So even though I want to read long, meaty novels - I was just looking at the Steven Erikson shelf yesterday, thinking of how I really loved the first half of the Malazan series, but I can see no way I'm going to read even one more of those books any time soon, and I read the ones I did well over a decade ago now - it just doesn't happen. And when I do manage to read something longer, something more substantial, a book that took me five days across two weekends....well, it's probably going to be non-fiction.
We are all prisoners of the people we actually are, as we keep trying to be the people we want to be.
Anyway, so I read Brian Doherty's fine history of underground cartooning Dirty Pictures recently. It's one of those tell-the-whole-story books with a super-descriptive subtitle, so let me just quote that at you: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix.
I read it in the hardcover edition, from 2022, which I got a year later when it was remaindered. (There goes Gloria Mundy, as I bet someone in the underground world said.) There is also a paperback, which seems to have the identical text; it's not like anything much changed about the comix of the '60s and '70s in 2022.
Doherty has a big cast and a lot of threads to cover: his goal is to cover all of underground comix, with a central focus mostly on the seven Zap creators (with a tropism to R. Crumb, obviously) and a secondary focus on the group that peaked slightly later (especially Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith) and also attention to other clusters or areas of interest, from the women (which seems to turn into Trina Robbins vs. every other woman in comics eventually) to Justin Green and others. He also wants to start from their childhoods, for at least some of these major figures - Crumb, Spiegelman, Robbins, Robert Williams, S. Clay Wilson, Frank Stack, Spain Rodriguez - to trace their commonalities (Mad magazine and Harvey Kurtzman in general, overwhelmingly) and show how they all ended up "together."
There are seventeen chapters here, which tend to each be about a period of time or a particular piece of the story - distribution troubles and police busts, changes in audience and how undergrounds influenced the other worlds of comics in the USA - with each one broken into smaller sections, to explain what this person or group was doing, and then that one, and so forth.
Doherty has organized a lot of material here - he has an extensive list of acknowledgements at the end, and seems to have spent a lot of 2019-2021 talking to nearly all of the players still alive and willing to talk. He did a lot of original research, as well as having what seems to be a smart, informed look at the existing literature - which, in this case, means nearly fifty years of fan publications, multiple university archives, and just knowing the long and twisted history of undergrounds.
I'd estimate the book hits its halfway point in the early 1970s, which is about right: half the book is childhood and influences and those first five to ten years of ferment and explosion, and the back half is everything that happened afterward: how underground morphed into "indy" and what that meant, what the old underground creators and the next generation of creators most influenced by them did in the '80s and '90s and so on.
I am not an expert on this area; I know a bit, and have been reading underground-influenced stuff for a long time, but I'm a generation too young to have been there, and, as the hippies always said, you don't know the scene if you weren't in the scene. But I found Dirty Pictures to be a thorough, fascinating, well-researched look at a whole universe of comix, doing heroic work to differentiate and describe several dozen creators and their work over four or five decades.
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