A dive into the history of ... "underground comics"

WARNING - Although this is censored it delves into graphic content, the uncensored version is here https://arseniclullabies.com/nl20241024XXX.html

My neanderthal theory will be in a day or two...juuuust have to double check on the date of one cave drawing...but for now...

I don't let much that I see online get under my skin these days, but I did recently see something that galled me, which was a good excuse to take you on a fast dive into the batsh*t bizarre history of underground comics.

note- by "recently" I mean a few months ago, and I'm not even irritated anymore but it still makes for a pretty wild blog. I kept forgetting to track down pictures I needed, and the pics were absolutely necessary, as you shall soon see

Backing up to what I saw...there's a gentleman by the named Dinesh Shamdasani. He is a comic book publisher of high regard, by anyone who knows good from bad, and from my experience he is a delightful human being. He took over Valiant Comics years back. I did some freelance stuff for him there, and he earned my respect quick, fast and in a hurry. He's since moved onto publishing comics under the label "Bad Idea". He puts out top notch work, by top notch professionals. Any quick look at Bad Idea's offerings is proof that the guy cares about quality.

I can't say I've kept in touch much, beyond the "hey, how's things by you?' every once in a blue moon, but I do keep an eye on him because, as I said, the guy knows his stuff and puts out great work. So...that's how I saw...THIS

whoa, whoa, whoa....whoa... "underground comics publisher" ...HAHAHAHA...what?!

We've all, since the beginning of comics, thrown around unquantifiable claims- "best kids comics on the rack!" "worlds greatest comics magazine"...."king of dark humor". There's no real measuring stick for any of that, it's all bravado. You make the claim and it's up to the reader if you lived up to it or not. BUT....the term underground comics is SPECIFIC.

"Underground comics " refers to comics, that because of their CONTENT...edgy, subversive, counter culture ideas, controversial subjects, controversial imagery, things like that...they were not able to get distributed through the standard mainstream means, sometimes not even produced through standard mainstream means, and/or caused problems for those who dared sell them. That term comes with some merit. Implies... courage... for lack of a better word, to continue forward despite having many doors closed to you and in the face of possible backlash from mainstream type people and/or the powers that be, because they will likely react aggressively to the CONTENT you choose to create.

Bad Idea publishes work by brand name pros, some of whom are borderline legendary in the industry and not a single thing they put out is likely to draw the wrath of an average reader, parent, or make a store concerned about having it's content on the shelves.

Those are damn fine looking works...but they ain't underground comics. The degree of absurdity of that claim is about to become very clear to you.

Let's start by going WAY back to grand daddy of underground comics, the Tijuana bibles. These were 3x5inch, 8 page, one or two colors, and printed on the cheapest stock available. They had varying degrees of quality of work and even of production. Most of them were direct parodies of mainstream cartoons/comics/characters, and some were just parody of the genre or an amalgamation of different cartoons.

We're talking the 20s and 30s at their apex. and they were...well, with the imagery in my head of model T fords driving around, men wearing spats and Charlie Chaplin in the movie theaters, I know my mind was blown.

_*_NOTE- You can see an uncensored version of this blog by clicking the link below. I'll warn you right now, though, it's worse than you think and way worse as we get into the 80s/90s ".

https://arseniclullabies.com/nl20241024XXX.html

I almost threw up..anyone else? Here's another.

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**another side note here- Obscenity aside, these illustrations are pretty well on par with the illustrations being published by the actual syndicated cartoonists in newspapers at the time. The Laurel and Hardy parody is actually a bit better than most of them were. Someone, of considerable skill, spend several hours drawing Laurel and Hardy screwing flappers. You wanna know who?...nobody knows! The reason for that will be clear shortly.

When you take into account this was an era not that a far removed from WW1, in the tail end of prohibition, and going headlong into the great depression...these TJ Bibles actually seem more fitting. This was an era of bootlegging, gangsters, flappers and hobos. So with that in mind. Those comics above actually seem more appropriate for the times, than this...

"oh..ha ha, what a delightfully funny joke about being lazy at work, ha ha. Wish I had a job, but it's the great depression and every week I have to find a way to not starve to death."

There's a lot of subtext that's going on with each era of underground comics, and you could write a whole sociology paper on it. I'll try to stick with the nuts and bolts of Underground stuff and not get philosophical. I'll say this though- In every era of "pop culture" in this country, you've had people content with whatever is mainstream entertainment, the example in this era, Blondie and Dagwood. And you're going to have people ( Creatives and audiences) who look at that stuff and say "yeah...that ain't doing it for me". This happens especially in times of change, upheaval, cultural stressors.

Conversely there's the segment of the population that is perfectly happy with the status quo, deals with change by attempting to ignore it or hoping it goes away and is not interested in any alternative taking root. People, don't like feeling powerless, and if there are giant stressors and changes going on that they cannot affect, some of them go hard down on affecting the little things that that can. Which is why these throw away comics, became the subjects of state and federal investigations. Arrests were being made, warehouses were being raided, equipment was being seized. At one point the FBI was making raids and confiscating TJ bibles by the thousands,

...at a time that the morality police were in such power as to be able to take away booze, they sure were not going to let a bunch of pornographic comics get distributed. And there was no internet, remember...never underestimate the reach of people who want to ruin fun. To be fair they were violating pornography and obscenity statutes, though with John f*cking Dillinger on the loose, it all seems like a waste of manpower.

Even though there was a huge market for TJ bibles (print runs in the hundreds of thousands) they were not going to be able to sell these on the newsstand. These where literally black-market products, and passing through all the same avenues of distribution as bootleggers . They sold them under the table in places like speak easies/barrooms, bowling alleys, garages, tobacco shops, and burlesque houses...anyplace where people weren't skittish and knew how to keep their mouth shut. They'd print them up ship and them in bulk through the post office, or by rail or truck to the black-market hub of a given city, where they would be picked up by whichever business owners were happy to acquire illegal goods as long at they sold.

...and that is the root of underground comics.

The TJ bibles managed to keep going by hook or by crook for a long time, then ww2 happened and machinery, paper, talent, means of shipping, any everything else was a lot harder to come by for even legit publishers. Although they did keep getting printed into the 50s, they had honestly pretty well petered out during the 40s.

But...stressors and changes to the culture continued. And so concepts, subversive by comparison to what was the status quo, did arise...

Those (above) are a fair sample of the work published by EC Comics Publishing. EC comics are not, by anyone's measure, "underground". They sold millions right on the news stands. BUT the backlash they got was important to setting the table for the next wave of underground comics, so here are the high points of EC's hand in the matter.

in the late 40s early 50's Horror comics were big, and EC comics was the largest and best publisher of that genre. and they were...awesome. BUT....as always, "there where those who did not like our hero".

There were giant protests by the usual personality types, ( we call them Karens, now) it's the same personality in a different body in a different part of the timeline. Or perhaps the daughters of the people who wanted the FBI to spend time stopping TJ bibles from being bought.

Believe it or not, this time there were CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS...on comic book content...I sh*t you not.

That's Bill Gaines on the right, the publisher of EC Comics and a legend worth an entire blog on his own. Eventually the comic book industry itself set up a list of rules and a half assed board to monitor itself. You had to submit your book to the board, and if they decided your book was not going to lead any children to immorality you could put this logo on it.

And if it DIDN'T have that logo...good f*cking luck getting any distributor to touch it with a ten foot pole. Magazines, however did not have to have any such logo or restrictions and that is why EC Comics turned Mad comics into Mad Magazine. So technically, maybe, you could call Mad's first few issues in comic book format, an Underground comic. The overall point though is the Karens kept comics from crossing any lines that mainstream didn't approve of via the comic code/putting pressure on the distributors. And with the era of speakeasies long gone as well as any real interest in comics by black-market types, subversive comics were more or less non existent or at the very least irrelevant....

UNTIL the next change in the zeitgeist, the era of this country known as the 60s

.This is the time of filthy hippies and drugs and sex and rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and... a segment of people were looking for more than batman and robin, Casper, and Archie. A new rise in talent had stories to tell to a new audience that was bored with the usual pap. Most of these comics had, well...lots of drugs and sex, of course. It also had a rather distinct look, mostly pioneered by the legendary Robert Crumb. It was a strange mix of a cartoony foundation but with very workmanlike shading. If we gave it some thought, we could probably suss out how that was a allegoric mirror of the culture somehow.

I've said it before and I'll say it again about the 60s undergrounds stuff..."i don't get it". I just personally never liked any of that stuff, and every time I say that I have to listen to a lecture from someone who does. Look...it's fine, they clearly had some skill and I guess this was all funny at the time. I just don't get it.

In any case, they didn't bother with any comics code, nor did they even bother thinking of putting these on a newsstand or bookstore shelf. They went right to were the audience was..head shops, concerts, record stores...points of sale where the proprietor was of the "screw the man" disposition, and thus happy to sell subversive comic books. And they sold BIG and many were so well done that they inspired a generation of talent. Not me...I never heard of any of this until I was already making comics, I frankly I'd be just fine never knowing they existed. I just...I hate them, all the characters look gross and make me want to take a shower.

By the 80s there were so many actual comic books stores that the old means of distribution had changed. These stores were not getting their comics from the same distributors as the bookstores and grocery stores. They had different/new distributors that had no policy saying you must have that code/logo on your books. If they thought your book could sell they'd put it in their catalogue and it was up to the stores to decide what they'd sell or display, and up to them to figure out what the obscenity laws were in their town.

That last wrinkle though...meant the claim of being underground was not obsolete, and still came with some peril. The underground comics of the 80s and forward still found ways to push the edge, be subversive and piss off those people we can call the third reincarnation of Karen's..

The 80s and 90s underground stuff was a bit all over the map, but if I had to point to something relatively unique...the themes of satanism, gore, anything anti religious where used early and often. This was because at that time, the powers that be where the religious right.

How much of this genre was content for the sake of giving the finger to the religious right and how much was genuenly wanting to tell a type of story, depends on each individual comic and the people working on it. Faust for example (above), surely knew they were poking the bear, but there is no doubt a huge amount of creativity, skill, and effort went into telling the story that they wanted to tell, the way they wanted to tell it. It is the gold standard of that genre. If fact the quality of work overall is at a level as good as the best at Marvel Comics...clearly a Marvel Comics type story isnt what they were interested in working on ( that'd be a MASSIVE understatement), and they were willing to risk whatever was awaiting them in order to put their story out.

Some gen-Z might be reading this and thinking "yeah the religious right is still a problem and..." NOPE, trust me, you have NO idea. There was the Satanic Panic, there were people convinced the board game version of Dungeons and Dragons was going to make their child go insane, TV televangelists going after radio DJs, and congressional hearings about heavy metal music, the list goes on of BS AND...there was no internet, so you had no platform from which to defend yourself other than whatever platform you had in the first place, that they where attempting to kill off.

They had the numbers and the money and they threw their weight around at anything that caught their ire, and rallying a defense of the same scale was nigh impossible (no...internet) . It was on a scale and ratio that is not matched in any way shape or form by what you might see going on now. It was just... just a whole other level.

And they had no interest in anything being sold at a comic shop in their town that wasn't PG rated.

A nonprofit organization, called the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, was set up to help pay for attorney fees, and in some cases provided attorney's, for stores that were being fined, having their business license revoked, having their merchandise seized by the police. And for comic makers who were getting slapped with obscenity charges.

Here's a case that'll blown your mind-

-2002 The Castillo v. Texas case centered around Jesus Castillo, an employee of a comic book store in Dallas, Texas, who was charged with two counts of "display of obscenity", and convicted of one, after selling adult comics to an adult undercover police officer.-

...a STING OPPERATION...for comic books. Hoe lee sh*t. Make note off that trial date. That means this sting was going on like, right after 9-11 hahahahaha. Yep, better go undercover and buy some dirty comics...you follow that up the chain and it's bound to lead to a terror cell.

Satanism, demonic stuff and gore were somewhat the tip of the spear of underground stuff causing trouble, but as I said it was a pretty diverse field. Here's a couple of other examples below, that I'm going to use to point something out... Ed The Unhappy Clown on the left and Omaha the Cat Dancer on the right.

Omaha was one of a sort of wave/resurgence/formalizing of "anthropomorphic erotica", i.e. cartoon animals having sex. A genre I never understood the interest in...nor do I want to.

and Ed the Unhappy Clown was a book, rooted in surreal storytelling, a genre that never has really gotten name. To give you an idea of content in Ed, the head of a tiny Ronald Reagan from another dimension accidentally ends up, alive, aware, and able to talk, onto the head of Ed's penis.

Copies of Omaha ended up being seized by the police and caused the store owner no small amount of legal problems. and Ed the Unhappy Clown...as far as I could find...managed to somehow avoid controversy. On the face of things, this makes no sense. There's couple of possible explanations for one getting caught up in controversy and the other not catching any shrapnel. First, it might just be the numbers game. At the time there were roughly 200 independent comics being published a month. That is not a typo. Now, 90% or more of them would never last past issue no.3 for any number of reasons, the biggest being bad sales. But at 200 titles per month hitting shelves, even staunch vigilant censorship advocates, are going to miss a book or two worth railing against in order to keep the world safe from...drawings.

Another reason is more philosophical. Censorship types are, by and large, bullies...and not very deep thinkers, and the same goes for the people they rile up for the cause. So, as far as the bully aspect, if you were a bully and wanted to steamroll over someone...which of these two books seem like the writer would back down faster? The cartoon romance, or the batsh*t crazy story about talking penises from another dimension?

As far as riling people up for the cause, the cat sex book is obviously an easier pitch "it's beastiality!!!" than taking five minutes trying to explain a twilight zone esq plot about interdimensional travel and a clown and vampires.

Anyways, the larger point is, that even not that long ago, publishing or selling subversive comic books came with some risk. This went on well into when I started Arsenic Lullaby.

I personally don't think Arsenic Lullaby classifies as an underground comic, because I had two legit distributors, it was a pretty solid hit with stores right off, and as far as I know law enforcement never got involved. It is in the Underground Comics Price Guide, though, now that I think about it. I dunno, it's really never how I viewed the book. Maybe if it came out in an earlier era, but society had pretty well crumbled by the time A.L. started getting published. In either case I'll tell you a little story to give you a first hand account of what non-mainstream publishers had to deal with even as late as Arsenic Lullaby hitting the shelves...

Issue no.2 almost didn't see the light of day because the printer, curious at what the thing on the cover was...read the issue, and found out it was a cartoon fetus.

The distributor called me asking where the shipment was, I called the printer asking why it hadn't been shipped and...they said they did not print it, and were NOT going to. Not bothering to tell me this was an added middle finger, by them, to the content. This was before digital files so they had the art boards and were not particularly interested in sending them back. As I recall I had to recopy the art, remake the art boards, and redo the cover in one night and fed-ex the whole mess to another printer and it just BEARLY got it to the distributor before the drop dead date. Had I missed the distributors deadline on only the second issue...that could have been the end for Arsenic Lullaby.

Every underground publisher that lasted more than a year has stories like I just mentioned or even worse ones...

Publishing Underground comics was about being on the edge (or over) of what the culture will tolerate and that goes hand in hand with risk and stress and pushback. You do it BECAUSE you have stories you believe in, that will not get done without being watered down, unless you do it yourself. And when you succeed it is because those stories resonated with enough people who were just as bored or disenchanted with what the mainstream is able to deal with as you were.

Which brings us back to the absurd claim that started off this blog. Now that you've seen the depths which underground comics live in and the backlash and hurdles that they must deal with. You can understand how ridiculous it is to declare yourself to be an underground comics publisher when you put content out such as this...

That is not underground...that is expertly printed, top quality work, by established pros...the content of which is easily, if not deliberately geared to be, appreciated by a general/wide audience. One guy shooting another guy may well be very dramatic in the context of the story, but nobody's going to have to take a pause to get their head around what they just saw and unless that giant Kiju looking thing starts smashing the city with his giant dork, it's all frankly hell and gone from "underground comics".

To use a music analogy, Bad Idea publishing is not The Clash, The Sex Pistols, or Public Enemy...they are Van Halen. Van Halen is a very good band with lot's of hits, but if they declared themselves to be punk rock or gangster rap it would be...ridiculous. And Johnny Rotten and Chuck D would probably have a thing or two to say to them.

"Greatest Underground Comics Publisher" let's not forget that part, "Greatest"...gotta be kidding me. Greater than Kitchen Sink Press, Rebel Studios, Apex Novelties...see, now I'm getting irritated again, over something the guy said like three months ago. And I had gotten it all out of my system too, when I emailed him about it.

"no...no, you didn't"

Oh, yes I did! I wrote my objections out and said to myself "why are you...what's the point of...don't do this" and then I hit send. Hahahahaha. ...He never go back to me, that's kinda weird. Usually, he does. Hahaha...

ANYWAYS...

In this day and age, in this country, I don't know that it'd still even be possible to legitimately claim being an underground comic. Ironically, maybe if your published some super religious comic and tried selling it at colleges you'd cause a ruckus but half the country would have your back, or conversely you could publish some over the top LGTBQ comic in the wrong area and get some backlash but the other half the country would have your back. And plenty of people do these and get that sweet, what I call, "us vs them money". But that's not the same as someone in 1960 putting out an anti establishment comic, not knowing what kinda hell might be waiting. You give the finger to one establishment or another now, half the people will loathe you and the other half will think you're great, shrug meh. There's 50% safety net for anything...kinda makes me sad. It bemuses me when I hear people lament and say "yeah, you're not supposed to say that anymore" or "you can't do that anymore." You were NEVER supposed to say or do "that", that's what made it so fun.

So...let's recap what this blog gave ya. Bad Idea is a great publisher but they are not "underground", there was a time in this country where the FBI and Congress cared what was in a comic book, you saw a cartoon cat's genitals, and you'll will never be able to look Popeye in the eye again.

and until next time, I might as well leave you with something semi-normal, to cleanse the pallet

Always, my homepage is here- https://arseniclullabies.com/

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