say it in pictures: a brief history of comix
My most recent fit of geekdom has involved lapping up every wikipedia page within reach on the subject of underground and alternative comics. Sorry: “comix.” Believe it or not, there’s a difference.
The underground comix scene is the hot bed of subversion you, honestly, probably never heard of. Think: knowing that there are those who can illustrate anything they imagine — and that we alllll can imagine some pretty….well, unpretty things — the possibilities are raunchy and endless.
The comix scene wasn’t just sex, drugs, and stickin it to the man, though. It was about the creation of independent art and social commentary without restriction. “Comix” refers to the small scale of publication and production, often done by the artist him or herself…or by teams of these artists, working together to publish in magazines and anthologies like Mad, EC Comics, Help!, and Bizarre Sex.
This is the world where many of today’s well-know comic artists who aren’t Stan Lee and aren’t sponsored by Marvel or DC got their start. Tell me you know Art Spiegelman, author of the Holocaust memoir-of-sorts Maus? Art left the scene, so to speak, in the late 1970s when
What had seemed like a revolution simply deflated into a lifestyle. Underground comics were stereotyped as dealing only with Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills. They got stuffed back into the closet, along with bong pipes and love beads, as Things Started To Get Uglier.
Art helped to pioneer the alternative comics movement, what Stephen Holland termed “the real mainstream” of comic production. The idea is this: “mainstream” comics are obsessed with producing superheroes and fantasy with the same intensity of the little boys (and girls) in Superman pajamas with sugar highs and fruit juice stained faces that read them between bounces on the bed. (GROSS GENERALIZATION.) But the real mainstream, as in the mainstream outside of the comic world, deals with genres of drama, romance, thrills, (real) life, and memory and so on. “Real mainstream” comics, then, are freed from radioactive-spider-infused plots and future toy lines. I’m sorry, Spiderman, but it’s true.
And this Best Of History is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, friends.
After the jump: some lessons from the wild world of upside down comic reading. (In which the author accidentally reviews a “comic” memoir of 9/11.)
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My eyes have traced pages of words and pictures (comix, comics, whatever) for years, but it wasn’t until I was upside down on a park bench this summer that a thought settled into me in the form of Art Speigelman’s enormous (14×10x9) tome In The Shadow of No Towers.
The weight of Speigelman’s work was literal — and not just in the oh-em-gee-this-book-is-huge-and-is-crushing-my-diaphragm-help! kind of way. Speigelman writes comix that are intensely personal: Maus depicts conversations between Speigelman and his father about survival in concentration camps, No Towers covers Speigelman’s memory of 9/11 and the falling of a greater New York….And by 2010, that graphic intimacy is not even “weird” any more — or it shouldn’t be. The real mainstream now abounds with the memoirs and biographies of simple-humans. A short list notes Persepolis, Blankets, Malcom X, and Trotsky. They’re “graphic novels,” shedding the over-worn spandex* associated with the “comi-” suffix. (*Maybe socialism, too.)
But Speigelman’s No Towers isn’t just a footnote that alternative comics survived the 80s. No Towers is laced with characters from and references to comics of the past, specifically the Sunday newspaper “funnies” from the turn of the century. He turned to them for solace after the Towers fell, but as images from these old strips blend into Speigelman’s narrative, they reveal something sinister: the real changes to New York over the last 100 years, say, or a loss of innocence. Though considered “soft” on the news scale, these “ancient” comics encapsulate current events and public moods that history and maturity make very hard – visualizations in the shadow of the social climate of WWI and II.
Speigelman lays these connections bare, exposing us fully not only to his thoughts, but the history of his expression. (Comics.) And as the art corrupts, melding good memories with bad, we watch Art corrupt under the pressure of self-reflection. 9/11. New York. Family. Terror. Politics. Control. Escape. In a word: intense. I had to sit to sit up straight to finish reading.
(c) Art Speigelman
Categories:
Co-learn, Fit of Geekdom
