaxon had come to know all the poster artists, Many were eager to get back into the first love of their teens, comics, but some took time to develop the storyteller's gift and specialized at first in cover or full-page drawings. Griffin and Moscoso were in this category, and so was Greg Irons, a bold strong radical with a pen who had absorbed the old E. C. shock techniques to perfection. No one else can so graphically freeze the millisecond of impact, say, between a bullet and a human brain.

Directly upon hitting the coast, Dave Sheridan and Fred Schrier--two former students from the Cleveland Institute of Art--fell in with Shelton, Jaxon and the rest of what underground artists already called The Texas Mafia. They lived at Jaxon's for a while, doing illustrations for the Berkeley Tribe and anti-war leaflets; then holed up in a nearby country house from which they emerged with Mothers Oats Comix #1. Their strips, like Sheridan's Doings of Dealer McDope and Schrier's Ego Trips, explored the inner flashes and transmutations of hallucinogens, elaborately, fusing verbal and nonverbal imagery. Their drawing styles also began weirdly to merge, until they looked nearly indistinguishable. Mothers Oats' back cover pictures a man horrified at Far Out Funnies--his eyes popped altogether out of his skull, his tongue elongated to the dimensions of a varsity scarf, his hands and feet and scalp exploding:

If this is what happened to your old man's head when he finally read one of the comics he caught you with as a kid, buy this and, since you're big enough to throw HIM down the stairs, take it home and show him what kind of comics you're reading NOW!

But San Francisco was hardly the only mecca for comix. The underground papers were already flourishing; most, following the East Village Other's lead with the psychedelic Captain High, began carrying strips of their own. Quickly, comix appeared from Austin (Armadillo), Madison (Radical America Komiks), Milwaukee (Mom's Homemade Comics), Detroit (Tales from the Ozone), Washington, D. C. (Tasty Comix, Conspiracy Capers), Providence (Ghost Mother Comics) and elsewhere.

About a year after Zap #1 appeared, Gothic Blimp Works, the E. V. O.'s Sunday funnies supplement, started up on the opposite coast. Its regular artists, including editor Vaughn Bode, Kim Deitch and Roger Brand, were, if anything, even more obscene and scathing than the Zapsters. In The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You, orchestrated by John Thompson, an intricate, mysterious poster artist, they showed they could be gentle, beautiful, mystical and ironical all at once.

Buffs and closet cartoonists began emerging into the sunlight, corresponding, crashing at one another's pads, hatching distribution schemes. By mid-1969, the comix underground had grown sufficiently to inspire a fanzine of its own. Jane Lynch, Jay's wife, began sending out Little Ladies, the uninhibited "magazine for the wives and sweethearts of today's top cartoonists."

Zap #1 and #0 are 100 percent Crumb, as are several Rip Off numbers, like Big Ass Comix ("Weird Sex Fantasies with the Behind in Mind"), Motor City Comix (featuring Lenore Goldberg, a kind of feminist Trashman) and the magnificent Despair. Having assimilated, it seems, the entire history of comics (with perhaps special emphasis on Barney Google, Orphan Annie, early Popeye, Dick Tracy, Pogo and the Katzenjammers), Crumb is by now a one-man band of cartooning. A tall, skinny guy with glasses, he was born in 1943 and began drawing in 1947. His father is a career officer in the Marines, his mother a TV-addicted housewife. Both believe he has disgraced the good Catholic name of Crumb. He quit school at 19 and went to work for American Greeting Card Company in Cleveland at $60 a week, doing intricate detail work, flowers and scrolls. A supervisor chanced upon his extracurricular doodlings and brought them to the attention of the Highbrow Cards division. You can still buy some of his old unsigned Highbrows.

Crumb tried to free-lance for a while in Europe and New York. His strips became dark and subterranean: pandas and rabbits turned into toads and weasels. One day he accepted a ride with two guys he met in a bar who said they were driving to California. Out west, he drew the cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company's number-one album, Cheap Thrills. Crumb intended that striplike mélange as a back cover, but Columbia Records rejected his front-cover portrait of the late Janis Joplin, because, they demurred, "It looked cheap." "But the name is Cheap Thrills, right?" Crumb asked disgustedly.

It was one of his last in a series of hesitant dealings with the establishment. Viking obliterated a whistling vagina and other "offensive" details from his collection Head Comix; such highhandedness infuriates Crumb. He's acutely, painfully conscious of how America flatters and debases talent, simultaneously fawning over and devouring it--far more conscious, I think, than Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Mailer ever were. Several months ago, he moved out of San Francisco to a small, dilapidated farm about 40 miles to the north. In the interests of producing, he even gave up grass, in which he'd been indulging extravagantly since arriving in the Haight.

Crumb's preoccupations and, therefore, his subject matter, have varied as wildly as Dylan's over the several years of his published career. More than any of his predecessors, he's concerned with what Russian novelists liked to call "the eternal questions." Yet he also manages to stand apart from his own desperation. This duality emerges in the testy association of hung-up Flakey Foont and the spiritually arrogant, self-appointed guru Mr. Natural. Now, Mr. Natural may be a moocher and a phony, but he certainly knows some things Flakey doesn't. Theirs is doubtless the most complicated relationship ever developed in a comic.

As soon as I encounter a new Crumb character, I can't wait for his further adventures. Dyseptic Whiteman ("I think I definitely need some kind of TREATMENT"); Dale Steinberger, the Jewish Cowgirl; "Sock-a-delic" Angelfood McSpade, the uninhibited tribal sex queen ("Yo' awt to try some o' mah sweet jelly roll") who sometimes gets so degraded by "civilized" instructors she winds up endorsing Canned Nigger Hearts. ("All's ah gotta do is lick out dese toilets an' ah'll git lotsa money and be a boss chick!") Crumb's characters get horny, goofy, pretentious, mean--everything real people get. Of all cartoonists, he is the most eclectic, the most fertile and the easiest to get into. His cartoons are the friendliest, the uppest. Every one of comics' age-old mannerisms reappears in them: the sweat beads jumping off anxious brows, the hats levitating in surprise, the inspirational light bulbs, the lampposts, the moons.

Bookstores on both coasts, including Ferlinghetti's famous City Lights, were busted for selling Snatch and Zap #4, which features "Joe Blow," a Crumb story about a family that stays together because it lays together. Zap was also then available at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Circuit-court judge Roscoe H. Parker, after hearing "expert" testimony comparing Crumb's work with Toulouse-Lautrec's, Picasso's and Georg Grosz's, ruled it was "repulsive to even suggest" the cartoons were art. Yet even Crumb's snorchiest, gurgliest 69 has a weird wholesomeness. He digs sex. But did some hung-over puritanism make him sign them with such names as Little Bobby Scumbag and R. Crumbum?

Crumb gets irritated by special attention, keeps de-emphasizing his own stuff, keeps stressing "the movement." "Take a tip from R. Crumb," proclaims one of his back covers. "Anyone can be a cartoonist! It's so simple a child can do it!! 'ART' is just a racket! A HOAX perpetrated on the public by so-called 'artists' who set themselves up on a pedestal and promoted by pantywaste ivory-tower intellectuals and sob-sister 'critics' who think the world owes them a living! NO SUCH THING AS 'INBORN TALENT.' ...People are always telling me, 'I sure wish I had your talent.' ...This is just so much utter baloney!... and remember: IT'S ONLY LINES ON PAPER, FOLKS!"

"The more famous I get," he says, "the weirder it is."

•••

I've been asking myself: What continued to engage me, against my submerged better judgment, through the comics' dark years? My best guess is the form of the strips--a form close to movies and dreams, or to our memory of them. We stop their continuous flow on single frames, stills that capture what mattered--freeze the most telling postures, facial expressions, camera angles. What we remember is something like a comic strip of a movie. Should a line of dialog issue from a full-screen close-up? Or from a window of a skyscraper on the horizon?

Even a cartoonist's mistakes are more like a film director's than like a painter's or a writer's: too much verbalizing when an image would work faster and stronger. Too many scenes observed from senseless vantage points. Too much happening in a frame; not enough. Losing momentum through digression or time jumping. Weakness anywhere--even in costuming or set decoration--dissipates a strip's gestaltic effect. Of course, there's no actor to blame, no anyone to blame. Moreover, anything's allowed to happen, however unlikely. Talking animals and fire hydrants, smiling suns, ferocious autos, outlandish metamorphoses, the easy reversibility of injury or death. Any of the laws that normally govern reality can be suspended in this anarchic universe. The cartoonist can take his plot anywhere, in the very next panel. And each panel abounds in what Crumb calls "little eyeball kicks"--contrapuntal extras, more trivial than subplots, that enrich the background to the main action. And his screen can expand suddenly to include double pagefuls of simultaneous happenings--an orgy or a police raid, say--that the reader can pore over for minutes, lost in endless details.

Only by the comix' flowering do we recognize the form's complexity, its communicativeness. This means we're just now at the beginnings of that flowering. Post-McLuhan, anti-literary kids who grow up with comix, their cover warnings notwithstanding, grow up wired in to the medium's rich expressive power.

Because of the cooperative underground setup, the cartoonists are in no one's employ, at liberty to draw exactly what they want--to reflect their inner obsessions without compromise. They turn out to be at once unrestrainedly aggressive and terrified of aggression from the outside; the darkest, lewdest, most hysterical humor in any American medium.

Occasionally, you come upon collaborative, jam-session strips that got passed from artist to artist with each successive panel, like eerie stories progressing round a campfire. Underground cartoonists make such heterogeneous bedfellows, they often seem united by little beyond their common rejectability for the Comics Code Seal of Approval. Their panels seem crammed with gratuitous affronts, as if to make up for those lost years when neither comics nor they themselves were allowed to say fuck in public. Just thinking about censorship drives them to a pugnacious purity in reverse. Every exclamation from faceless figures in a crowd scene offers opportunity for a tiny challenge--"Far fuckin' out!" "Fanfuckintastic!" "Tree fuckin' mendous!"--reaffirming that they've liberated their medium from the uptight profiteers who gripped it in a 15-year strangle hold of Gosharooties! and Great Scotts! Plots rarely demand that genitals hang out or agape. But aren't our fantasies, too, filled with such unnecessary exposure? The artists just don't care about alienating the great majority that finds their excesses puerile or disgusting.

In the same panel, comix can be searching, acute, artfully executed--and uncompromisingly low. Their lowness forces us to think freshly about certain unresolved problems in American popular culture. During the Fifties, critics were preoccupied with the sociology of art appeciation, with status divisions and audience demarcations. Mass cult, elite cult; high/middle/lowbrow. Hollywood was trash; foreign films with subtitles were good. Pop music was trash; jazz was good. The "intellectual" strips--Gordo, Pogo, Peanuts, Feiffer--were good; comic books were trash. Later, Dylan and some others decimated cult 'n' brow divisions by showing that what seemed most common, what made kids scream, could be as good as any art produced in our time. Crumb's art is precisely that good. It compels us to disown the idea that comics are just simple-minded drawings with overhead balloons geared to people without enough upstairs to handle pictureless books.

Looking back on the Fifties, we understand that the ludicrous Beats, Mad, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl did more than all the Young Socialist rallies ever held to keep some of us from identifying with the good old Saturday Evening Post life. They created the credibility gap, opened up the kids who would mold the counterculture a decade later. Eventually, history fed us the ammunition to sustain our recalcitrance into adulthood. It turns out that we were a vanguard of sensibility: isolated, for the most part, and without a voice in the culture. It took ten years to discover that there were so many of us. But comix belong to people younger than I, people who grew up in a vulgar and seditious subculture, never burdened by reverent illusions. Comix belong to people who don't need them to point out the grotesquerie, who grew up feeling like an audience to a freak show. Like Dylan, Crumb has acquired a cult of followers seeking clues to the proper conduct of their own lives. He sees so much. Fans pore over his oeuvres for something like guidance; at least for an appropriate attitude, a posture toward all the meshugaas that's going down now. They play Flakey to Crumb's Mr. Natural. Hopeless. For he won't stop shifting his ground, shifting targets. Like all great fantasists, he's irresponsible. His worlds forever suggest the one we know but never bear any easy or explicit relation to it. Conditions are never quite the same, never quite the opposite.

The New Left briefly embraced, then rejected him. Some derided his superficial "life-style" radicalism as assimilable within capitalist culture--even as part of a ruling-class attempt to co-opt the revolutionary threat. Paul Buhle, the first devoted comix critic, disavowed such silly orthodoxy in Leviathan: "Like any potentially subversive cultural mechanism, komix serve at best to destroy an old view of the world and to replace it with a new one. They must provide a means of self-expression for the artist's inner compulsions or be false--and in a healthy political movement, the artist's attitudes will correspond to the needs of the larger movement, making his self-expression a new way for masses of people to see their own lives."

For America to change, great numbers of people must come to see their lives differently, and that's been happening. The system has not yet been budged, but the cultural revolution is being won on all fronts. The significance of that will remain, for a time, inscrutable, awaiting the adulthood of tens of millions who don't look forward to entering the mainstream. Back in Little Neck, we were starved for an alternative culture. Kids now have one to feed on. Comix are a part of it.

As yet, they are a tiny phenomenon. Not one has hit a six-figure circulation. But demand will almost surely increase, press runs will expand, cover prices will go down, new artists will surface, channels will open for wider distribution, and, probably, comix will come to define where large numbers of young people stand in relation to our maniac culture. We may look back on them as the most powerful subversion of the Seventies, because, of all subversion, they're the most fun.