http://madison.decider.com/articles/now-hanging-beefs-and-bummers-hangups-and-freakout,28597/
Decider roams Madison's galleries looking for stimulation
by Jessica Steinhoff
May 31, 2009
You might not guess it nowadays, but Wisconsin was once breeding
ground for comic artists aiming to incite a revolution of ideas and
an upheaval of the American way of life. Along with a few other
places like San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and New York
City's East Village, Milwaukeeand to some extent, Madisonwas the
place where hippie "happenings" were happening, both on paper and off.
As such, much of Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics
Into Comix, 1963-1990, on display at the Chazen Museum Of Art through
July 12, comes from the personal collection of Milwaukee-based comic
artist Denis Kitchen, who launched the influential underground
newspaper The Bugle-American and Kitchen Sink Press, one of the
earliest publishers of the medium, between 1969 and 1970.
Before visitors even reach the exhibit, they'll encounter signs
warning that "adult content" is festering inside the walls of the
exhibition space. It's an ironic statement, given that many of the
works on display look like they're made for childrenat least at first glance.
The cover of issue No. 4 of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers could be
mistaken for a Daniel Pinkwater children's noveland no doubt
influenced the author's goofy storytelling styleuntil you realize
the zany characters in the drawing are lined up outside a welfare
office. Joel Beck's 1974 comic strip "Various Cells Of The Human
Brain" resembles Shel Silverstein's Where The Sidewalk Ends until you
look at the content: Inside the caverns of the artist's brain are
multitudes of file cabinets, labeled with phrases such as "guilt
trips," "sex hang-ups," "old forgotten beefs and bummers," "shit on
the nicest people," and "revengeful hateful thoughts about everybody."
Across the room, Kitchen's cover for the inaugural issue of Bizarre
Sex depicts a giant phallus with a bloodshot eye as it bursts through
the asphalt of a city street, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone in
sight. While those who bought the comic in 1972 complained that there
wasn't much content to go along with it, pieces like these certainly
paved the way for the "news" section of The Onion and those who
aspire to join its ranks. As local blogger Shane O'Neill (of
Screamin' Cyn-Cyn And The Pons) recently commented, "If I worked for
The Onion, I'd submit the headline 'Debonair Erect Penis Dons Top Hat
and Spinning Bow Tie for Night on the Town.'" Without underground
comics, this kind of statement would probably lead to a shiner and a
broken arm rather than a barrel of laughs and a spike in page views,
as Joel Beck's 1970 strip "The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall And
Rise And Fall Of The American Revolution" so poignantly illustrates.
These artists weren't just broadcasting their beefs, bummers, and sex
hang-ups to freak out children and their parents, though. They had a
hell of a lot to complain about, especially during the heyday of the
medium: the early '70s, when the Vietnam War was escalating,
anti-obscenity laws were making their way through the courts, and
conscientious objectors were still pretty strange creatures to folks
born before the Baby Boom.
Rage against hypocrisy, despair about the public's loss of
conscience, and feelings of being misunderstood run through many of
the exhibition's pieces, summed up by Gilbert Shelton and Dave
Sheridan's "Fat Freddy's Cat … And His Friends." The main character,
a comic artist, laments that no one draws anything funny anymore and
boasts that he could write a funny comic that's not built upon human
suffering, then clobbers a friend who derails his train of thought.
Underground comics royalty R. Crumb takes these sentiments a mile
further than most, offering alternatives to the homogenization of
American culture rather than simply griping about it. A screen print
of his famous 1979 strip "A Short History Of America" illustrates how
the nation's physical and spiritual landscape has deteriorated,
beginning as a bucolic field of trees and deer and evolving into a
treeless dump of used-car lots, gas stations, and booze ads. In the
final panels, however, he offers three versions of the future: a
scorched, barren field of rubble and shriveled roots; a creepy,
Jetsons-esque scene with flying cars and signs demanding conformity;
and "The Ecotopian Solution": people living out of tents, bartering
for vegetables and traveling with simple wooden pushcarts.
Just a few feet away, Crumb uses a cast resin of two of his
characters ("Snoid and Host Woman") to scoff at the wave of political
correctness that divided the underground comics community in the wake
of the Supreme Court's 1973 Miller v. California decision, which
determined that obscenity is subject to community standards of
decency and not protected by the First Amendment. A large,
confused-looking woman stands by idly as a nasty little man climbs
out of her rear end, looking as if he's won the lottery. While
there's a whole backstory to this image in his Snoid series, it's
also a metaphor for the conflicted, post-MIller world of underground
comicsand it's not pretty.
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