OAF Curated Space
The Underground Is Always Outside
Curated by Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Dan Nadel

Underground comics remain one of the most misunderstood artforms. Born of the liberatory impulse of the 1960s American counterculture and honed in the 1970s and ‘80s, it has offered innumerable artists an outlet for trenchant cultural commentary, absurdist humor, psychedelic flowerings, confessional autobiography, and all-out fantasy. Nevertheless, the tremendous visual, narrative, and emotional diversity of underground comics has rarely been examined as a form of drawing. The works on view here are, with a single exception, drawings made to be reproduced in comics books and underground newspapers, which means they needed to be both striking images and move a narrative forward. The American underground encouraged and rewarded highly individual approaches to mark making and representation.

It was a place where artists of all kinds could flourish – it was about as far out as one could get, forever teetering on the edge of art and acceptability.

Phoebe Gloeckner 

A native San Franciscan of extraordinary talent, Phoebe Gloeckner (b.1960) was a young protege of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Robert Crumb in the late-1970s. She took inspiration from Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin’s confessional comics, creating meticulously drawn chronicles rooted in her life in, and observations of the lives of young women in a city and time of libertines, as in this first hand reportage from the early 1980s. Gloeckner’s graphic novel, Diary of a Teenage Girl, is widely considered one of the very best, and was made into an acclaimed film. 

Bill Griffith 

Bill Griffith (b. 1944) is best known for his clown-suited philosopher/media star Zippy the Pinhead, through whom the cartoonist has observed, shaped, and lampooned American life since the early 1970s, and continues daily to this day. The present story is the quintessence of Griffith’s approach: excellent draftsmanship in service to a laser focused sense of the absurd. Griffith was, with Art Spiegelman, co-editor of Arcade, The Comics Revue for its seven issue run in the mid-70s, publishing a number of the comic strips in this exhibition.  

Aline Kominsky-Crumb

Aline Kominsky-Crumb (b. 1948) is one of the key figures in underground comics, taking Justin Green’s self-excoriating approach to autobiographical comics and applying it to the life of a young woman from Long Island in search of love for herself and from others. She founded the seminal comics series Twisted Sisters with Diane Noomin in 1976, and, during the 1980s, served as editor for the influential alternative comics anthology Weirdo, to which she also contributed throughout its run. Limp Dick! Comics is an unpublished cover drawn in the midst of a brief break-up with Robert Crumb, who is featured front and center, with various players in life and comics forming a border. 

Michael McMillan

In 1969 Michael McMillan (b. 1933), sculptor and industrial designer,  saw an exhibition by the Chicago art group the Hairy Who at the Art Institute of San Francisco. McMillan was fascinated by the artist’s graphic panache and punning wordplay. Around the same heady time, he found Zap #1 at the store City Lights and thought, “why not try this?” And so he did, producing his own comic book, Terminal Comics, and contributing meticulously drawn riffs on old time movie serials, science fiction, and superheroes, filled with precise mechanical detail and poetic dialogue, to some of the best anthologies of the era, as with the present story for Young Lust. 

Barbara "Willy" Mendes

Of all the cartoonists in this exhibition, Barbara "Willy" Mendes (b. 1948), most ecstatically drew the utopia that so many in the 1960s imagined was just around the corner. She graduated from high school in 1966 and almost immediately began contributing comics and graphics to underground newspapers. OMA, drawn with a rare combination of exquisite design and detail, is one of the great picturings of psychedelic life for a generation of young people living out their fantasies and hallucinations in the edenic hills and valleys of Northern California. 

Diane Noomin

Diane Noomin (1947-2022) is an acclaimed comics artist and editor and creator of her alter ego, the glamorous and louche DiDi Glitz, whom she describes as “a suburban Sysiphus striving futilely to redecorate her life. She thrives on highly charged emotional scenes, valium and pepperoni pizza. She scrupulously examines and catalogs her physical flaws and any sign of incipient aging sends her into a panic . Wrinkles, dewlaps, crows feet, cellulite, flab and gray hairs are all featured in her self-flagellating litany of disgust.” Noomin She has been a central figure in women’s comics since the early feminist publications of the 1970s, co-founding Twisted Sisters with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and editing acclaimed anthologies of female cartoonists. The cover image of True Glitz is perhaps her finest drawing – an immersive rendering of DiDi’s domain, with period-accurate fashion, decor, and our hero’s classic come-on. 

Read The Comics Journal's John Kelly heartfelt obituary for Diane Noomin.

Spain Rodriguez

Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012), moved to New York’s East Village in the mid-1960s and began a nearly fifty-year run of publishing in Zap, Arcade, Weirdo, and numerous other books and magazines. In the pages of the East Village Other he introduced the world to Trashman, Agent of the 6th International, a kind of urban Marxist James Bond. Trashman Cover, 1969 was published as the cover for the very first collection of those classic strips, and became one of the most widely reprinted images in the underground, circling the globe in those heady years as a symbol of freak power and class liberation.

Gilbert Shelton

Gilbert Shelton (b. 1940) came out of the Austin, Texas cartooning, humor, and music scene of the 1960s, and joined the Zap crew in 1968. He is the creator of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, an affectionate, epic, and surreal satire of American life through the whacked-out adventures of three very different hippies. These pages, which chronicle the boys as they journey back to visit their parents, were published first in the the L.A. Free Press and then reprinted in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic book. They showcase Shelton’s eye for detail, dialogue, and page design, which included extra strips and advertisements, giving each one the feel of a classic Sunday comic strip page.

Robert Williams

Robert Williams (b. 1949) grew up drawing, fighting, and hot-rodding in Albuquerque in the ’50s. After art school, he worked for Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, custom-car genius and creator of Rat Fink, turned to the underground press in 1968 and a year later joined Zap. He began his painting life as a sort of psychedelic realist, of which Peripheral Bogies is a prime early example of William’s ability to combine lysergic perspectives with immaculate finishes to satire upper class life. Of this artwork,  Williams wrote: “This rather strange painting revelans an hysterical woman looking into a mirror which she is holding while being plagued by creatures in her peripheral vision. The double ring vignette around the scene represents the picture as seen by her.” 

S. Clay Wilson

S. Clay Wilson (1941-2020) was a lifelong comics-afficionado who fell in love with the Beats, motorcycles, and beer, and was galvanized by the wild and wooly poetry and art scene in Lawrence, Kansas. He began drawing densely packed visions of violent American encounters – hoodlums, pirates, partiers, bikers and all the outlaws of his America were crammed into his elaborate drawings, which were first released in the 1967 portfolio Twenty Drawings by S. Clay Wilson. Portfolio in hand, he went to San Francisco in search of comrades. These drawings, of which Untitled (Beer), changed the course of the underground. Robert Crumb said, "I was never quite the same after meeting Wilson… I studied the portfolio of drawings he had handed to me as he kept up a rapid, inspired patter, full of white- hot enthusiasm for a vast gamut of cultural subjects. The drawings were rough, crazy, lurid, coarse, deeply American, a taint of white-trash degeneracy. The content was something like l'd never seen before, anywhere, the level of mayhem, violence, dismemberment, naked women, loose body parts. huge, obscene sex organs, a nightmare vision of hell on-earth never so graphically illustrated before in the history of art. After the breakthrough that Wilson had somehow made, I no longer saw any reason to hold back my own depraved id in my work.”  

Rory Hayes and Jay Kinney

Rory Hayes was born and raised in San Francisco, and emerged as comics’ great primitive, drawing horror comics in a genuinely horrifying and hallucinatory manner. He was a true “artists’ artist” whose importance and influence continues to grow. Jay Kinney is a cartoonist, writer and co-founder (with Bill Griffith) of the romance satire anthology, Young Lust. In Schizo, Hayes and Kinney teamed up, Kinney drawing the “normal” life of Dale Clark, and Hayes the unleashed side of our man. The two artists passed the board back and forth in person and by mail to complete this ultimate psychodrama of square/freak life in the early 1970s.

Outsider Art Fair Paris

September 15–18
Atelier Richelieu
+1 212 337 3338
info@outsiderartfair.com
outsiderartfair.com

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