'Dirty Pictures' by Brian Doherty
Art Spiegelman’s Maus made the news lately. The Holocaust-themed graphic novel has been targeted for banning in GOP-controlled school districts. Spiegelman’s origins in ‘60s counterculture comix are one of many threads sewn together in a history of that underground movement, Dirty Pictures.
Comix began, like so many vital things, in a subculture outside the academy—“a loose network of anxious, alienated wisenheimers trading their self-made comics and fanzines across the country,” writes author Brian Doherty. Acutely aware of adult hypocrisy, like smart kids everywhere and in every time, these artists turned their observations into sharp satire. They drew and circulated their comix in the period when the comic book industry operated under a strict code—designed like the old Hollywood Production Code to ward off government censorship—and American society was upended by Vietnam protests, the counterculture and psychedelia. In many places, you could be arrested for selling the drawings of R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins (the girl in the boys’ club), Spiegelman and others.
Doherty catches the human stories motivating the key figures in the comix movement. He doesn’t entirely overlook the Milwaukee connection, devoting several pages to Dennis Kitchen in a sketchy account that deserves a book of its own.
