A circle of 1960s-70s activist-intellectuals around my Radical America magazine took a special interest in applying the dialectical theories of the Frankfurt School to the emerging “Counter-Culture,” applying them by effectively turning them upside down. That is, the cultural challenges of a young generation to capitalism and capitalist values amid the civil rights movement and the US war on Vietnam.
A new comic art emerged out of the proliferating “underground” newspapers, but also out of the poster art created for musical events. The “Underground Comix” flourished for ten years and collapsed into a much smaller field of “Alternative Comics.” In my second journal, Cultural Correspondence—like Radical America, entirely available on line, via Brown University—made a point of interviewing some of my favorite underground comix artists, including Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith. By the 1990s, writing for the Nation among other publications, I recognized that a new phase had been reached: comic had become recognized as an “art.”
The prospects for dramatic social change, dramatic challenges to American capitalism, had by this time long passed and would come again only in the 21st century. But elements of a reinterpretation of popular culture had indeed emerged, not so much in theory (“Deconstruction” had seized literary studies) as in areas of the arts themselves. The publication of Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, and its recognition in the Museum of Modern Art, prompted an irreversible development, accompanied by his magazine RAW. As RAW contributor and extraordinary comic artist Ben Katchor quipped, the magazine convinced readers that comics could be descendants of French poetry and obscure, avant-garde art forms—however improbable this might be.
Meanwhile, another influence on Radical America became increasingly clear. Pan African theorist C.L.R. James, the fluid Marxist inspiration to our circle, had offered in his famous study of sport, Beyond a Boundary, an inspiration for close study of a genre. We took this, by the 1990s, as encouragement for the study of the one overwhelmingly popular sector where Marxists or near-Communists had made an impact: film. My friends and i were able to interview the survivors of the Hollywood Blacklist, including such Academy Award winning writers as Ring Lardner, Jr. Most had their careers destroyed, but some, like Lardner, made a large impact in a return to work in film (MASH, the origin of the most popular television show in US history, and the most anti-war) and earlier in television he and friends, under assumed names, wrote “You Are There,” a semi-documentarian fictional show, and “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” a very satirical “outlaw” adventure. In short, they had found ways to break through restraints.
This recovered history, published in a series of volumes, allowed me to advance with collaborators into the newest comic art, with ample room for leftwing, anti-capitalist messages. A circle of artists had been publishing the annual World War 3 Illustrated since 1979, and from their circle, together with a handful of the survivors of the 1970s underground comix, I created WOBBLIES! (2005), a visual history of the Industrial Workers of the World, the most rebellious in US labor history, the most musical and also the most romantic.
Readers of this commentary can easily find my review-essays on various important comic artists and their books, over the last fifteen and more years. My collaborators and I have produced about a dozen volumes, from anthological studies of Bohemians, Beats and Yiddish writers to biographies of Emma Goldman, Che, Isadora Duncan, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Luxemburg, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Robeson, to adaptations of Howard Zinn and Eugene V. Debs. (Works on W.E.B. Du Bois and William Morris are in process.) I can only regret that my comics projects on Bernie Sanders are now suspended, with his socialistic campaign.
This is, in any case, where my study of comic art, arising in the “underground,” has led me. The continuing work to transform society and also transform the nature of comic art.
Courtesy Dr. Paul Buhle
