Comix: The Underground Revolution

Comix: The Underground Revolution
by Dez Skinn
Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004

Although I pride myself on having a pretty good knowledge of books devoted to underground comix, I only became (belatedly) aware of this history of underground comix a few months ago. 

'Comix' is a rather unusual book in that it uses a 8 x 8 inches landscape format. That said, the print quality is very good.

Dez Skinn (b. 1951) is of course a major figure in the history of UK comics, both as editor and publisher, and thus would seem to be well-qualified to write a history of comix. 

However, if essays published in 2004 and 2005 in the pages of The Comics Journal are any indication, 'Comix' has quite a bit of controversy surrounding it.

Patrick Rosenkranz accused Skinn of plagiarism by lifting text and illustrations from Rosenkranz's 2003 book Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963 - 1975 and placing them in 'Comix' without attribution. Skinn issued an apology and payment to Rosenkranz, and blamed the ghostwriters he hired to contribute content to 'Comix' for the transgression.

In another essay in The Comics Journal, well-known comix artist and writer Trina Robbins also expressed dissatisfaction with not being given what she felt was appropriate credit for contributing a chapter to 'Comix'. Skinn's defended himself by stating that he told Robbins beforehand that the book would not provide co-authorship credit to sub-contractors.

So with 'Comix: The Underground Revolution' we have a book to which a number of contractors contributed, which was assembled under Skinn's direction

'Comix' features 9 chapters, arranged in chronological order, that cover comix from the days of the 'Tijuana Bibles', on up to the early 2000s and the advent of 'indie' titles that can be seen (arguably) as the descendents of the comix of the 60s and 70s.

Skinn also provides a chapter on the underground comix scene in the UK, starting with the 1970 title 'Cyclops'. Most histories of comix are written by Americans and thus don't give much emphasis to the underground movement in Britain. Skinn's overview of the UK scene is informative and enlightening; I didn't realize that so many of the British artists that would become house names for DC and Marvel in the 90s got their start in the comix of the 70s.

The book's format mingles text passages with copious illustrations in a way that makes 'Comix' easy to pick up and difficult to put down. For the most part Skinn's prose (or rather, that of his contributors) is clear and straightforward, and often incorporates some sarcastic editorial comments that give it an opinionated tenor not usually seen in treatments of the topic authored by Americans.

Most of the titles and artists profiled in the book's early chapters will be quite familiar to anyone who follows the comix scene; after all, there are only just so many obscure comix still left to discover and discuss. 

Where 'Comix' breaks a bit of new ground is in Skinn's decision to devote a chapter ('Beyond the Page') to recounting how the San Francisco poster art movement, and its adherents Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, and Greg Irons, made the transition from advertising rock concerts to doing comix. This then segues into an overview of the contributions of comix artists to album cover art, all the way up to Robert Williams's fatefull decision to let Guns and Roses use his illustration for their debut album, 1987's Appetite for Destruction.

Skinn also earns kudos for providing coverage of the underground comix scene that emerged in the UK in the mid 1970s. Inspired by the American comix that were reprinted for the UK market, many artists began to write and draw their own creations and published them in Cyclops and Near Myths, to name a few UK outlets.

I didn't know that many of the superstars of the UK comics scene, who later would go on to fame and fortune for publishers like Fleetway, IPC, Marvel, and DC, got their start in the British comix of the 1970's.

'Comix: The Underground Revolution' concludes with a chapter devoted to the inheritors of the comix movement: the writers and artists of the 'indie' comics boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Not being much of a fan of the Hernandez Brothers, Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, or Chris Ware, I wasn't all that captivated by this chapter. But that's not to say others won't be.

The verdict ? While an argument could be made that more than a little bit of the book is content recycled from Rebel Visions, the presence of the chapters on the poster art intersection with comix, the birth of the movement in the UK, and the high quality of the reproductions of the covers and contents of comix gems and obscurities, combine to give the book sufficient redemption to make it a worthy addition to Rebel Visions and Mark James Estren's A History of Underground Comics as accessible overviews of the topic.