Notes
164 NOTES 1. COMIX, COMIC SHOPS, AND THE RISE OF ALTERNATIVE COMICS, POST 1968 1. Notable precursors to Zap emerged from college humor magazines. Frank Stack’s The Adventures of Jesus, published in 1964 in a photocopied edition of about fifty copies, stemmed from Stack’s work with Gilbert Shelton on the Texas Ranger, the magazine for the University of Texas at Austin. Jack Jackson, a friend of Shelton and the Ranger crowd, credited Stack’s cartoons with inspiring his own comics booklet, God Nose, also produced in 1964 (Rosenkranz 16–25; Harvey, Comic Book 211). Yet these formative publications were seen by few at the time; claims for Stack and Jackson as the “firsts” reflect their later stature as much as their historical priority. Ditto for Shelton, whose mock-superhero “Wonder Wart-Hog” bowed during the same period and eventually earned a short-lived newsstand (not underground ) magazine in 1967, pre-Zap (Rosenkranz 90). (Shelton went on to create the “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,” comix hippies par excellence, who became staples of the underground press.) Another precursor was the late Joel Beck, a cartoonist for the UC Berkeley Pelican, whose booklets of the early sixties were later reissued by comix publisher The Print Mint (Estren 49, 316; Rosenkranz 20, 58–59). These proto-comix, however, were obscure, and did not exploit the comic book format the way Zap did; hence claims for their primacy are always couched in terms of “predating” Zap, a testament to Crumb’s greater impact. 2. Regarding the mid-1950s shakeup in magazine (and therefore comic book) distribution, discussion has been scarce, though Nyberg’s Seal of Approval does address the problem (125–26). The withdrawal of the once preeminent American News Company from distribution in May 1957 appears to have had a great impact; so too did the damage done to smaller distributors , e.g., Leader News, by the public backlash against comic books. See Vadeboncoeur 4–8, Irving 24–26, and contemporary news coverage of American’s cave-in (e.g., Freeman, “Selling Problem”; “American News to Sell Assets”; “Newsstand Giant”). Regarding the encroachment of television, see, e.g., Witty et al. (1963) for an essay that links the decline in comics reading to the rise of television viewing. 3. The semi-autonomous Comics Code Authority, whose seal of approval emblazoned the covers of most comic books from 1955 onwards, worked to insure publishers’ compliance with the rigid Code adopted by the majority of comic book publishers in late 1954. As originally adopted, the Code—a strategic concession to public criticism and congressional pressure—not only curbed the depiction of violence and sexual behavior but also forbade NOTES 165 explicit criticism of public figures and, in general, demanded adherence to an authoritarian ideal (in which the law is never wrong and lawbreakers are never right). Targeted at such comics as the infamous horror, suspense, and satire titles from trend-setting publisher E.C., the Code effectively snuffed the kind of antiauthoritarian comics later celebrated by the underground . For the history and significance of the Code, see Nyberg’s Seal of Approval. For a general treatment of comics censorship, including the global influence of the late-1950s American crisis, see Lent, ed., Pulp Demons, and Leonard Rifas’s review of same. 4. Mad (in both comic book and magazine format) has been cited repeatedly as a major influence, both on underground comix and on American satire in general. Mad founder/editor Harvey Kurtzman was the single figure from mainstream media most cited by the comix and a direct inspiration for such cartoonists as Crumb, Lynch, and Spiegelman. Regarding the Mad/comix connection, see Groth and Fiore 24–38; Estren 37–38; Rosenkranz 275; Bijou Funnies No. 8 (1973), an underground pastiche of Mad with a cover by Kurtzman himself; and Spiegelman’s comic-strip eulogy for Kurtzman (“Genius”). 5. The Cartoonists Co-Op Press, a short-lived publishing collective formed in 1973 by Bill Griffith and other Bay Area artists, circulated an advertisement in comics form (drawn by Willy Murphy) that satirized the comix publishing business for making undergrounds “almost as stupid and disgusting as . . . overground comics.” This ad depicts underground publishing as an impersonal, corporate process presided over by a “Mr. Bigg,” whose comix factory spews out tons of sub-par publications yet cannot boast sales to match. The ad implicitly links questions of quality, creative ownership, and, of course, sales (Estren 252–53). In 1973 Griffith had already inveighed against a rising...
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