Is there anybody left here at this site old enough to remember Zap Comics and other "underground comic gems" from the 1960s? If so you must check out the Rise and Fall of Underground Comix from FoundSF. San Francisco is celebrating its history, and this is stop #5 on their web tour.
"At the peak of the underground comix movement—roughly 1972-1973—the Mission District was peppered with cartoonists all living within walking distance of each other. Few of the artists involved were San Francisco natives. As with the upsurge of the Beats in North Beach in the ’50s, and with the much-hyped love generation in the Haight-Ashbury around 1966, the influx of cartoonists attracted to the underground scene in the Mission pulled in participants from far and wide."
by Jay Kinney, from his essay "The Rise and Fall of Underground Comix in San Francisco and Beyond, in the anthology "Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78" (City Lights Foundation: 2011), edited by Chris Carlsson.
Zap #1, Robert Crumb's hugely influential comic book
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Jay Kinney at work in winter ’72-’73 Photo by Jeannie Schiff
At nearly the same time as Crumb was peddling Zap #1, another odd duck was founding what would soon prove to be the focal point for the San Francisco comix scene. Gary Arlington ... (started the) San Francisco Comic Book Company, one of the world’s first comic book stores, wedged into a tiny storefront on 23rd Street near Mission, in the City’s low-rent, mainly-Latino, Mission District. ...
In common with many of the underground cartoonists, Arlington had been a big fan of EC Comics, the small New York comics publisher who had published, arguably, the highest-quality horror, science-fiction, war, and humor comics of the early ’50s. EC had nearly been driven out of business when the comic book field was subjected to congressional hearings concerned about comics possibly corrupting young readers. A whole generation of EC fans was traumatized by the demise of their favorite titles (only Mad survived the debacle, and only by switching to magazine format).
The shared myth of EC’s martyrdom fueled Arlington’s hospitality for the underground artists stopping by his shop. Aided by certain psychoactive enhancements, Arlington was soon seized with the vision of the fledgling underground comix movement comprising a latter-day rebirth of EC.
When they had their fill of time at the drawing board, the cartoonists would wander by the shop and shoot the breeze with Gary and whoever else showed up. Surrounded by a mix of golden age comics pinned to the walls in stiff plastic sleeves and expanding racks of the new underground comix, the underground artists could develop a sense of their movement as situated within a comics continuum extending back decades.
For former flower children, hippies, under-ground comic fans, and other "adult intellectuals" who considered San Francicisco's Mission Hill and Haight-Asbury District, the Mecca of the late 1960s and early 1970s this review of The Rise and Fall of Underground Comics will be a Zap from the Past.
Keep on truckin' fellow travelers.
8:24 PM PT:
8:35 PM PT: Mr. Natural says 'keep on truckin'
8:43 PM PT: