Notes on the Underground: A Brief History of Comix
"[T]he most direct influence on underground cartoonists," according to History of Underground Comics author Mark J. Estren, was a postwar publisher of crime, horror and satire known as EC Comics.
Described by Ben Saunders as "the most aesthetically ambitious and politically daring comic book company of the twentieth century," EC enjoyed only a brief heyday, from the late nineteen-forties to the mid-fifties. A climate of political reaction and moral panic (exemplified by the 1954 bestseller, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth) prompted the comics industry to establish a self-censorship regime called the Comics Code Authority (CCA). By 1956, the CCA had felled all of EC's titles but one: Mad.
Despite its short ascendency, EC Comics' spirit pervaded the underground comix of the 1960s. Cover art paid homage to the distinctive design of EC titles, and cartoonists' embrace of the grotesque and irreverent likewise channeled the publisher's style. But underground comix were not merely a new iteration of EC's audacious genre comics. They were also expressions of the counterculture, embodying both its liberatory possibilities and its callow self-regard. Some of the art form’s chroniclers maintain that the very term "underground comix" signified a countercultural commitment to transgressive free expression, with the "X" standing for "X-Rated."
As evidenced in the work of archetypal underground cartoonist R. Crumb, making a virtue of transgression can have many effects. It can unleash new creative and artistic possibilities. It can promote id-fueled bigotry and lowest-common-denominator laffs. And after a time, transgressive art can even end up committing the worst sin of all: getting kind of dull.
