From Birth to the 1970s

by Tim Pilcher

  COMIX GONE BAD

  Into the crazy, hippie world of ’60s San Francisco came a lanky, slightly gawky-looking young cartoonist from the Mid-West. His name was Robert Crumb, and like so many who washed up on the shores of the Bay Area, he was looking for an indefinable something; “freedom.” He’d left his job as a greeting-cards illustrator, abandoned his new young wife, Dana, in Cleveland, and joined a commune, where he found kindred cartoonist spirits. Pretty soon, Crumb was cranking out comix at an impressive rate. His childhood experiences creating endless strips with his brother, Charles, had instilled a prodigious work ethic that amazed his fellow creators.

  Filled with guilt, Crumb sent for his pregnant wife Dana, and together they folded and stapled 5,000 copies of Zap Comics #1—selling them out of a pram at a street party in the Haight Ashbury district. The comic was a galvanizing force for other artists in the area, including Gilbert Shelton (creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers), Rick Griffin (already famous for his gig posters), and S. Clay Wilson, who all started to contribute to Zap as well as publishing their own comics.

  Other creators realized that much of Zap’s success was down to its sexual content and started to jump on the “smut revolution” bandwagon. The titles of these anthologies were designed to provoke a reaction and leave the browser with no doubt over the subject matter. From Tales from the Leather Nun and Amputee Love to the more extreme Demented Pervert, Bestiality, and White Whore Funnies, these comix pushed the boundaries of “good taste” to the absolute limit.

  Amputee Love was written by double amputee Rene Jensen and drawn by her husband, Rich, and focused on the taboo-breaking proposition that amputees could maintain a happy and fulfilling sex life.

  Another title that attempted to smash the last vestiges of the previous generation’s morality was Felch Comics. Published by Keith Green in 1975, it featured work by S. Clay Wilson, Robert Crumb, Jay Lynch, Spain Rodriguez, and William Stout, among others. But it was Robert Williams’ cover that was the most shocking, portraying the devil having anal sex with a victimized woman, while a second demon felched the resultant cum. The barbarians were no longer at the gate, but were ransacking the sanctity of Middle America, raping and pillaging their way across the cultural landscape.

  Spain Rodriguez’s distinctly anti-Catholic Leather Nun strip combines biting satire with a savage brush.

  The back cover to Spain’s Tales from the Leather Nun equates Catholicism with sado-masochism.

  An anti-papal piece by Dave Sheridan.

  BIZARRE SEX

  Another artist who dared to be different and explore the dark domain of erotic underground comix was Vaughn Bodé. His strips would often feature sexually charged characters with strange accents, and one of his most enduring characters was Cheech Wizard, a foul-tempered magician’s hat on legs. His Deadbone Erotica strip would eventually replace Robert Crumb’s revered Fritz the Cat strip in the men’s magazine Cavalier.

  Bodé also produced Purple Pictography with fellow artist Bernie Wrightson for men’s magazine Swank, which was published from 1971 to 1972. Bodé’s work was collected into various editions like Junkwaffel and Erotica, and featured Disney-esque characters with an underground twist—sex and drugs, mainly. Bodé would often “perform” his strips at his Cartoon Concerts—lewd and erotic shows in which the artist would show slides, narrate, and play the voices of his characters to audiences at colleges and comic conventions.

  Tragically, Bodé hanged himself accidentally in 1975 in an autoerotic act that would strangely portend the demise of INXS’s lead singer, Michael Hutchence, 22 years later. But Bodé’s legacy lives on, with his erotic art inspiring thousands of graffiti artists across the globe. His son, Mark, has continued the family tradition of erotic cartooning, and still ocassionally performs Cartoon Concerts.

  Elsewhere, others were also exploring the realms of erotic comics. Interestingly, Bizarre Sex was one of the rare underground comix that didn’t spring from San Francisco, but from the rather more parochial Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Published by legendary underground artist, distributor, and publisher Denis Kitchen, Bizarre Sex continued to push the envelope the Californian artists had opened and would go on to feature early work by legendary creators such as Howard Cruse, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Harvey Pekar.

  The title lasted for 10 issues, from 1972 to 1982, and later issues saw work by Robert Crumb and Fred Hembeck (with his Sexterrestrial strip). The comic was also the original home of Omaha the Cat Dancer by Reed Waller and Kate Worley. This latter strip was a “funny animal” story that owed its roots to Robert Crumb’s earlier successful creation, Fritz the Cat. Where Crumb left off, Waller and Worley picked up, portraying fully realized characters with genuinely erotic storylines, quality writing, and superior art.

  Publisher and cartoonist Denis Kitchen’s provocative and amusing cover to Bizarre Sex #1.

  A John Howard biker slut strip, God Forgives, Weasels Don’t, which followed the underground comix tradition of excessive sex and violence in equal measure.

  The cover to Horny Biker Slut Comics #4, by John Howard and colored by James Burchett.

  ROBERT CRUMB

  Despite being a major catalyst for the underground artists in San Francisco, Crumb always felt like an outsider—uncomfortable with all the pseudo-spirituality and hippie ethics. To him it was simply a way of meeting girls, or more specifically, girls with big butts. “All my life I’ve been a slave to that butt,” the artist revealed in Crumb and Peter Poplaski’s R. Crumb Handbook. “The motion of a big, round, human female butt while she’s walking has the same effect that the blossom has on the bee. To see is to desire! It’s primal.”

  Crumb was raised a good Catholic and initially kept his faith, but over the years he drifted away from the flock. However, his Catholic urge to confess stayed with him for life, as he redirected his declarations of guilt from the confessional to the comic page. Crumb developed the “confessional comic,” where he could purge his soul of all his dark sexual thoughts for the “entertainment” of the public. This form of semi-autobiographical comic continues to be popular, with creations such as Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You and Joe Matt’s angst-ridden Peep Show strip, which reveals his excessive masturbatory habits.

  “All my natural compulsions are perverted and twisted. Instead of going out and challenging myself against other males, all those impulses are channeled into sex,” recalled Crumb. “That’s why I want to ravage big women, that’s how I get out all my aggressions, and fortunately I’ve found lots of women who like that! Oh thank the gods!”

  Crumb’s comic antics were egged on by his cartoonists-in-arms, S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams. These two “bad boys” were determined to push the boundaries of comic content, and urged Crumb to break as many taboos as possible. The cartoonist didn’t need much encouragement, and he was soon producing startling and shocking material.

  In 1968, Crumb started Snatch Comics, and went straight for the jugular with full-page spreads such as The Grand Opening of the Great Intercontinental Fuck-in and Orgy-Riot, and The Family That Lays Together, Stays Together. The latter image was simply a warm-up for his infamous Joe Blow strip in Zap #4, which portrayed an incestuous family.

  The flak that Crumb received for these strips cannot be overstated. Copies of Zap were seized by the San Francisco police and it was banned completely in New York. As fellow Zap cartoonist Victor Moscoso recalled, “I never did an incest story and Crumb never did an incest story again, as far as I know. However, we did not self-censor ourselves; it was just after a while we got it out of our systems.”

  Robert Crumb gets down to basics in the strip All Meat Comics, from Big Ass Comix #1.

  Snatch Comics #1 features Crumb’s idealized woman on the cover and was siezed by police in January 1969. Note the signature, R. Cum.

  Honeybunch Kaminski, the drug-crazed runaway from U Needa Comix (1970).

  This strip from Big Ass Comics #1 was reworked by Oz magazine in the U.K., w
ho put Rupert the Bear’s head on the character without Crumb’s permission. The result saw them taken to court on obscenity charges.

  Cover to Big Ass Comics #1 by Robert Crumb.

  Crumb’s massive list of comics continued to be more and more controversially named, upping the ante from Jiz to the nadir of Cunt Comics, which proclaimed it was “The only comic you can eat!” Most of these titles only ever made it to two or three issues as police pressure was constantly applied to the retailers—mostly head shops—that stocked them.

  Crumb’s huge roster of characters included the massively popular Fritz the Cat, an oversexed “funny animal” and a cynical parody of the free-loving ’60s. The strips were turned into the first full-length, X-rated animated movie in 1972, which Crumb denounced as a travesty.

  Another recurring character was the deliberately racist, oversexed Angelfood McSpade, a black woman with an Amazonian body who is constantly molested by smaller white men. One character that became very popular was Honeybunch Kaminski, “The Drug-Crazed Runaway.” The character was bizarrely prescient of Aline Kominsky, a female cartoonist who later became involved with Crumb and would ultimately marry him (after first being chased off the commune by Dana with a shotgun).

  Women attacked Robert Crumb regularly for his portrayal of them in his strips, but much of Crumb’s misogyny at the time came from misdirected anger. He had an adoring public, which appealed and repulsed him simultaneously, and his comics tested his devoted fans: “They love me so much, let’s see if they can handle this.” But even this couldn’t last. Crumb’s guilt caught up with him when he confessed—self-mockingly—on the BBC’s 1987 Arena documentary, “Yeah, I guess you could say I’m a sexist. I’ve tried to raise my consciousness, God knows… I have this reccurring vision that I’m standing in front of this tribunal of feminist women and I’m answering for my exploitation of women in my cartoons. And the only answer I have is that I’m telling the truth about myself, for better or worse. Take it or leave it.”

  The drawing that caused controversy, The Grand Opening of the Great Intercontinental Fuck-in and Orgy-Riot, featured several Crumb characters including Angelfood McSpade and Mr. Natural.

  S. CLAY WILSON

  Steven Clay Wilson was born in 1941 in Lincoln, Nebraska, and was to be one of the most taboo-breaking underground cartoonists working in San Francisco, paving the way for numerous others.

  After protesting at university about fellow students being forced to do military service, he was, ironically, conscripted into the army as a young man, where he was exposed to gruesome movies about combat wounds as he trained to be a medic. This would prove to be fertile ground from which the seeds of Wilson’s fetid imagination would blossom into the most gruesome and shocking of the underground comics. “Frankly, we didn’t really understand what we were doing until Wilson started publishing in Zap,” said Victor Moscoso. “I mean, he’s not a homosexual, yet he’s drawing all these homosexual things. He’s not a murderer, and yet he was murdering all these people. All the things that he wasn’t, he was putting down in his strips. So that showed us we were—without being aware of it—censoring ourselves.” Crumb concurred, “What I learnt from him was the absolute freedom to draw whatever comes into your mind.”

  Crumb’s art, though unsettling in its subject matter, had a familiar stylistic cuteness that harked back to more innocent times. Wilson’s stories held all the appeal of an auto wreck. They were horrific and gruesome, yet strangely compelling, and his ability to portray every sexual act imaginable with his unnerving, loose penmanship left no stone unturned.

  Wilson’s pirate story Head First in Zap #3 (“A tale of human pathos on the high seas below deck”) hinted at the shape of things to come, with a gay buccaneer showing off his enormous phallus, only to have it chopped off and eaten by a shipmate. The cartoonist then drew the chapter-length Captain Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates, featuring deviant derring-do on the high seas as they battled against Captain Fatima’s Dyke Pirates.

  Wilson went on to create many other disturbing characters, including the sexy, Barbarella-esque Starry-Eyed Stella, a biker gang known as The Hog Ridin’ Fools, and Ruby the Dyke. His best-known character, The Checkered Demon, first appeared in 1968 in Zap #2, and also turned up in many anthologies, including Crumb’s Weirdo. The Demon finally got his own three-issue series that ran from 1977 to 1979. In it, the small devil indulged in excessively violent beatings and extreme sex with everything from bikers to aliens.

  One often overlooked aspect of Wilson’s work is that many of his grotesque characters are extremely literate and erudite in both speech and thought, in contrast to their extremely base sexual and violent actions. However, as if it were possible, Wilson’s later work became even more ghoulish, featuring zombie pirates and the Virgin of Guadalupe as a rotting vampire mother.

  Unlike many counterculture figures, Wilson has always remained true to his art and ideologies, refusing to dilute himself for mainstream acceptance. His work remains as troubling and unsettling to today’s mainstream sensibilities as it was 40 years ago. All the more mystifying, then, that at the turn of the 21st century, Wilson moved into illustrating fairy tales.

  Despite his many critics, Wilson remained defiant: “Yes, I did take dope, acid, speed, every drug known to man. And yes, I did get more pieces of ass than you’ve had hot dinners.”

  Two panels from Starry-Eyed Stella, from Zap Comix #4, starring two of Wilson’s favorite subjects—aliens and pirates.

  Wilson’s style evolved over the years to a slightly more jagged line, as opposed to his earlier brushwork. This illustration comes from The Master Thief in Wilson’s Grimm, a collection of fairy stories illustrated by the artist.

  Wilson’s illustration Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, from his 1999 book Wilson’s Grimm, adds a whole new dimension of unease with its overtones of bondage and fetishism.

  Wilson’s A Ball In the Bung Hole strip from Zap Comix #4 (1969) featured all his hallmarks, including Grand Guignol sex and violence.

  WIMMEN’S COMIX

  In response to the extreme violence and misogyny being portrayed by the male artists, female underground cartoonists banded together under the second-wave feminist ideology and started creating their own comic book backlash. At the forefront of this movement was cartoonist Trina Robbins. Robbins left her “male chauvinist pig” husband and joined the feminist West Coast newspaper It Aint Me Babe, drawing her Belinda Berkeley strip.

  Finding it almost impossible to break into the “boys’ club” of underground comix, Robbins then created the accompanying anthology, It Aint Me Babe, published by Last Gasp in 1970. This was the first comic created solely by women, and featured Meredith Kurtzman and Lisa Lyons, among others. From 1970, the movement really got going, with the formation of the Wimmen’s Comix Collective. The original founders included Robbins, Aline Kominsky, Shelby Sampson, and Lora Fountain (Gilbert Shelton’s future wife). The Wimmen’s Comix Collective published 17 issues of its eponymous anthology, starting in 1972, and featured a wealth of female creators including Lynda Barry, Melinda Gebbie, and Janet Wolfe Stanley. Wimmen’s Comix continued to be published until 1992, making it the longest-running and most successful women’s underground comic.

  Sex was an important component of these women’s comix, but it was a very different type of sex than that portrayed by their male counterparts. The stories were about female sexual empowerment, not relying on men, reactions to sexual harassment, birth control, and periods.

  In many ways, Trina Robbins was the female antithesis of Robert Crumb. While he incited the men, Robbins spurred on the women with an almost fanatical zeal. In 1976, publisher Denis Kitchen finally saw the potential market for erotic comix aimed at women, and asked Robbins to create one for him. The result was Wet Satin (“Women’s Erotic Fantasies”), which featured Rawhide Revenge, Robbins’ parody of Eric Stanton’s classic bondage comics of the ’50s and ’60s.

  The hypocrisy of the male-dominated society was
brought into sharp relief when Kitchen Sink’s Mid-Western printer (who had already printed Bizarre Sex, with its cover images of giant vaginas landing on skyscrapers) refused to print Wet Satin because of the content. The first issue of Wet Satin was eventually printed in San Francisco and Robbins’ editorial in Issue 2 explained, “When asked why he [the printer] drew the line on Wet Satin #1, he answered that the predominately male comics were all satires, but that Wet Satin #1 was serious, and therefore pornographic.” Yet this wasn’t an unusual situation and women found the prejudices far greater against them producing erotic material than the men, to the point that some were threatened with legal action.

  Cover to It Aint Me Babe #1 (1970) by Trina Robbins, paying tribute to various female characters including Olive Oyl, Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel, Little Lulu, and Sheena Queen of the Jungle.

  The cover to Wimmen’s Comix #1 parodies the unrealistic romance comics of the time.

  Cover to Wimmen’s Comix #9 by Lee Marrs.

  Dianna Noomin’s cover for Wimmen’s Comix #11 in 1987, 15 years after the first issue.

  Barb Rausch’s effete, naked cavalier, Roger Hawke, from the back cover of Wimmen’s Comix #16.

  An Epidemic… cured by the pen, drawn by Joyce Farmer, mixes sex and sedition, encouraging people to call in “sick” to work, making a political statement about homosexuality being classed as an “illness” at the time in Sweden.