Rebel Visions: Underground Comix - Hardcover

Rosenkranz, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560974648 ISBN 13: 9781560974642

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2003

Synopsis

by Patrick Rosenkranz
A provocative chronicle of the guerilla art movement that changed comics forever. This comprehensive book follows the movements of 50 artists from 1967 to 1972, the heyday of the underground comix movement. Through interviews with the participants and other materials, Rebel Visions is the most intimate look ever at the people and events that forged the phenomenon known as underground comix, from New York to San Francisco, from the corn belt to deep in the heart of Texas, beginning that day in 1968 when R. Crumb debuted Zap #1 from a baby carriage on Haight Ashbury Street. Rosenkranz has spent over 30 years researching this book and acquiring the cooperation of every significant underground cartoonist who worked throughout this period, including Crumb, Gilbert (Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) Shelton, Bill (Zippy) Griffith, Art (Maus) Spiegelman, Jack Jackson, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, and many more. The book is illustrated with many never-before-seen drawings by all of the underground cartoonists and exclusive photographs.
HC, 240pg, PC

About this title

About the Author

Patrick Rosenkranz and his wife, Virginia, live in Portland, Oregon, where Rosenkranz serves on the faculty for the Northwest Film Center's Certificate Program in Film. He has written for various publications including The Oregonian, Western Horsemen, and High Times.

Reviews

Moving from year to year and town to town, through a revolving cast of artists and publishers, this story of revolutionary 60s art-making seeks to capture some of the frenzied scope and communal bonhomie that made the hippie counterculture click. The big names here are Robert Crumb, Robert Williams and Art Spiegelman, who emerge from the postwar era of conformity and repression into a period of broad cultural experimentation and self-discovery. Once the text moves beyond boilerplate mythmaking about San Francisco in the free love era, an interesting portrait begins to emerge-of ambitious, committed artists seeking to push their own boundaries, and with them the boundaries of society at large. In its detailed account of an art that celebrated sweating burnouts and libidinous creeps, the volume gives all the anecdotes and minutiae a reader might want. Lavishly illustrated with pages and panels from the underground press of the time (at least one per page), the book serves as a solid reference point for the developing styles of hippie draftsmanship. Crumb and co. round out a decade one-upping each other in degrees of explicitness and self-revelation, and leave behind a massive inheritance for future generations of doodlers to draw from. Illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The most lasting artistic legacy of the 1960s hippie movement, other than its music, is its eye-poppingly transgressive underground comics--black-and-white pamphlets that spread the counterculture message of sex, drugs, and rebellion to freak and straight alike. Rosencranz thoroughly documents the phenomenon, providing a year-by-year account of the underground scene, from 1968's Zap #1, which artist R. Crumb sold from a baby carriage on the streets of Haight Ashbury, to its crash in 1973 in the wake of obscenity rulings and a crackdown on head shops. During the period, the comics' subject matter mirrored countercultural concerns as they shifted from peace-and-love to antiwar, feminist, and other political messages. Rosencranz's writing may lack flair, but with personalities this colorful (the artists themselves provide fly-on-the-wall reminiscences) and art this outrageous (reprinted on nearly every page) to write about, who needs it? Many underground veterans, especially Crumb and Art Spiegelman, continue to produce significant, high-profile work, but their most lasting influence is seen in today's alternative-comics artists, who followed them in placing artistic expression above commercialism. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560974648
• ISBN 13: 9781560974642
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240