Night Class: Doodlers in dairyland
From the cover of an issue of Dope Comix, published by the Wisconsin-spawned Kitchen Sink Press.
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Though Madison’s full of old hippies, and not a day goes by without some UW tour guide mentioning the antiwar demonstrations that took over the campus in the ’60s, the radical acts of that era seem distant nowadays.
For Paul Buhle, however, it’s important that these events—and the ideas that inspired them—remain real and vital in the public memory. Once one of those protesting UW students, he’s since made a career out of studying the Left: founding the journal Radical America, creating the Oral History Of The American Left project, and authoring more than 30 books, including The Encyclopedia Of The American Left. He’s even an Ivy League lecturer, teaching Brown University’s latest crop of brainy coeds what "dissent and revolt" means.
Buhle returns to his alma mater on Thursday, June 25, to present a lecture at the Chazen Museum Of Art—Wisconsin Ideas About Comics! The Madison Underground, And As Far Away As Princeton And Mt. Horeb, In The Growth of Comic Art, 1967-Present—that combines his love of progressive politics with another passion: underground comics. In addition to being a prolific writer, Buhle’s a go-to editor of graphic novels by some of the most groundbreaking comic makers of the period, including Sharon Rudahl and Harvey Pekar.
Presented in conjunction with the museum's show on rabble-rousing doodlers like R. Crumb, Joel Beck, and Kim Deitch, the lecture will explore how Wisconsin, of all places, was the center of the underground comics movement during the last century, with an explosion of revolutionary ideas, subversive art, and alternative presses rivaled only by San Francisco’s. Buhle will tie together his theses on radicalism with his memories of the time when being bohemian was still a political act.
