Now Hanging: Beefs and bummers, hang-ups and freakouts
Decider roams Madison's galleries looking for stimulation
All photos by Jessica Steinhoff
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
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You might not guess it nowadays, but Wisconsin was once a breeding ground for comic artists aiming to incite a revolution of ideas and an upheaval of the American way of life. Along with a few other places like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and New York City’s East Village, Milwaukee—and to some extent, Madison—was the place where hippie “happenings” were happening, both on paper and off.
As such, much of Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into Comix, 1963-1990, on display at the Chazen Museum Of Art through July 12, comes from the personal collection of Milwaukee-based comic artist Denis Kitchen, who launched the influential underground newspaper The Bugle-American and Kitchen Sink Press, one of the earliest publishers of the medium, between 1969 and 1970.
Before visitors even reach the exhibit, they'll encounter signs warning that “adult content” is festering inside the walls of the exhibition space. It’s an ironic statement, given that many of the works on display look like they’re made for children—at least at first glance.
The cover of issue No. 4 of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers could be mistaken for a Daniel Pinkwater children’s novel—and no doubt influenced the author’s goofy storytelling style—until you realize the zany characters in the drawing are lined up outside a welfare office. Joel Beck’s 1974 comic strip “Various Cells Of The Human Brain” resembles Shel Silverstein’s Where The Sidewalk Ends until you look at the content: Inside the caverns of the artist’s brain are multitudes of file cabinets, labeled with phrases such as “guilt trips,” “sex hang-ups,” “old forgotten beefs and bummers,” “shit on the nicest people,” and “revengeful hateful thoughts about everybody.”
Charles Burns' cover for Dope Comix No. 5, from 1982.
Across the room, Kitchen’s cover for the inaugural issue of Bizarre Sex depicts a giant phallus with a bloodshot eye as it bursts through the asphalt of a city street, scaring the bejeezus out of everyone in sight. While those who bought the comic in 1972 complained that there wasn’t much content to go along with it, pieces like these certainly paved the way for the “news” section of The Onion and those who aspire to join its ranks. As local blogger Shane O’Neill (of Screamin’ Cyn-Cyn And The Pons) recently commented, “If I worked for The Onion, I’d submit the headline ‘Debonair Erect Penis Dons Top Hat and Spinning Bow Tie for Night on the Town.’” Without underground comics, this kind of statement would probably lead to a shiner and a broken arm rather than a barrel of laughs and a spike in page views, as Joel Beck’s 1970 strip “The Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall And Rise And Fall Of The American Revolution” so poignantly illustrates.
These artists weren’t just broadcasting their beefs, bummers, and sex hang-ups to freak out children and their parents, though. They had a hell of a lot to complain about, especially during the heyday of the medium: the early ’70s, when the Vietnam War was escalating, anti-obscenity laws were making their way through the courts, and conscientious objectors were still pretty strange creatures to folks born before the Baby Boom.
Rage against hypocrisy, despair about the public’s loss of conscience, and feelings of being misunderstood run through many of the exhibition’s pieces, summed up by Gilbert Shelton and Dave Sheridan’s “Fat Freddy’s Cat … And His Friends.” The main character, a comic artist, laments that no one draws anything funny anymore and boasts that he could write a funny comic that’s not built upon human suffering, then clobbers a friend who derails his train of thought.
A sculpture based on one of R. Crumb's running sexual motifs.
Underground comics royalty R. Crumb takes these sentiments a mile further than most, offering alternatives to the homogenization of American culture rather than simply griping about it. A screen print of his famous 1979 strip “A Short History Of America” illustrates how the nation’s physical and spiritual landscape has deteriorated, beginning as a bucolic field of trees and deer and evolving into a treeless dump of used-car lots, gas stations, and booze ads. In the final panels, however, he offers three versions of the future: a scorched, barren field of rubble and shriveled roots; a creepy, Jetsons-esque scene with flying cars and signs demanding conformity; and “The Ecotopian Solution”: people living out of tents, bartering for vegetables and traveling with simple wooden pushcarts.
Just a few feet away, Crumb uses a cast resin of two of his characters ("Snoid and Host Woman") to scoff at the wave of political correctness that divided the underground comics community in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1973 Miller v. California decision, which determined that obscenity is subject to community standards of decency and not protected by the First Amendment. A large, confused-looking woman stands by idly as a nasty little man climbs out of her rear end, looking as if he's won the lottery. While there's a whole backstory to this image in his Snoid series, it's also a metaphor for the conflicted, post-Miller world of underground comics—and it's not pretty.
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