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The Greatest Team-Up Never Told? Paul Buhle Theorizes the New Left and Underground Comix
- Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society
- The Ohio State University Press
- Volume 3, Issue 2, Summer 2019
- pp. 191-198
- 10.1353/ink.2019.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
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ABSTRACT:
In the late 1960s the writer, editor, and activist Paul Buhle imagined an ambitious political future for underground comix. Across a series of articles - but especially in the 1969 essay "Komix Kountermedia" - Buhle proposed that the comix were the latest turn in a dialectical history of US comics and they promised to provide the space in which a popular anticapitalist sensibility might be forged. Buhle was inspired by a range of critical thinkers such as C. L. R. James, Antonio Gramsci, and Theodor Adorno, and he saw his Marxist-infused analysis of comix as an American analogue to the work in cultural studies being undertaken in Britain. "The Greatest Team-Up Never Told?" provides a summary of Buhle's theoretical coordinates and his hopes for the role that comix might play in the revolution to come.