Underground Comix: A Brief History Of Western Comics Part 3
- Eve Andrews
- Nov 27, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 21, 2021
At first, the comic book industry seemed to have fallen in line with the highly sanitised requirements being enforced as a result of Wertham’s study.
However, the removal of dark themes by the Comic’s Code Authority did little to quell the public’s thirst for amoral material. As a result, it wasn’t long before some readers again began tiring of the black and white, clean-cut heroes that the Comic’s Code Authority had lumbered them with.
With frustration simmering among audiences and artists alike, the comic book world once again began to shift, beginning with one of the most outrageous newcomers the Western World had ever seen; Underground Comix.
Underground Comix was a small press of self-published comic books, pioneered in the late 1960s by American cartoonist, R. Crumb.
Having come of age in the fifties at the dawn of comic book censorship, Crumb was another member of Western society who had been quick to grow tired with the surface level tropes presiding over the comic book medium. Inspired by the satirical works of cartoonists such as Harvey Kurtzman and Jules Feiffer, Crumb envisioned the unexplored potential of comic books with vividly shocking detail.
He stated in an interview with Louisiana Channel:
“Cartoon and comic books up to that time were a very lowgrade medium. You know, you had Superheroes and then you had funny animal characters. [...] There wasn’t anything in the comic book world that was a personal, artistic expression of the artist themselves, you know? It just didn’t exist, it wasn’t there.”
Determined to break the mould, Crumb put his visions to paper and set out to create the most outrageous, brutally honest material he could.
Shortly after, he gathered together a creative team and Underground Comix was born.
Due to Crumb’s decision to self-publish his work, the content of Underground Comix fell outside the now industrialised world of comic book production, rendering the Comic’s Code Authority nothing more than an optional guideline; a guideline which Crumb unashamedly disregarded.
Unburdened by the censorship of the Comic’s Code Authority, Crumb and his creative team took full advantage of their freedom, producing loaded content that soon became known for its preoccupation with drug use, sexuality, politics and crime.
The content was so graphic and controversial that it was rare for shops that stocked it to place it on public display, instead choosing to hide it under the counter for request only. This was a precaution against the ever-watchful US police, who were more than likely to spring at the opportunity of an easy obscenity bust.
Even the title of the publisher itself hinted at the obnoxiously salacious nature of the material with their calculated spelling Comix, replacing the ‘S’ with an ‘X’ as a nod towards the X rating found on the covers of adult movies. This was both a jibe at the now clean-cut nature of the comic industry as well as being a warning to parents that these particular comic strips were not an appropriate choice for children.
Despite the discreet and obscure ways in which the material was sold, the work of Underground Comix was embraced by consumers. Breaking down the walls of creative censorship, the arrival of Underground Comix was the first step in reinvigorating a frustrated and heavily restrained creative industry.
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