Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [95]
“Will saw it and he just blanched,” Kitchen remembered. “I mean, he was virtually speechless. As I recall, he started to stutter. I said, ‘This isn’t exactly typical.’ He said, ‘I had no idea they were this strong.’ There were fans standing nearby—fans who recognized Will—but there was also a very young and virtually unknown Art Spiegelman, and as soon as he saw Will start to harrumph about these undergrounds, he stepped in to try to defend his buddies.”
Eisner had no interest in engaging in a public debate with Spiegelman or anyone else over the merits of the undergrounds. If this was the type of material published by the underground publisher, he wanted no part of it, regardless of how the business was run. Maybe the generation gap was too much to overcome. Rather than continue the conversation, he politely excused himself and left the convention. To Kitchen’s dismay, he didn’t return.
Given Eisner’s age and background, it isn’t difficult to understand why he might have been offended by the Wilson comix feature. Nor is it difficult to determine the appeal of comix to the underground artists and their readers. In the rebellious decade between 1965 and 1975, when the undergrounds took root, thrived, and eventually lost some of their impetus, the Comics Code of Authority stamp of approval stood nakedly in the world of comics as the ultimate symbol of the Establishment. Following the implementation of the code, comic books issued by the big publishing houses had been reduced to pabulum. With only an occasional exception, such as the Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow contributions to DC, or a Steve Ditko or Jack Kirby story about one of Marvel’s conflicted superheroes, comics had no heart and soul. They could be accomplished in their artwork, but their stories were vapid and their heroes predictable.
Stan Lee, though mainstream in his subject preferences and a good company man while working for Marvel, was intrigued by the popularity of the undergrounds. There was obviously a market for this new anti-Establishment material and money to be made. In 1974, he would approach Denis Kitchen and enlist his services in the production of a new Marvel title, Comix Book, but the title had no chance. The magazine-sized hybrid, a kind of cross between the undergrounds and Mad magazine, lasted only three issues at Marvel. Lee admired some of the work of a few comix artists, but, like Eisner at the convention, he had no tolerance for the excesses. “To be successful, they had to be outrageous and dirty,” he said. “I didn’t want to be dirty, so I abandoned it.”
The excesses, of course, were precisely what attracted readers to the undergrounds. To teenagers and young adults schooled in the hurricane mixture of rock ’n’ roll, radical politics, free and open drug use, and casual sex, the more excessive the comic book could be the better. There was no room for compromise in a country engaged in an extremely unpopular war, where political assassinations destroyed any faith they might have had in their futures, where a dissident voice might be silenced by law enforcement officials using petty drug busts and subsequent incarceration as a means of eliminating protesters. The undergrounds, sold in head shops next to black-light posters, rolling papers, and tie-dyed T-shirts, were further endorsements of their lifestyles. Freedom of speech, although wounded, wasn’t dead.
Robert Crumb, who preferred to use only an initial for his first name when signing his work, was nothing less than a god in the underground canon. Crumb had loved comics as a kid, and along with his brother Charles, he had created comics as a teenager, including a series of adventures involving a cat named Fred, later renamed Fritz. Suave, fast-talking, and oversexed, Fritz the Cat was just about everything Crumb was not. Harvey Kurtzman, editing Help! magazine after his stint with Mad, saw the feature when Crumb moved briefly to New York, and he gave Crumb a job at the magazine, working as an assistant for future filmmaker Terry Gilliam.