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89 T he rose-colored visions of nuclear power without consequence and the whistle-in-the-dark civil defense warnings faded amid the widespread social upheaval that followed the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. So, too, did comic book depictions of grim nuclear exchanges with the Soviet Union. But the rampant parodies first sparked by Mad and Humbug remained alive and well. The radical cartoonists seized on the Watergate political scandal, the official statements regarding “progress” in the Vietnam War, and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 as proof of their position. Three major technological disasters of the 1970s/1980s added further grist to their mill: the near collapse of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (1979); the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger (January 1986); and the near meltdown of the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, USSR (April 1986).1 The malfunction of these gigantic technological systems seemed to confirm all the cynical predictions of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964). No politician or large technological system could be trusted. Ever. It is difficult to pin down the first anti-nuclear cartoon book, but one can make a good case for Laurence Hyde’s Southern Cross: A Novel of the South Seas (1951). This “wordless novel” consists of 118 wood engravings that lambaste the 1946 US atomic detonation on Bikini Island. A British Quaker living in Canada, Hyde labored for years to produce this poignant book, which depicts a Pacific Eden that American soldiers completely destroy with the simple push of a button. The only survivor in Hyde’s tale is a child, whose future remains uncertain .2 Hyde struggled to find a publisher, however, and Southern Cross always remained a bit of an oddity. A M E R I C A N U N D E R G R O U N D C O M I X , P O L I T I C A L A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L C A R T O O N I S T S , A N D T H E R I S E O F J A PA N E S E M A N G A 5 90 ^ AT O M I C C O M I C S C H A N G E D I R E C T I O N S Beginning in the late 1960s, however, anti-nuclear underground “comix” reached a much wider audience. In retrospect, the emerging underground comics in the late 1960s and 1970s served as an ideal medium through which to express cultural dissent. Comics could be produced relatively cheaply in a basement or garage, and their visual images had great appeal to a generation raised with television. The chief problem lay with distribution. Although drug paraphernalia shops (“head shops”) initially stocked underground books, circulation remained modest—from one thousand to ten thousand per issue— until the rise of the comic book specialty stores in the mid-1970s. Borrowing from the movie rating system, the stores introduced similar “mature audiences” or “adults only” sections, which assured at least a partial survival. Talented artists such as Robert Crumb were no longer forced to peddle their books on the streets of San Francisco. Although the underground comix produced more than their share of “selfindulgence and bad art,” they also provided a training ground for a bevy of talented visual satirists. Indeed, the industry “grandfather,” former editor of Mad, Humbug, Trump, and Help! Harvey Kurtzman, once termed the early counterculture artists “a remarkable phenomenon.” He praised their energy, and their enthusiasm. He also credited them with adding a completely new dimension to the world of cartooning. Social critic Jay Lynch went even further. He argued that “underground comics were the most important art movement of the twentieth century .” With wanton abandon, the new artists began a total assault on Middle American values. They lambasted gender relations, the business world, and the politics of the Nixon era. Simultaneously, they celebrated drug use (chiefly LSD and marijuana), street language, sexual liberation of all kinds, and a variety of “revolutions.” Although the West Coast Beat poets and writers remain far better known, the underground comix artists probably reached a wider audience as a grim “us” versus “them” world slowly began to emerge.3 Without exception, underground artists lambasted all things nuclear. In Forbidden Knowledge (1977), Last Gasp comix artists drew melting flesh, women impaled by flying glass...

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