Underground Comics

Underground comics, definitely not my cup of tea.  I struggled through some of the awful ones on the course resource page to find out that none of them really caught my attention.  Most of them were littered with extremely poor illustration and juvenile storytelling with not much of a purpose other than to make a disgusting sexual reference or throw out a racial slur and then move on to the next one.   I noticed from the class blog that most of our study would be centered around Robert Crumb.  So, I took the initiative and gathered up some of his comics, mostly “Mr. Natural” and got to reading.  Come to find out Crumb wasn't much better than the rest.

I say this because though he has relatively better craft and illustrative quality in comparison to most of the other underground comic illustrators, his material never says anything more than cheap blatantly racist and extremely immoral sexual references and acts.  I found this to be completely uninteresting in pretty much every aspect.  Come to find out he was taking hard drugs the entire time he was writing/illustrating these comics, which I can't personally respect either, as I'm much more of a hard working person that believes in full coherent understanding of your work and surroundings rather than relying on a substance to do the work for you.  I'm not even sure how some of these were thought to be acceptable for publishing as some of the acts just seemed so outrageous that I don't feel comfortable reiterating them on my blog.

I know I'm generalizing a lot when I write this, because I'm sure not every underground comic is like this, though from what I've looked at, it seems the majority is. During class I “read” one that I thought was interesting, it had decent art that had obviously been inspired by traditional comics but still had a sort of amateurish feel.  But, what made it interesting was not the art, but the fact that it contained no words, but it was really easy to follow panel to panel, and even included some memory scenes. I respect the scene for the fact that it put comics back into the hands of readers during a time when the industry was lagging.

Anyways, I think that's about all I can say about Underground comics, but I've already began reading “Maus” for next week and I'm really enjoying that one, so look forward to my thoughts on that!