Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix by Drew Friedman

I keep discovering new categories of books that don't work as well in digital form. I was a somewhat reluctant convert to digital - I very rarely read prose that way, and have been consuming a lot of comics digitally largely because the library Hoopla app has scads of good stuff, including what looks to be the entire output of Europe Comics - so this is not surprising to me, but it is vaguely annoying when I momentarily overcome my prejudices only to discover I was correct after all.

Anyway: this is not a great book to read digitally. Anything large-format fits in that category, obviously, and a book of full-page portraits even more so. And yet I persevered.

Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix is the latest "bunch of full-page portraits" book from Drew Freidman, who I think now has not worked as a cartoonist in at least a decade. It follows several books on Old Jewish Comedians, one of famous Jews who were not necessarily comedians, a couple on Golden Age comics-makers, and one with all the US Presidents. Of those, the only one I've seen was Old Jewish Comedians, the very first - I was a big fan of Friedman's dark, celebrity-tormenting comics all the way back to the 1980s, but he mostly transitioned from that work to much better paid illustration work over the course of the '90s. (For the comics work, see The Fun Never Stops! And for the illustration before he started doing the themed-portraits books, see Too Soon?)

This book is explicitly a follow-up to the two books of Golden-Agers; it has a hundred-and-one of those full-page pictures on right-hand pages, each one with a short potted biography of the subject (by Friedman, I assume) facing it, tastefully printed knockout on black, as if it were a gallery show or index of the deceased. All of the portraits are of makers of comics, all people (mostly men, a few women) who were active in underground comics from 1967-1975. There's also a short section at the end with much smaller head-only illos of major underground publishers of that era, though many of these are also in the main section, since that's the kind of scene it was.

That's what it is. But what's important is that it's all drawn by Friedman, the master of the realistic grotesque, who draws lumpy, sweaty, hairy, specific people in amazingly characteristic poses in that stunning photorealistic style (which I don't think he still does by stippling, as he did in the '80s). He seems to have worked from photographs, but not by copying photographs. These are all new images, of these hundred-plus people in their prime, presented each when they were at the peak of being underground comics-makers.

Look, I still prefer narrative to portraiture. I'm a story guy. So there's a small part of me still somewhat sad Friedman left the worlds of narrative for portraiture. But he's so good at it - so incisive, so particular, so super-real - that this is obviously what he should be doing.

Any of Friedman's books are more interesting and resonant the more you care about and know the people involved. That's been the case way back to his goofy comics about Joe Franklin. So you do have to know and care, at least a little, about the underground comics movement and some of the major figures in it, to get much out of Maverix and Lunatix.

But if you do have any connection, to any of Friedman's books, they're like a distorted mirror, more real than photography, that reveals true faces. I do recommend you read them in physical books, though: that's a better experience.