Crumbs of Truth
November 1, 2022 12:04 PM Subscribe
Black, White, and Grey All Over: Where Binary Teaching Fails Underground Comix - The newly relaunched Gutter Review (previously Neotext Review) takes a look at teaching underground comics, generational changes in reading, Robert Crumb and the place of offense in literature. Previous Robert Crumb. Previously.
Am curious as to what counts as the canon and what texts are typically on the course syllabi (link goes to a list of syllabi compiled by the Center for Cartoon Studies). Here's another list of syllabi.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:13 PM on November 1, 2022
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:13 PM on November 1, 2022
I'm old...Miss the days of reading Little Lulu and Nancy. Ten cents each. Used the church collection money my parents gave me...and skipped Mass.
posted by Czjewel at 1:28 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Czjewel at 1:28 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Don't forget Scrooge McDuck, Turok Son of Stone and Classics Illustrated. (I can still remember CI War of the Worlds. I would draw those tripods all the time.). My dad was a doctor and when I started grade school I had to hike four blocks from grade school to his office where comics were his patients' magazines. And I got to read them until it was time to go home. That part worked out for me.
posted by y2karl at 2:01 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by y2karl at 2:01 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
Fans of Classics Illustrated note, most are available at the Internet Archive. Here's The War of the Worlds. And how about The Hunchback of Notre Dame? I've heard it alleged that the CI version is the best telling of the latter.
posted by Rash at 2:10 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Rash at 2:10 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
I learned to ply capitalism from scrooge McDuck. Get off the lawn, I'm cutting that for a reduced price of 7%, setting up a quarterly hedge fund and have long term equity built up the Petunia trust
posted by clavdivs at 2:14 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by clavdivs at 2:14 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Am curious as to what counts as the canon and what texts are typically on the course syllabi (link goes to a list of syllabi compiled by the Center for Cartoon Studies). Here's another list of syllabi.
So I looked through a bunch of those syllabi (note that I did not look at all of them - I looked at most of them from the first link and a sampling from the second, and wow, they don't teach about women, do they? And it looks like most of what is getting taught is from no later than the mid-nineties, except for courses that focus on queer comics. It's weird - I stopped following indie comics closely in the early-mid 2000s when my favorite store closed and yet I've read almost everything that seems to get taught frequently, and indeed had read most of it by 1996.
Interestingly, there were a lot of women drawing comics in the eighties and nineties with some success - I have several 1990-era anthologies and then books by those women.
And then you'd think that one would teach, eg, World War III Illustrated and Seth Tobocman and them even if you were teaching nothing from after 1996, Tobocman in particular is a towering figure.
It seems really sad not to be teaching about women or recent-ish work, and it seems like a way to shrink your discipline, like teaching a contemporary literature class where contemporary literature stops when the Berlin Wall falls or something.
posted by Frowner at 2:30 PM on November 1, 2022 [15 favorites]
So I looked through a bunch of those syllabi (note that I did not look at all of them - I looked at most of them from the first link and a sampling from the second, and wow, they don't teach about women, do they? And it looks like most of what is getting taught is from no later than the mid-nineties, except for courses that focus on queer comics. It's weird - I stopped following indie comics closely in the early-mid 2000s when my favorite store closed and yet I've read almost everything that seems to get taught frequently, and indeed had read most of it by 1996.
Interestingly, there were a lot of women drawing comics in the eighties and nineties with some success - I have several 1990-era anthologies and then books by those women.
And then you'd think that one would teach, eg, World War III Illustrated and Seth Tobocman and them even if you were teaching nothing from after 1996, Tobocman in particular is a towering figure.
It seems really sad not to be teaching about women or recent-ish work, and it seems like a way to shrink your discipline, like teaching a contemporary literature class where contemporary literature stops when the Berlin Wall falls or something.
posted by Frowner at 2:30 PM on November 1, 2022 [15 favorites]
Binaries fuck us over in more ways than we immediately realize.
The response to the oppressive "mainstream" can be an offensive "counter-culture." It can be liberating and radical to express sexual urges in honest and ugly ways and still be one-sided or misogynistic. Crumb could expose and examine some of his own fucked-up ways of thinking about women, and recognize them as misogynistic in the process, without ever actually dedicating time to recognizing a single woman in the process.
And you can find entertainment and interest, even find meaning, in work that is fucked-up and offensive. There are a lot of stereotypical "loved-by-straight-men-only" artists who I do, in fact, love, because I think they're brilliant and vulnerable and powerful; some of those artists are also so solipsistic, so devoted to "their truth" regardless of whether it's ugly or disgusting, and so flagrantly unconcerned with the inner lives of anybody but themselves that I would never recommend them to anyone who wasn't, well, a straight man dealing with the same set of neuroses that I have. If something holds meaning to me, it holds meaning to me; I shouldn't expect other people to find the same meaning there, or feel defensive if other people's reactions are flat-out "fuck this guy." (Especially since some of those guys well and truly should get fucked.)
I feel like the art I'm most interested in nowadays is the byproduct of people listening to other people: it's inclusive, not in the sense of demographics, but in the sense of truly wanting to allow other voices into a space. Among other things, that means that—despite the level on which "art is solely for the artist, not the audience"—people making things consider the possibility that folks who don't look exactly like them, or experience the world in the exact same way, might come across their work, and have feelings about it too. There's a dialogue to be had, even if it happens entirely within the artist's head.
It feels like, on some levels, culture has slid back towards certain kinds of political moralism, in a way that makes some things feel pandering or "safe" or simply not that interesting. (I don't mean any conversations here—but there's a disturbing trend towards people accusing depiction of bad things as identical to doing bad things, and a general anti-intellectualism towards art and lack of media literacy overall.) And there's an increasing reaction in the form of "shock" media in various ways, some of which feels exciting and fresh, and some of which feels... well... reactionary.
But none of that is binary either. The push to be more aware or considerate is not the same as the push to be "ethical" in unaware or ill-considered ways. The push to let art and culture address difficult or uncomfortable things, even in jarring and unsettling ways, is not the same as the push to undo all of the progress we've made, or to view any attempts to think ethically as pointless or black-and-white or what-have-you.
All of which is to say: this is a very good article about a very interesting subject! Thanks for sharing!
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:36 PM on November 1, 2022 [19 favorites]
The response to the oppressive "mainstream" can be an offensive "counter-culture." It can be liberating and radical to express sexual urges in honest and ugly ways and still be one-sided or misogynistic. Crumb could expose and examine some of his own fucked-up ways of thinking about women, and recognize them as misogynistic in the process, without ever actually dedicating time to recognizing a single woman in the process.
And you can find entertainment and interest, even find meaning, in work that is fucked-up and offensive. There are a lot of stereotypical "loved-by-straight-men-only" artists who I do, in fact, love, because I think they're brilliant and vulnerable and powerful; some of those artists are also so solipsistic, so devoted to "their truth" regardless of whether it's ugly or disgusting, and so flagrantly unconcerned with the inner lives of anybody but themselves that I would never recommend them to anyone who wasn't, well, a straight man dealing with the same set of neuroses that I have. If something holds meaning to me, it holds meaning to me; I shouldn't expect other people to find the same meaning there, or feel defensive if other people's reactions are flat-out "fuck this guy." (Especially since some of those guys well and truly should get fucked.)
I feel like the art I'm most interested in nowadays is the byproduct of people listening to other people: it's inclusive, not in the sense of demographics, but in the sense of truly wanting to allow other voices into a space. Among other things, that means that—despite the level on which "art is solely for the artist, not the audience"—people making things consider the possibility that folks who don't look exactly like them, or experience the world in the exact same way, might come across their work, and have feelings about it too. There's a dialogue to be had, even if it happens entirely within the artist's head.
It feels like, on some levels, culture has slid back towards certain kinds of political moralism, in a way that makes some things feel pandering or "safe" or simply not that interesting. (I don't mean any conversations here—but there's a disturbing trend towards people accusing depiction of bad things as identical to doing bad things, and a general anti-intellectualism towards art and lack of media literacy overall.) And there's an increasing reaction in the form of "shock" media in various ways, some of which feels exciting and fresh, and some of which feels... well... reactionary.
But none of that is binary either. The push to be more aware or considerate is not the same as the push to be "ethical" in unaware or ill-considered ways. The push to let art and culture address difficult or uncomfortable things, even in jarring and unsettling ways, is not the same as the push to undo all of the progress we've made, or to view any attempts to think ethically as pointless or black-and-white or what-have-you.
All of which is to say: this is a very good article about a very interesting subject! Thanks for sharing!
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:36 PM on November 1, 2022 [19 favorites]
"...Miss the days of reading Little Lulu and Nancy."
Oh, Nancy is still here. But a bit different and drawn by a woman now.
posted by aleph at 2:39 PM on November 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
Oh, Nancy is still here. But a bit different and drawn by a woman now.
posted by aleph at 2:39 PM on November 1, 2022 [4 favorites]
And yeah, wow, seconding Frowner: those syllabi are depressing! What a bummer that Chris Ware is literally the only artist singled out in that first syllabus. (A perfect example of "man, that guy's a genius—thank god he and his subject matter aren't the end-all be-all of artistic expression." And I doubt anybody would agree to that more readily than Chris Ware himself.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:39 PM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:39 PM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
Seeing that Omaha page gave me ... is there a word like "nostalgia" for a bad memory you do not want again? Same thing with the Gilbert Shelton strip. I came across those very things in my early teens, mainly because I thought underground comics were cool and I wanted to be cool too, and I ... bore them. I felt a bunch of things about them, but I basically understood them as how men felt about sexuality, and, with Omaha, how women were expected to feel. It was bad! It was very bad indeed. But it seemed as inevitable as rain.
So I admire young people for looking at misogynistic art and saying: you know what, fuck this. I wish I'd said it every day of my life. Of course, that's not all there is to say about it. Crumb does masterful work on blues artists, for one thing, and if he can be pulled out of his horrible head there's nothing he can't depict. You have to meet people where they are before you dismiss them as "puriteens." (After that, of course, you can. I'm on Tumblr and it gets weird out there.)
posted by Countess Elena at 4:12 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
So I admire young people for looking at misogynistic art and saying: you know what, fuck this. I wish I'd said it every day of my life. Of course, that's not all there is to say about it. Crumb does masterful work on blues artists, for one thing, and if he can be pulled out of his horrible head there's nothing he can't depict. You have to meet people where they are before you dismiss them as "puriteens." (After that, of course, you can. I'm on Tumblr and it gets weird out there.)
posted by Countess Elena at 4:12 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm looking at those Omaha pages and I'm not seeing the misogyny, at least not compared to Crumb (who, well, you know what you're getting into at this point if you're not reading American Splendor). Maybe it's that I'm coming to it older and I'm not seeing Omaha as something that I have to try to be?
posted by kingdead at 5:42 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by kingdead at 5:42 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]
Back in the 1990s I taught at a small college in Louisiana. I relied heavily on its inter-library loan service for my research. (They hid ILL, weirdly. I think I did 40% of its traffic)
I ordered a lot of comics and comix books (among another things) through them while prepping my multimedia class (fun stuff, combining digital and analog multimedia examples and tools). The librarians freaks out about the comix books, asking me if I ordered them by mistake, whispering frantically when I picked them up.
posted by doctornemo at 7:45 PM on November 1, 2022
I ordered a lot of comics and comix books (among another things) through them while prepping my multimedia class (fun stuff, combining digital and analog multimedia examples and tools). The librarians freaks out about the comix books, asking me if I ordered them by mistake, whispering frantically when I picked them up.
posted by doctornemo at 7:45 PM on November 1, 2022
I'm grateful to the undergrounds for having helped to open the doors for me to understand that there were vastly more possibilities inherent in comics than simply various superheroes drawn by Curt Swan or whoever at Marvel was imitating Jack Kirby or Neal Adams that month. They shared that with similarly revelatory work in Heavy Metal at about the same time (for me). But, like a lot of that Eurocomix stuff, the work is in no small part about what gave their creators boners, and also like National Lampoon (like so many of the underground creators, overwhelmingly straight white men), a lot of the transgression seemed to consist of punching down and not realizing the difference between that and punching up. I can recognize that the undergrounds probably had a bigger influence on a lot of the non-superhero work that I read and like nowadays than the output of the Big Two without having to celebrate or rationalize a lot (or any) of the more problematic aspects of it.
In terms of teaching it... I dunno. Classes in comics literature didn't exist when I was an undergrad, and may have only been in their embryonic stages when I was in library school in the early nineties. How do literature classes in general treat problematic works in the Western canon in general?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:22 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
In terms of teaching it... I dunno. Classes in comics literature didn't exist when I was an undergrad, and may have only been in their embryonic stages when I was in library school in the early nineties. How do literature classes in general treat problematic works in the Western canon in general?
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:22 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
I find The Viz funny as heck; probably too British for the Metafilter readership.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 9:45 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Narrative_Historian at 9:45 PM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]
God, comix. All these titans of comix being held up as the greats of the sixties during the eighties b&w boom were so… into their own nastiness. Every single sexy comic I read seemed to be just wallowing in its own sinfulness because everyone seemed to be doing work influenced by that.
Until I ran into Xxxenophile. First damn sexy comic I read where I didn’t feel like I needed to wash my soul off afterwards. Also probably the first damn sexy comic I read that felt like it was done by someone who had actually had sex, ever.
posted by egypturnash at 11:40 PM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
Until I ran into Xxxenophile. First damn sexy comic I read where I didn’t feel like I needed to wash my soul off afterwards. Also probably the first damn sexy comic I read that felt like it was done by someone who had actually had sex, ever.
posted by egypturnash at 11:40 PM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]
I still remember Willy Murphy as one of the good guys and remember his Arnold Peck the Human Wreck fondly. Murphy's satires were gentle and hilarious. Of all the ironies of his very short life, he died way too young of pneumonia incurred via a deadline for the National Lampoon.
And then there was Rory Hayes. I still have a copy of his Age of Reason on the side of my 'fridge, photocopied copied many decades ago from an old Arcade. Yet another mentally ill acid casualty but erudite, funny and wise in Age of Reason all the same.
And of course, a shout out to Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead and Griffith's Observatory is in order. Today I Re-Learned
Griffith's personal story is, well, personal. I had no idea. And he was married to the late Diane Noomin, whose death I only found about today. She mattered and Twisted Sisters, her collaborative project with Aline Kominksy-Crumb was one of my favorite series. And here is a transcript of Noomin's presentation at the University of Florida's 2003 Comics Conference. Diane Noomin -- now there is a person who deserves a well done obituary post.
And, of course I cannot not mention Seattle's own Shary Flenniken, author of Trots and Bonnie, who I consider, as far as Seattle originating women's comics artists are concerned, I consider the greatest of all time.
posted by y2karl at 5:10 AM on November 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
And then there was Rory Hayes. I still have a copy of his Age of Reason on the side of my 'fridge, photocopied copied many decades ago from an old Arcade. Yet another mentally ill acid casualty but erudite, funny and wise in Age of Reason all the same.
And of course, a shout out to Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead and Griffith's Observatory is in order. Today I Re-Learned
Although several people, including the comedienne Carol Burnett, claimed to have created it, the phrase "Are we having fun yet?" was in fact first uttered by Zippy in the mid-70s and has been immortalized in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.Who knew? ...well, me. *Until I forgot*.
Griffith's personal story is, well, personal. I had no idea. And he was married to the late Diane Noomin, whose death I only found about today. She mattered and Twisted Sisters, her collaborative project with Aline Kominksy-Crumb was one of my favorite series. And here is a transcript of Noomin's presentation at the University of Florida's 2003 Comics Conference. Diane Noomin -- now there is a person who deserves a well done obituary post.
And, of course I cannot not mention Seattle's own Shary Flenniken, author of Trots and Bonnie, who I consider, as far as Seattle originating women's comics artists are concerned, I consider the greatest of all time.
posted by y2karl at 5:10 AM on November 2, 2022 [7 favorites]
y2karl, Trots and Bonnie is one of the few things from National Lampoon that I can remember without cringing even a little. And, in general, there's a whole story to women in underground comix that TFA mentions a bit, and that hasn't been discussed here much because Crumb is way out on the upper right corner of the graph of "people have heard of them and/or seen their comix work" and "is really pretty reprehensible/hasn't aged well." Women in the undergrounds just weren't as reprehensible as the better-known guys, on the average; I was trying to think of the most extreme work by a woman cartoonist of that era, and all that came to mind was Roberta Gregory doing a short comic in her Naughty Bits title which, IIRC, is a direct response to a Crumb comic.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:49 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:49 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
When I was younger I had a passing knowledge of R. Crumb, and apart from a comic book he wrote? illustrated? about Billie Holiday, my opinion of his work was that he was a very talented artist and it just wasn't for me. Finding out that he's not only antivax but actively spread misinformation about how AIDS was spread/contracted in the 1980s made me considerably less interested in his work. I have a finite amount of time on earth and I'd rather not spend it with this dude.
posted by pxe2000 at 7:31 AM on November 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by pxe2000 at 7:31 AM on November 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
It's possible for something to be historically significant and also bad. But which I mean some good stuff but mostly equal parts boring and vile.
I just imagine this same serious discussion taking place about hentai, and I start giggling.
Which Anime Club member are you? Publicly I say I'm more of a Dave, but really I think I'm reflected in all of them.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:31 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
I just imagine this same serious discussion taking place about hentai, and I start giggling.
Which Anime Club member are you? Publicly I say I'm more of a Dave, but really I think I'm reflected in all of them.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:31 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Until I ran into Xxxenophile. First damn sexy comic I read where I didn’t feel like I needed to wash my soul off afterwards. Also probably the first damn sexy comic I read that felt like it was done by someone who had actually had sex, ever.
"Why the hell can't people just write nice happy stories about people having happy sex? That's what I want, and I bet a whole bunch of other people want it too."
Foglio gets it.
(There's another quote of his that I can't find where he talks about all of the different kinks and twists and variations depicted in XXXenophile, and he mentions that while he does his best never to kinkshame, his response to people who are into inflicting pain and degradation and abuse is 'stay the fuck as far away from me as you can.')
posted by delfin at 7:50 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
"Why the hell can't people just write nice happy stories about people having happy sex? That's what I want, and I bet a whole bunch of other people want it too."
Foglio gets it.
(There's another quote of his that I can't find where he talks about all of the different kinks and twists and variations depicted in XXXenophile, and he mentions that while he does his best never to kinkshame, his response to people who are into inflicting pain and degradation and abuse is 'stay the fuck as far away from me as you can.')
posted by delfin at 7:50 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
y2karl, Trots and Bonnie is one of the few things from National Lampoon that I can remember without cringing even a little.
That is a nobly obliging thing for you to say.
John Crowley on Trots and Bonnie.
posted by y2karl at 7:53 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
That is a nobly obliging thing for you to say.
John Crowley on Trots and Bonnie.
posted by y2karl at 7:53 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
Diane Noomin is dead! That makes me sad, also makes me realize that I too am speeding toward death.
I have both of the Twisted Sisters anthologies that came out in the nineties - the first one is better IMO. Like Research Publications Angry Women, it introduced me to a lot of eighties/early nineties stuff a bit after the fact and set a lot of the aesthetic course for me.
Not that those anthologies are above criticism, honestly - there was criticism over the basic exclusion of queer women (and their depiction by straight women), there's a lot of "cool girl" stuff in some of the contributions, all the contributors are white IIRC* and there are a couple of stories that struck me as thoughtless about race in their "this is a side note and I don't need to think about how race works in this story" way.
If you like mean comics (which I don't, exactly) those are the anthologies for you - they are definitely mean in that same seventies/eighties underground way that many comics by men are.
I'd actually suggest looking at some of the old World War III Illustrated comics for a different take on eighties "underground" comics - there are a couple of anthologies available.
posted by Frowner at 8:03 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
I have both of the Twisted Sisters anthologies that came out in the nineties - the first one is better IMO. Like Research Publications Angry Women, it introduced me to a lot of eighties/early nineties stuff a bit after the fact and set a lot of the aesthetic course for me.
Not that those anthologies are above criticism, honestly - there was criticism over the basic exclusion of queer women (and their depiction by straight women), there's a lot of "cool girl" stuff in some of the contributions, all the contributors are white IIRC* and there are a couple of stories that struck me as thoughtless about race in their "this is a side note and I don't need to think about how race works in this story" way.
If you like mean comics (which I don't, exactly) those are the anthologies for you - they are definitely mean in that same seventies/eighties underground way that many comics by men are.
I'd actually suggest looking at some of the old World War III Illustrated comics for a different take on eighties "underground" comics - there are a couple of anthologies available.
posted by Frowner at 8:03 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
kingdead: to be fair to Omaha, the female characters are well-rounded with lots of motives, as you can see in the excerpts. And one creator is a woman, which usually makes a key difference. But it didn't age well, at least not to me.
To be more positive about underground comics,* Lynda Barry's stuff made a huge impression on me, as did Alison Bechdel's. Nina Paley -- was she underground? I dunno, but I thought a lot of her when I was young and even when I was grown, before she got so TERFy she would scare JK Rowling.
-----
* Does the x only belong if you were in the sixties scene? Unclear.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:04 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
To be more positive about underground comics,* Lynda Barry's stuff made a huge impression on me, as did Alison Bechdel's. Nina Paley -- was she underground? I dunno, but I thought a lot of her when I was young and even when I was grown, before she got so TERFy she would scare JK Rowling.
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* Does the x only belong if you were in the sixties scene? Unclear.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:04 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
*I was going to add that as with science fiction, there were fewer women of color producing work in the eighties than in the nineties and certainly in the present, but not zero.
posted by Frowner at 8:05 AM on November 2, 2022
posted by Frowner at 8:05 AM on November 2, 2022
* Does the x only belong if you were in the sixties scene? Unclear.
We said "comix" in the nineties, and "folx" for that matter. I'm sure I described my then-fanzine as containing "comix".
posted by Frowner at 8:06 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
We said "comix" in the nineties, and "folx" for that matter. I'm sure I described my then-fanzine as containing "comix".
posted by Frowner at 8:06 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
As to the topic, I would heartily recommend Brian Doherty’s recent book Dirty Pictures. It’s a history of the rise and fall of underground comix. Throughout the book he wrestles with the innate misogyny etc. in the business. A lot of Yes, but… He does give the women who were part of the scene a voice in the story. And what they have to say isn’t very positive. It appears that most of the men in the business were what they were depicting.
I first encountered comix as a freshman in college, Zap 1 to 4 in a local student ghetto tobacco store. My roommate and I snatched them up, and reading funny books become a whole new thing. Many years later, I met and shared a few beers with S. Clay Wilson, who I was sort of afraid to meet given his ouvre. Interesting, and not scary in person. But now, much older and hopefully a slight bit wiser I’m really torn about comix. Doherty’s book describes how fundamentally revolutionary these comix were and their impact on society both good and bad. But the rampant exclusionary nature of the scene, just us white, male transgressive artists please, doesn’t make a good impression. He ties a lot of this in with the patriarchal nature of the whole hippie scene and the protest scene in the late 60’s. There is nostalgia for the radical times back then but reading the history of that time is a quick cure for that. There was some good and some bad. But it bred the Reagan years. Comix were definitely a product of that time.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:35 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
I first encountered comix as a freshman in college, Zap 1 to 4 in a local student ghetto tobacco store. My roommate and I snatched them up, and reading funny books become a whole new thing. Many years later, I met and shared a few beers with S. Clay Wilson, who I was sort of afraid to meet given his ouvre. Interesting, and not scary in person. But now, much older and hopefully a slight bit wiser I’m really torn about comix. Doherty’s book describes how fundamentally revolutionary these comix were and their impact on society both good and bad. But the rampant exclusionary nature of the scene, just us white, male transgressive artists please, doesn’t make a good impression. He ties a lot of this in with the patriarchal nature of the whole hippie scene and the protest scene in the late 60’s. There is nostalgia for the radical times back then but reading the history of that time is a quick cure for that. There was some good and some bad. But it bred the Reagan years. Comix were definitely a product of that time.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:35 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]
The thing about women being left off the college course syllabi is just so similar to the thing about women being left off the rock critics top lists ... And maybe even with the same, not necessarily nefarious explanation that it comes down to which kind of person thinks it's valuable to make these lists, and the same argument that you're making comics history look more white and male in retrospect than it actually was.
posted by subdee at 10:00 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by subdee at 10:00 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
I looked up Xxxenophile without knowing who it was drawn by and immediately recognized the art style behind Girl Genius and the cartoons in Dragon magazine. I always knew he must have drawn x-rated stuff based on how (tastefully) horny his mainstream comics were.
It's really disappointing to find out Nina Paley is a terf. It's like when I found out Tony Hawk has an NFT collection.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:05 AM on November 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
It's really disappointing to find out Nina Paley is a terf. It's like when I found out Tony Hawk has an NFT collection.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:05 AM on November 2, 2022 [4 favorites]
I've encountered the work of C. Spike Trotman at a few pre-pandemic comic conventions, and her Iron Circus Comics is a pretty significant underground publisher. She's certainly an influential figure in the current underground comics realm.
posted by JDC8 at 11:56 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by JDC8 at 11:56 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]
Content warning: rape
Once every year or two a journalist wheels Robert Crumb out from his basement, crumbles a few viagra into his coffee, and prompts him to say something offensive. I haven't read that many Crumb interviews myself, but a few standouts include the one where he said he didn't believe in science (2011) and the one where he called Obama a "house negro" (2015). More than anything, though, journalists love to talk to Crumb about sex and women. Among Crumb's many controversial thoughts and feelings on those subjects, there are times he has unwittingly described sexual assaults that he has committed over the years. It is harrowing to read.
(Article continues for several more pages.)
posted by AlSweigart at 8:38 PM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
Once every year or two a journalist wheels Robert Crumb out from his basement, crumbles a few viagra into his coffee, and prompts him to say something offensive. I haven't read that many Crumb interviews myself, but a few standouts include the one where he said he didn't believe in science (2011) and the one where he called Obama a "house negro" (2015). More than anything, though, journalists love to talk to Crumb about sex and women. Among Crumb's many controversial thoughts and feelings on those subjects, there are times he has unwittingly described sexual assaults that he has committed over the years. It is harrowing to read.
(Article continues for several more pages.)
posted by AlSweigart at 8:38 PM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]
That article has, by the way, a reproduction of an allegedly "autobiographical" comic that shows Crumb raping a young woman he has gotten drunk. Her back looks like it's about to break, she is shoved against the floor and he is forcing his fingers into her mouth as she cries "oh no, oh no".
That's it, that's the one, Crumb is not excusable or redeemable. There's no "fantasy" or "unconscious" excuse, this is what he puts out into the world as something he has done. That comic looks like a scene from a war crime. Even if it's an embroidered account of a "mere" date rape, the embroidery is what he would have liked to experience. There's no "ha ha this is a sexy game where she pretends she doesn't want to do this but we actually talked about it" stuff, this is just a brutal rape that he describes perpetrating on an intoxicated date.
And it's pretty brutal. The "oh no oh no" stuff, that's the kind of thing where you almost wish you were dead, or a rock or a tree, or something that didn't have to know that this was done to someone. It's the kind of thing that makes you wish life hadn't crawled out of the seas.
posted by Frowner at 8:00 AM on November 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
That's it, that's the one, Crumb is not excusable or redeemable. There's no "fantasy" or "unconscious" excuse, this is what he puts out into the world as something he has done. That comic looks like a scene from a war crime. Even if it's an embroidered account of a "mere" date rape, the embroidery is what he would have liked to experience. There's no "ha ha this is a sexy game where she pretends she doesn't want to do this but we actually talked about it" stuff, this is just a brutal rape that he describes perpetrating on an intoxicated date.
And it's pretty brutal. The "oh no oh no" stuff, that's the kind of thing where you almost wish you were dead, or a rock or a tree, or something that didn't have to know that this was done to someone. It's the kind of thing that makes you wish life hadn't crawled out of the seas.
posted by Frowner at 8:00 AM on November 3, 2022 [6 favorites]
in a queue of Robert Crumb experts I'm somewhere at the back of the line
I've been reading the shared articles and gone from " I liked what he did with Introducing Kafka" and being aware of his work, to, well. What Frowner said.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:04 AM on November 3, 2022
I've been reading the shared articles and gone from " I liked what he did with Introducing Kafka" and being aware of his work, to, well. What Frowner said.
posted by elkevelvet at 8:04 AM on November 3, 2022
Man it's real disappointing to witness the continued hagiography of specific parts of underground cartooning, and the obsession with "controversy" and "offensiveness" that somehow mysteriously avoids detailed discussion of what the "noose of censorship" that was drawn around comics by the CCA was trying to root out vs. what the ZAP guys ended up drawing. There's a lot to unpack there - I know I was surprised when I finally read some pre-code comics some time after I had read a bunch of undergrounds, and the level of sophistication and craft of those pre-code comics is way, way higher. And we have this story about how Apex and Last gasp were somehow sticking it to the man in a serious artistic way by selling comics with titties in them at the head shop. There's so many questions to ask about why a specific era of underground comics still casts a long shadow in the minds of specific kinds of comics, and it bugs me when articles like this snap to: "Is ZAP really offensive? What imagery and concepts in here should or could be considered legitimately offensive?"
IDK man I'm just reminded of the Dan Clowes interview in Dangerous Drawings where he mentions encountering Robert Crumb comics as a kid and realizing they were basically just porn and not as interesting to him as an adult as him and his friends' weird kid brain ideas of what would be inside a comic called "Big Ass Comix".
On a brighter note, there's some excellent writing now available on underrepresented comics stuff -- Trina Robbins' Last Girl Standing and Black Women in Sequence are two books that come to mind for me.
Comics, man! Fuck!
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 10:39 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
IDK man I'm just reminded of the Dan Clowes interview in Dangerous Drawings where he mentions encountering Robert Crumb comics as a kid and realizing they were basically just porn and not as interesting to him as an adult as him and his friends' weird kid brain ideas of what would be inside a comic called "Big Ass Comix".
On a brighter note, there's some excellent writing now available on underrepresented comics stuff -- Trina Robbins' Last Girl Standing and Black Women in Sequence are two books that come to mind for me.
Comics, man! Fuck!
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 10:39 AM on November 4, 2022 [3 favorites]
Some other great stuff happening on Gutter Review:
Do You Believe in Fairies: Northstar and the Early Erasure of AIDS in Marvel
The X-Men Save You Too, in the End
You Can Call Me Al’s Baby: The Bundle of Joy in a Throwaway Title
Man of Tomorrow: Deathlok as a Transhumanist Manifesto
And, personal favorite: Interview: Simon Bisley, Still the Dog’s Bollocks After 35 Years
posted by Artw at 11:38 AM on November 5, 2022
Do You Believe in Fairies: Northstar and the Early Erasure of AIDS in Marvel
The X-Men Save You Too, in the End
You Can Call Me Al’s Baby: The Bundle of Joy in a Throwaway Title
Man of Tomorrow: Deathlok as a Transhumanist Manifesto
And, personal favorite: Interview: Simon Bisley, Still the Dog’s Bollocks After 35 Years
posted by Artw at 11:38 AM on November 5, 2022
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Man, I missed those. Those were excellent threads. We shall see how this turns out. But I have stepped into enough minefields today as it is.
posted by y2karl at 12:46 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]