READING BETWEEN THE PANELS

For those of you that don’t already know it, there is more to comic books than guys running around in spandex, flamboyant villains, and mystical super powers. Your parents, teachers, and the government (especially our current regime), however, would never want you to know it.
A little back story: In the Fifties, during the "Red Scare", McCarthy tried his damnedest to out regular Joes and movie stars alike in the name of anti-Communism. In much the same way, Dr. Frederic Wertham tried to convince the public that by letting your kids read comic books, they would grow up to be illiterate felons! In the end, the mainstream comic industry buckled, and created the "comics code" to regulate the content of comic books rejecting any references to sex, drugs, explicit violence, gore, and anything that could be perceived as a slam on cops or government. Even stories that were written as anti-drug propaganda were banned in the beginning. Now, parents, the public, and Middle America were happy, and the comic book industry could slug on until its next big boom.
However, there were still those who weren’t going to let the government tell them what they could write or draw. In the Sixties, creators like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman began using the medium of the comic book to tell stories that Middle America didn’t want to hear about. Stories about sex and violence were all the rage; kids rebelled against their parents. But comics about personal loss and family insanity were also relating to the youth of the day.
Spiegelman’s most widely known work, Maus, is a biographical retelling of his parents’ ordeal in Hitler’s Germany, as well as his relationship with his father in the current day. The art of comix (as the genre was labeled) was often much more stylized than the pseudo-realism of mainstream comics. It ranged from the very graphic to very line-heavy, with multiple layers of crosshatching employed for a sense of depth. Crumb would even employ aspects of Cubism into his designs.
As American tension boiled over the next few decades, comix were able to gain acceptance within society, take firm root, and now seem almost commonplace. Due to their nature, subversive magazines were often hard to find in the early days; a group of friends would sometimes need to pass one copy between them. Now, comics that deal with nearly the same subject matter are available in your local comic shop, right next to Batman and Spider-Man. Two of the most recognized are Jhonen Vasquez and Jim Mahfood. Vasquez often deals in insane tales of psychological trauma with an art style unlike anything I had ever seen before. Mahfood is a master of social commentary. Rooted in the bowels of the California drug scene, he has a very worldly and satiric view of public perception versus reality. He’s also not afraid to voice his opinions about music, government, fads, or people he sees on the streets. His very graphic (bordering cartoony) art infuses even the most dramatic scene, with a sense of tongue-in-cheek humor.
I know I’ve only scratched the surface of this, and I’m sure there are a lot of you out there who have tons of underground independent creators you’d like to share. Go ahead and email me. Tell me what you’re reading, and maybe I can help you share it with the masses of tastes like chicken readers out there. Give me your input. This column should be here for you, more than it is for me.
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