Search results for ""author brian doherty""

A complete narrative history of the weird and wonderful world of Underground Comix—now in paperback! In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of MAD magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture. Their “comix,” spelled that way to distinguish the work from their dime-store contemporaries, presented tales of taboo sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of society. Embraced by hippies and legions of future creatives, this subgenre of comic books and strips often ran afoul of the law, but that would not stop them from casting cultural ripples for decades to come, eventually moving the entire comics form beyond the gutter and into fine-art galleries. Author Brian Doherty weaves together the stories of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Harvey Pekar, and Howard Cruse, among many others, detailing the complete narrative history of this movement. Through dozens of new interviews and archival research, Doherty chronicles the scenes that sprang up around the country in the 1960s and ’70s, beginning with the artists’ origin stories and following them through success and strife, and concluding with an examination of these creators’ legacies, Dirty Pictures is the essential exploration of a truly American art form that recontextualized the way people thought about war, race, sex, gender, and expression.

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The first complete narrative history of Underground Comix, the countercultural movement from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s that forever changed comics In Dirty Pictures: How Nerds, Feminists, Bikers, and Potheads Revolutionized Comix, author and journalist Brian Doherty tells the wild history of the outlaw, outsider, and sometimes illegal world of Underground Comix. This subterranean subgenre of comic strips and books was printed in lofts on out-of-date machinery, published in handbound zines and underground newspapers, and distributed in headshops, porno stores, and on street corners. Comix—spelled that way to distinguish the work from its dime-store superhero contemporaries—presented tales of illicit sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of American society that was embraced by hippies, the fine-art world, and legions of future creatives. With a narrative that weaves together the stories of Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, and Art Spiegelman, among many others, Doherty details, in the first complete narrative history of this movement, the local scenes that sprang up in the 1960s and ’70s in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Chicago, and provides insight into the rivalries, ideological battles, and conflicts that flourished. The book begins with the artists’ origin stories and follows them through major successes, including Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Maus and Robbins’s Wimmen’s Comix, and tragedies, from S. Clay Wilson’s spiral into alcohol abuse that resulted in career-ending brain damage to Crumb’s neurotic running from his own success (and his use of controversial race and gender imagery), and ends with an examination of these creators’ legacies. Dirty Pictures is the essential exploration of a truly American art form that recontextualized the way people thought about war, race, sex, gender, and expression.

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