It was a great and terrible time for the American underground comics in 1973, or so the books tell me. Certainly the viability of the form had been proven, with independently published pamphlets securing sufficient distribution outside the newsstands and drug stores of square society to rack up some considerable attention. New, young artists were rushing in. Patrick Rosenkranz notes in his
Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 that the first underground comic-con was held in Berkley, at the famous University, in '73, April 20th to 22nd.
Greg Irons designed the three-day admissions button, while Spain Rodriguez and Trina Robbins drew one-day stickers. It maybe wasn't totally unlike today's Small Press eXpo or the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art festival, although I trust there was no comics critics roundtable, which is a surefire symptom of decadence. There were over 200 underground-or-thereabouts comics titles in print then -- and Rosenkranz emphasizes that the scene was beset by infighting and philosophical disagreement over what ‘underground' comics even
were by that point -- so maybe decadence was nonetheless close. Peril certainly was.
Almost exactly two months later, on June 21, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in
Miller v. California, establishing the Miller Test for determining obscenity, which was reaffirmed as
not protected speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Under the Miller Test, state regulation of forms of expression was permitted when a work: (1) lacks "serious" literary, artistic, political or scientific value; (2) depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct or excretory functions as defined by state law; and (3) appeals to the prurient interest as found by an average person, taking the work as a whole and applying "contemporary community standards." This marked a helpful change of pace for the beleaguered Court, which by that time had found itself conducting weekly screenings of allegedly obscene films so as to assess said obscenity or lack thereof.
As a result, the Court could not possibly have enjoyed a private showing of 1973's
Up in Flames, maybe the greatest contemporaneous seal of the cultural penetration of underground comix: a feature-length hardcore porno "parody" of Gilbert Shelton's Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural. And since those characters were already comedic, it actually wasn't so much a parody as a full-blown movie
adaptation, unfaithful as movie adaptations often are, albeit also totally unauthorized and with no-faking sex scenes.
The Freak Brothers (created in 1968) were an obvious target, having been maybe the most popular characters of the era: a comedic trio of dope-smokin' good-timers, always scheming over another score and getting mixed up in satirical slapstick hi-jinx. And Crumb's Mr. Natural (first appearance: ‘67, Summer of Love) fit in even better as a funny, sometimes horny mystic straight out of the sometimes mystical and very horny mind of Robert Crumb, who didn't need no goddamned "community standards" to get 1969's
Zap Comix #4 and San Francisco's legendary City Lights Bookstore -- also famous as a publisher for the late ‘50s prosecution of Allen Ginsberg's
Howl and Other Poems -- raided by the fuzz over
Joe Blow, an infamous parody of polite American family life, in which everyone in the polite American family has sex with each other. I mean, the porn
just writes itself!
I've had a good history with Robert Crumb. I remember walking into a comics store on my 21st birthday in 2002, having just finished my first legal drink, and setting down a copy of
Mystic Funnies #3 on the counter. "You know who drew this?" asked the owner. "Robert Crumb," I replied, the wisdom of 21 years and alcohol on my breath. "Hell," he said, "if you're old enough to know who he is you're old enough to read it." Then another guy in the back asked if that was a new comic or a reprint. "Nah, it's reprints," answered the owner, incorrectly, "he died years ago."
Just this past month, the undead artist and the big fancy publisher W.W. Norton & Company released
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, a big fancy hardcover of hot, heavy Bible adaptation, capturing every word of the sacred text on the comics page, though the result is still not unlike Crumb's Franz Kafka comics, or even his short biographies of blues musicians. After all, the artist is a child of the wordy, stolid layouts of vintage
Mad, calmly laid out to facilitate the Harvey Kurtzman or Will Elder madness inside even panels. Naturally, Crumb's own pages are more varied, but there's nonetheless a textual/visual
density present that's attributable, I think, to mid-century comic book styling. As the old saying goes, the division in ‘60s underground comics was mostly between those who liked the ‘funny' EC comics and the ‘serious' EC comics, though Crumb's influence stretched deep into the funny animal work of the period, the stuff upon which Coulton Waugh, one the early comics critics (among many other things), in his landmark 1947 study
The Comics, pinned the funnybook medium's hopes for salvation from gross realism. Whoops?
But let's not pretend 2009 isn't a very different time for comics, and that Crumb's Genesis isn't his belated entry into the "graphic novel" scene, primed for shelf space in a Borders or Barnes & Noble near you. There isn't a damn thing wrong with that -- and anyway, a small stack of Crumb collections and retrospectives have scattered roses on the road years in advance -- but the old-fashioned elements of the new book keep pushing my mind back to the underground days, when comics distribution via head shops was susceptible to drug busts (another sign of the times in the early ‘70s), and the comics themselves were as likely to get shoved around by the Miller Test as porn. In this way, an honest-to-God '70s porno based on those very underground comics makes sense.
The thing about porn, though, is that it's always been around. There were porn movies in the Silent Era, and porn comics (the famous Tijuana Bibles) were among the first-ever pamphlet-format comics. Appropriately enough, there was always
union. And of all genres, broad genres, your comedies and tragedies and melodramas, erotica is the most imposing. Of all entertainments, it has the most direct
facility. You really can ‘review' porn as if evaluating whether a refrigerator keeps food cold. To apply the wonderful manga euphemism: is it
useful?
Porn, if useful, or even if recognized as potentially
useful, can be anything. You wouldn't call many cell phone videos ‘drama,' but they absolutely can be porn. Drawings on a bathroom wall. Drawings on a page.
Joe Blow.
It's no surprise then that underground comics -- the big pushback against the square society and mainstream publishers that demanded no comic book story could question the wisdom of judges or bear the word Weird on the cover -- shared an outlaw appeal with cinematic porn, which had spent much of the ‘50s and ‘60s in a bifurcated existence, pressing gently aboveground against legal allowances as burlesque movies gave way to nudist films and no-touching nudie-cuties segued into softcore (simulated, or at least ‘no evidence') sex pictures, while underground works lurked in city peep shows and private clubs stocked with illegal purchases. Underground comics weren't illegal, but heck - they might as well have been.
Deep Throat wasn't the first hardcore picture to play in movie theaters, but it was the hit, the media event, the
icon to commemorate the reunion of the two streams of movie porn. That was in 1972, the year before they cleared out space at a university to have an underground comics convention. You see the cultural moment? Comics and movies are almost the same age, but porn movies would last longer than underground comics, because comics are small and movies are big, and anyway pictures of people and the impression of reality the cinema projects are probably more ‘useful' than drawings. Underground comics withdrew into the nascent Direct Market, while porn movies were eventually knocked back by videotape.
Looking at
Up in Flames -- obtained on beautiful DVD-R from Something Weird Video -- you can sense a kinship between the comics and movies of the time. I've been conflating the ‘porn' in movies with the ‘underground' in comics for a few paragraphs now, which maybe has some of you rolling your eyes; we're not all like my brother, who was told my Checkered Demon comics were underground and immediately said "so, porn?" N… no! Porn is something else! It's… it's mechanical sex scenes, doled out with rhythmic frequency! Sex is the whole point!
Joe Blow is satire, man!
Lost Girls is erotica! Porn is a device! A mechanism! Useful!
Yet
Up in Flames (its title a solid half-decade ahead of Cheech & Chong's
Up in Smoke) wants to be
funny too. Comical. It throws down the gauntlet in its title sequence, shamelessly plopping its performers and credits into details from Gilbert Shelton's artwork while blasting the Grateful Dead's
One More Saturday Night, no doubt used 100% legally. There is no credited director, although actor John Se[e]man (as Mr. Natural) seems a possible culprit, having helmed several pictures of the type (and indeed ‘directing' two of his female co-stars during a crucial scene). It's a rip-off, make no mistake; it's taking other people's work and piggybacking, in a way that Crumb's legal counsel would have tried to put a stop to, I presume, as he did with many other unauthorized uses.
It's also oddly
clever, however, in linking underground comics to movie porn, disreputable #1 to disreputable #2. The plot of
Up in Flames concerns the Freak Brothers' attempts to scrounge up some cash to avoid being evicted from their apartment; useful scenes ensue. Fat Freddy's Cat is present and accounted for, although he's black & white instead of orange. Indeed, Fat Freddy is dark-haired and rather slim - he looks about as much like his comics counterpart as I do Jake Gyllenhaal, and I am so much more handsome than him. Characters often over-emphasize how fat Freddy is, because obviously they
know. Mr. Natural also sometimes removes his fake Santa Claus beard, though his glasses and hair stay on.
The banter seems mostly improvised, though I liked a bit with an upstairs drug dealer pouring oregano into a dime bag and going "Hmm, a little Colombian. That'll make ‘em happy." There's a lot of walking around in live, stolen footage on the streets of the city, Phineas decked out in a flared jacket and a trucker cap. I'm not convinced anyone read many of Crumb's comics, since Mr. Natural keeps making goofy puns on the word Natural, and his main useful scene is accompanied by saxophone jazz instead of obscure acoustic recordings. On the other hand, the plot is resolved when Mr. Natural -- ever the scurrilous modern guru -- loans the Freak Brothers some potent Vita-Beans that drive women (such as their landlord) wild, which seems about right.
The useful scenes will maybe stun folks used to today's Evan Stone epics, in that they're not continuous; comedy and antics and bits of other useful scenes typically interrupt. One of the encounters takes place mostly off-screen(!!) and another focuses on the
missionary position, in an odd echo of the countercultural backwash of some porn of the time, providing for the enjoyment of the
performers as much as the viewer.
Movie/video/cinematographic porn is not like that today, not in its mainstream. Every image is designed to be useful, no matter how uncomfortable it truly is. It is fiction, iconography. Closer to drawings traced for superhero comics. David Foster Wallace once wrote of a man who looked at porn to see fragility register, to see performers lose control for just a second, because so much is performance. I think reality television operates the same way, because everyone knows it's as faked as balloon boy, most of the time, but it offers the
possibility of ‘real' emotion and unguarded reaction to appear in a polished setting, like all the polished settings on television, which we cannot escape, like porn.
Maybe that's what people try to warn us of when they say literary comics and big publishers are sapping the vital fluids of comics art. If porn movies are everywhere, comics are only around in specific places still, and their power comes partially from marginality while porn draws from its omnipotence, now cultural (thanks to the internet) rather than merely formal. So Robert Crumb draws the Bible, and it's strange to see his doubly-old style, ‘50s informed and ‘60s bred, blown up so big, taking on a big book for big box distribution. The underground got big too, back in 1973, but that was a different time and those were different comics, if still tipping on American comics' slapstick tendency to screw up at the most crucial moments, with the soul of a clown. Ah well. I keep reading and watching and studying, like a one-man Supreme Court with no binding authority.
Oh, and the Something Weird DVD-R release has a second feature called
A Star is Born, wherein some guys encourage women to try and make an effeminate guy a real man. They succeed.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
