The Gleeful, Chaotic World of Underground Comics

The Atlantic

18-04-2025

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Art Spiegelman, the artist most famous for his novel Maus, makes comix. No, that's not a typo, as he explains in an article The Atlantic published last week: Comix have a heritage distinct from the humorous strips found in newspapers. They're a gleeful blend of art and writing with roots in 1960s counterculture, X-rated cartoons, and the alternative press. Spiegelman is a well-known practitioner, but his path was paved by many earlier artists—people such as Jules Feiffer, who died in January at age 95, and whom Spiegelman remembers fondly as 'a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore.'
Another one of the genre's most influential figures, and the man who 'effectively invented' the form, is the id-driven, lascivious, hippie titan R. Crumb: an artist who 'dove to the depths not just of his own subconscious, but of something collectively screwy, bringing up all the American muck,' as my colleague Gal Beckerman wrote for The Atlantic 's May issue. Crumb's outlandish, sexual, over-the-top characters and drawings are the shoulders that a generation of artists stand on, happily or not. As Beckerman points out, Crumb is the author of 'brutal fantasies' about women that blur the line between commenting on cultural misogyny and replicating it. He also created satires of racism so blunt that a white-supremacist newspaper reprinted them approvingly.
Reading about Feiffer and Crumb made me think of another set of underground comics, ones that also present a world of unrestrained, gleeful havoc, though from a very different perspective—Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Drawn in the 1990s, the series follows Hothead, an avatar of rage and delight who happily rejects society's stereotypes of women. She's a Mohawk-sporting, unshaven avenger in leather boots who chases down and attacks rapists, smug businessmen, and misogynistic catcallers; she embraces being known as a freak. TV commentators and respectable strangers find her disgusting, but Hothead bashes back, and she likes it. Over the years, her adventures, which were released in zine installments, grew to include more moments of repose, self-doubt, and community. She receives calming counsel from her wise older friend Roz; schemes and jokes around with her cat, Chicken; falls hard for an easygoing lover, Daphne; and talks to her lamp, which is also the voice of God. (As in other underground comics, a searching, sometimes psychoanalytic core can be found below the zaniness.)
I first met Hothead in the anthology No Straight Lines, a 40-year survey of queer comics. She stands out even among decades of cartoonists' takes on the pressures of fitting in with heterosexual America. There she is, fighting back against the standards for respectable young ladies and promising to smash in heads on demand, with 'special services for incest & rape survivors' on offer. But DiMassa's creation has been woefully hard to find in recent years. Thankfully, New York Review Books will publish a Hothead collection this August. The sweltering, lingering days of summer feel like the perfect time for the title character to burst back out onto the sidewalk, bat in tow.
The Dark Weirdness of R. Crumb
By Gal Beckerman
The illustrator dredged the depths of his own subconscious—and tapped into something collectively screwy in America.
What to Read
A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, by Noliwe Rooks
Rooks's history of the educator, philanthropist, and civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune is more of a meditation on the effect she had on those in the Black community, including the author, than a formal biography. 'I think Bethune—her image, her statues, her name—may be a kind of talisman, or maybe a light, guiding, promising, showing a path,' Rooks writes early on. Over about 200 pages, Rooks unpacks Bethune's legacy in fighting racism, exploring her efforts to found a school and secure investors to buy land near the ocean and create Bethune Beach, the only beach in Florida's Volusia County where Black Americans could congregate without restrictions during Jim Crow. In 2022, a statue of Bethune replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall, where she represents the state of Florida. As Rooks puts it, the activist 'taught me that there is strength in numbers, always a reason to hope, and that if someone disrespects you and yours, it is in your best interest to find a way to use the metaphorical flag that professes your citizenship, rights, and humanity as a weapon, and 'get it done.'' — Vanessa Armstrong
Out Next Week
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