Underground and Alternative Comics

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If 1967 was the year American pop culture embraced the flower-power ethos of the hippie movement, 1968 was definitely the year the bloom faded from the rose. In 1968, opposition to the Vietnam War brought down a sitting president, Civil Rights...
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If 1967 was the year American pop culture embraced the flower-power ethos of the hippie movement, 1968 was definitely the year the bloom faded from the rose. In 1968, opposition to the Vietnam War brought down a sitting president, Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was murdered two months after that, and the popularity of mind-expanding psychedelic drugs was eclipsed by a worrying preference for toxic chemicals that transformed their young users into burned-out speed freaks and nodding junkies. From this disquieting cultural milieu, underground comix were born. Ignoring the content guidelines of the Comics Code Authority, whose seal was prominently displayed on the covers of comic books published by the likes of Marvel and DC, the genre is generally thought to have been born in February of 1968, when Zap Comix #1 was released by Apex Novelties of San Francisco. Featuring a cover warning that its contents were intended “For Adult Intellectuals Only!” and written entirely by Robert Crumb, Zap would quickly become a vehicle for rock-poster artists Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, “Checkered Demon” creator S. Clay Wilson, and Gilbert Shelton, who today is best known for his underground comic-book series based on a trio of lovable-loser stoners known as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. As a genre, underground comix were unrepentantly, even gleefully, amoral. It was almost as if underground-comix artists had taken the list of everything that was banned by the Comics Code Authority and made that their content guidelines. Thus, the pages of underground comix were filled with graphic depictions of everything from rape and murder to less egregious acts of run-of-the-mill depravity. For example, concurrent with the first few issues of Zap, Crumb and Wilson penned three issues of lewd and sexually explicit content via a title called Snatch. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Crumb occasionally...
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