Seduction of the Degenerate

Rebel Visions and the underground-comics revolution

A A A Comments (0) Wednesday, Dec 11 2002

Rosenkranz pegs 1971 as the year underground comics peaked. Titles were typically selling over 40,000 copies. The cartoonists felt that they were part of something big and wonderful. Maus creator Art Spiegelman told Rosenkranz, “It did feel like this must have been what the Cubists were going through. All the magic of being in Paris for the Post-Impressionist movement did feel somehow like being in San Francisco in the early ‘70s.”

Of course, the magic had to end sometime -- but no one expected it to vanish so soon. By 1973, underground-comics sales had nosedived. Rosenkranz cites several factors: a nationwide crackdown on head shops, the Supreme Court’s ruling on community standards for obscenity, and an increasingly politicized underground press that censored what it interpreted as sexism or racism from stories. Mainstream culture had changed, too. In a 1998 interview, cartoonist Jay Kinney told Rosenkranz that underground-comic artists, once regarded as “taboo breakers and iconoclasts,” lost their mojo after mass media began dishing out their own brand of extreme sex, drugs and gore. How could underground comics “out-gross slasher films, video porn, Hustler magazine and Cheech and Chong?” asks Rosenkranz rhetorically. Twenty-five years after the death of the movement, his Rebel Visions brilliantly recalls the astounding influence, giddy thrills and sense of freedom that underground comics provided during a pivotal point in American culture.

Mark Frauenfelder is the author of Mad Professor, published by Chronicle Books.