Underground comix

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Underground comics (or comix) are self-published or small press comic books that sprang up in the US in the late 1960s. The movement was centered in San Francisco, but also included important artists and publishers in New York, Chicago and Austin, Texas. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Vaughn Bode, Robert Crumb, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Rick Griffin, Bill Griffith, Jay Kinney, Jay Lynch, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, Robert Williams, Skip Williamson and S. Clay Wilson.

Mainstream comics are typically produced by a team (writer, penciler, inker, letterer, editor), while underground books were often done by a single person. Underground artists also contributed shorter works to thematic anthology comic titles, such as Funny Aminals (1972), edited by Terry Zwigoff with work by Crumb, Griffith, Lynch, Spiegelman and Shary Flenniken.

Underground comix reflect the concerns of the 1960s counterculture: experimentation in all things, drug-altered states of mind, rejection of sexual taboos, ridicule of "the establishment." The spelling 'comix' was established to differentiate these publications from mainstream 'comics'. The notion of comic books outside the mainstream was suggested by Harvey Kurtzman when he used the headline "Comics Go Underground" on the newspaper-format cover of Mad 16 (October, 1954). The term 'underground comics' was created by writer-editor Bhob Stewart during a panel discussion at the July 23, 1966, New York comics convention. On a panel with Ted White and Archie Goodwin, Stewart predicted the birth of a new type of comic book: "I want to say that just as mainstream movies prompted underground films, I think the same thing is going to happen with comics. You will have underground comics just as you have had underground films. This would be more like James Joyce in comic book form. You can see the beginning of this in some of the cartoon panels that have been appearing in the East Village Other."

The underground comix were largely distributed though a network of head shops which also sold underground newspapers, psychedelic posters, and drug paraphernalia. In the mid-1970s, sales of drug paraphernalia was outlawed in many places, and the distribution network for these comics (and the underground newspapers) dried up. Although many of the underground artists continued to produce work, the underground comix movement is considered by most historians to have ended by 1980, to be replaced by a rise in independent, non-Comics Code compliant publishing companies in the 1980s and the resulting increase in acceptance of adult-oriented comic books (see alternative comics).

The term "underground comics" is sometimes used more loosely to also include some contemporary alternative comics.