Adult Comics (New Accents) by Roger Sabin

Author:Roger Sabin [Sabin, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781134558063
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

The modern era

Comics were originally intended for adults, not kids, and we’re slowly getting back to that again.

(Tom De Falco, editor-in-chief, Marvel Comics)1

It is possible to date the modern era in the evolution of adult comics in America from the emergence of the underground in the 1960s. The period thereafter has witnessed a great deal of crossover with Britain, and therefore events have already been covered in some detail in part I. Nevertheless, there were important variations in experience, and it is to these we must briefly turn.

The underground ‘shattered the tradition of comics as decisively as American jazz shattered the classical European musical idiom’, according to the Comics Journal.2 That is undoubtedly true. As in Britain, the comix were an expression of the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, which, in America, must be seen as in large part a reaction to the extremely repressive atmosphere of the 1950s (discussed briefly on p. 147). Indeed, it seemed to some observers at the time that American society was swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to another (though in reality, there was more continuity from the postwar era to the Nixon years than might at first have been imagined).

The 1950s had left their mark on the mainstream comics industry as well, of course, in the form of the Code. Thus from an American perspective, the underground can be seen as almost as much a revolt against the Code as an expression of the counter-culture in general. It was, in a sense, an outpouring of all the ‘unsound’ ideas bottled-up since 1954. The Code stipulated ‘no sex’, so the comix revelled in every kind of sex imaginable; the Code stipulated ‘no violence’, so the underground took bloodshed to extremes; above all, the Code stipulated ‘no social relevance’, yet here were comics that were positively revolutionary. Some creators even made direct reference to the Code: Crumb and Spain, for example, gleefully parodied the Code stamp of approval on the covers of their comix (see Figure 3.1 on this page).

Yet at the same time it is clear that in the USA, the comix were part of a continuum of adult material in a way that they were not in Britain. The creators were well aware of this tradition, and references to (among others) ‘Krazy Kat’, the ‘Dirty Comics’, The Spirit, the ECs and, above all, Mad, pepper their work by way of acknowledgement. (Indeed, it has been suggested that Mad gave rise to the term ‘underground comics’ in the first place, with a headline in the October 1954 edition which ran ‘Comics Go Underground!’. However, this seems unlikely, and the term is more probably an extension of ‘underground press’.3) Examples of creators acknowledging the continuing tradition include Robert Crumb, who produced his infamous sex comics Jiz and Snatch in a smaller format as a homage to the ‘Dirty Comics’; the undergrounds Snarf and Bogeyman which were openly inspired by the EC horror line; Will Eisner, who was ‘rediscovered’ by underground publisher Denis Kitchen,

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