Underground comix were very influenced by sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. From a distance, it's pretty obvious these guys were doing lots of dope and LSD; a lot of the work from this period was very psychedelic and trippy and usually didn't have a very interesting story or relatable characters.
I read a bit of Tits and Clits before class and got to see some Zap and Dopin' Dan in class. Tits and Clits was definitely an introduction to this genre; nothing is censored and all the stories are very sexualized (obviously). I was not a huge fan of most of this work, just because I couldn't get myself interested in the stories. But there was one story that really caught my attention and that was I Was a Sex Junkie!". This series deals with a woman who's addicted to sex and turns to drugs to get the money she needs to pay male prostitutes. Even though the story was a bit strange and not really my style, I enjoyed getting some perspective from female characters. This character treated rape and drugs like it was nothing and it certainly gave me an idea of the type of people who would go nuts for these underground comics at the time.
I thought these works, while not taken very seriously and usually considered crude, are super important to understanding the people of the era and the work that followed it. Everything came back to the Vietnam conflict and the pop culture of the time.
I think it is interesting to consider these works in the context of their time, and you are very right to bring that up.
ReplyDeleteI really don't like a majority of the underground comix because, while they can be visually interesting and sometimes genuinely funny, I just can't get over the overwhelming presence of (usually very intense!) racism, sexism, etc. and treating these things (and issues like rape and sexual violence) as jokes — and acting like it's brave and revolutionary to joke about them! I get that in a sense it was brave and revolutionary, breaking away from the buttoned-up morals and social taboos of the time, but often these artists (it seems to me) were just putting an "edgy," explicit spin on the majority views in their society. It's not cool or revolutionary to belittle women, rape victims, racial "minorities", etc. That's why the most successful of these underground works, to me, are the few that let the "minorities" have their own voice and tell their stories (like in "Gay Comix") or that use the "crude" underground voice to mock and condemn the perpetrators, and not the victims, of societal oppression.