 Thanks for coming out. I'm Nick Gillespie. This is the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie, script consultant Nick Gillespie, executive producer Nick Gillespie, key grip Nick Gillespie. But today's guest is Brian Doherty, my longtime colleague at Reason. You're now a senior editor. Oh yeah, that's a very senior editor. And you're the author most recently of Dirty Pictures. Have an underground network of nerds, feminist misfits, geniuses, bikers, potheds, printers, intellectuals, and art school rebels, revolutionized art, and invented comics. Who did you have to leave out of that subtitle? The favorite term that I pushed for and didn't end up was messiahs, because there are two different characters who saw themselves as messiahs in this book. Von Bode, who was the cartoon messiah, his name he used in his public performances. And Barbara Mendes, who used the name Willie as a cartoonist, who has a peculiar vision of Judaism, which she explained to me at great length, where she sees herself as a female messiah, which is what she believes God would do. God would not do the obvious thing and send some man from a shul to be the messiah. We'd send them an underground comics artist. Did you introduce her to the good news? I mean, the messiah has come. Yeah, no, she introduced me to the good news. She has painted beautifully elaborate versions of three books of the Bible, where she sort of outlays in a sort of comic format of painting every single verse of the Bible, gets its own panel illustration, this magnificent stuff. And my entire interview with Barbara Mendes, who was one of the most fascinating characters I met, is gonna run on the comics journal website sometime in the next few weeks. Do you have a quick and the type of mean joke that Von Bode might appreciate if he were still alive to appreciate it about how he met his end? Yeah, Von Bode wasn't, I was gonna say the word early, I don't know this true. He is the earliest case I know of, of a person prominent enough whose death is recorded by history of autoerotic asphyxiation. He did it frequently. It's a funny, weird, and also kind of touching story that's told in decent detail in the book, because his son Mark Bode, who has carried on the tradition of his art, Mark Bode still draws in his father's style and his father's character, was a young boy, five or six I think the details are in the book, was waiting outside. And I believe the detail is the last thing Von did before the autoerotic asphyxiation went wrong was like slip some money under the door so his son would have money for lunch. And he attached a certain visionary patina around it. He would say, you know, I go, again, I might state the details a little wrong there in the book more precisely. You know, he travels to God country and sees God and he did it one time too many and something went awry and he died at Jay Lynch, a very interesting cartoonist and character in the book was convinced that Von Bode faked his own death for reasons that the historical record did not make quite clear to me but he took this seriously enough that he like had his friends investigated. He thought Von had just slipped off to Canada and France for some reason I could find no evidence this was true. I think Von Bode did indeed die. What was that? A lot of erotic asphyxiation. With that as an amused bush, tell me what is the elevator pitch for dirty pictures? Yeah, comics as an art form have been transformed in the last 30 years into something that serious publishers regularly publish, book length comic books that are called graphic novels or graphic memoirs, museum exhibits of comics and more common. They've really taken sort of low brow to high brow change and I thought it was interesting that the key figures that led to that happening were people who started in the gutter, they started being very deliberately grotesque, kind of taking commercial comics even to a lower place in kind of cultural and attitudinal terms but by breaking the barriers of what it was acceptable to do with stories told through drawn pictures they advertently, it was advertent, I think. I don't think it was advertent at the start but it became advertent to some of them that hey, we started maybe by drawing absurd stories about talking turds but by realizing that we can draw and sell and get fans for stories about talking turds, we have a new sense of what you can do with comics and then the talking turd guy is specifically Art Spiegelman, one of the spines of the story and almost certainly the most important figure in this change and the very same comic book that contained his talking turd story also contained his original three page version of mouse which became kind of the lynchpin of the pivot of comics from disreputable nonsense to extremely serious and important American art and that seemed ironic and interesting and that I could write a whole book about it actually arose from a feature article I did for reason focusing on the fact that these comics actually were illegal like people actually were arrested in the late 60s and early 70s for selling these comics. None of the artists ever got arrested because it's hard to find the artist but it's easy to find the poor schmuck behind the counter of a bookstore who sold it to an undercover cop and so this happened a fair amount and that comic's revolution in taste and cultural cachet arose from that kind of scenario. It seemed interesting to me and the characters in it were super interesting and I tried to let their voices carry the story. There's not a lot about like what I think of all of it in this because they spoke for themselves very well and very eloquently. Let's talk about, I mean Art Spiegelman we'll get to him in a second. Let's talk about the other kind of leading figure in all of this who is Robert Crumb. Who was Robert Crumb and why is he so important to underground comics? And I guess now that I've asked you one question I'll ask you five more before I give you a chance to answer that, but explain what's the difference between an underground comic and a surface level or above ground comic. The business and distribution models were distinct and obviously the content was also distinct but the content could be distinct because the business models were distinct and Crumb can get complicated but I'll make it less complicated. Like I think it is fair to say and most people say that Crumb invented the underground comic book, the object, the pamphlet that looked like a normal comic and it was 32 to 48 pages and you put it next to Superman and they seemed like the same thing if he didn't look too closely, just in the shape. He invented that. He did not necessarily invent the style of drawing weird hippie-druggy personal stuff in comics form in the bookets and all this but he invented the comic book and he was a comic book hit. He was a weird nerdy tortured child with a very strange childhood who was bullied by his big brother Charles at age nine into drawing dozens of full length comic books. Like he was the Crumb chain gang, like his brother forced him to do it and it got in him and they were early fans in the community of comics and humor fanzines across the country. The most prominent one that him and his brother did was called Foo, F-O-O. So he was just a comic hit and it was ingrained in him at how he understood the world and he somehow got it in his head and it's really interesting to see the stuff he drew in the 60s before he published the first issue of Zap comics. Crumb's first comic was called Zap. It started as a solo Crumb thing and then a team developed to do it. He was drawing all the stuff in the 60s that there was no chance anyone would publish it sort of these protographic novel-y things, some of them starring his most famous character Fritz the cat. He was just compelled to do it. He didn't know why he was doing it. He didn't know that it could ever lead to anything. It was fascinating. I mean, there's probably lots and lots of egocentric kids who write letters to their friends about how they're gonna completely change the art form they love. I imagine there's lots of them. That was intriguing to come across the one who his letters to his friends, he wrote when he was 16 or published later and you see he was right. He had this crazy dream that couldn't come true and it did and he made it happen and he was just really great at it. And whether the book is not really shaped by my aesthetic judgments but it is universally acknowledged by everyone who followed that he was the greatest and he showed them the way and they understood that you could do things with ink on paper that they didn't believe you could do. Briefly, talk about fanzine culture because I think people in this audience we're all on the other side of an era of fan culture where fanzines were a thing or you could somehow, I mean, there were magazines like People that are kind of like fandom become like a time life property and things like that. But what were fanzines like in the late 50s or early 60s? Because this is set against the backdrop of mass culture at its most massified where it's like post-war culture, everybody is a conformist, there are three television networks, there are five publishers and there's very little individualism in the stuff that you buy at the store. What were fanzines doing and what did they look like then? Yeah, they were produced, this was most of them, and the year I'm writing about was before xerography was convenient to most people. So they were reproduced by, if you're sort of our age, you might remember like the Ditto machine in school and even more obscure technologies like the Hectograph where you would have this gelatinous mass that you would mush the image on and put a chemical and then if you pressed paper on the gelatinous mass, it would transfer the image to the paper. So they were generally done in, you know, editions of 20 to 50, generally by smart ass weirdo kids, teens who would find each other's addresses in like the letter pages of Cracked Magazine and they would just, and Krum arose from this, Spiegelman arose from this, he did a fanzine called Blase in 1962, Crumbs was Foo and then some others, Jay Lynch, Skip Williamson, and they all corresponded, you know, I guess it's kind of proto-internet-y in a sense and luckily Jay Lynch was a pack rat and all of his papers ended up at Ohio State University. So I got to read dozens, probably hundreds actually of the letters, these teenage wise-acres were sending to each other and they would get like the local TV show hosts to mention their zine and someone's mom knew someone at the New Republic and they could get their zine and DC Newsstands not really, they were convinced Mad Magazine was stealing ideas from their zines, just super enthusiastic weirdo kids who were very excited to find someone else who shared their passion. And I have in the book one of the more eloquent poetic passages that I liked a lot in my book kind of goes into this, I'm not gonna be able to reproduce it off the top of my head but I found myself very much falling in love with these kids and their visions and it's especially layered when you know that they did it, like they did change and I think where you're getting as we do live, they were kind of one of the first waves of fans of popular culture taking over popular culture. You know, comics beforehand were just made by professionals, you know, not necessarily people who loved or had a passion for the meat and there's a complicated question and I think a lot of them had a little more love for it than they would admit if you ask them but comics were the pop genre that first saw people who were fanatical fans of it take it over and it happened in superhero comics as well but with characters like Spiegelman, Lynch, Williamson and Crom, it was humor fans because they were, you know, we sort of think of comics as mostly a superhero thing or a manga thing. These particular kids we're talking about were fans of satire zines, mad and the things that followed mad. Mad was the thing that inspired all of them. Like none of this would have happened without Mad Magazine, particularly the early Mad Magazine by Harvey Kurtzman which sort of showed them, you know, as smart ass alienated kids, I sort of had a sense that there's something, you know, it's like a whole salinger thing like there's something ersatz about this culture around me, the things my parents are telling me. They're very phony, right? Exactly, that's how we would especially say it. Yeah, talk about Mad because I wanna work through in my shorthand, in my notes, I have, you know, this is kind of the story of three magazines all with three words or three letters in the title, Mad to Zap to Raw and we'll get to the latter two ones but what was Mad Magazine and how many people here have read Mad Magazine? How many of you grew up loving Mad Magazine? Actually, or maybe even having a subscription which was an odd thing, right? Okay, so a fair number of people. What was Mad and why was that, why is that so central to the experience of the people that you write about in here? Yeah, there's actually one specific Mad cover that various of them are like this one cover was a Basil Wolverton cover. It was meant to be like a fake life magazine of like America's most beautiful girl or whatever. It's one of, if you know, Basil Wolverton's one of his sort of slavering grotesque, you know, spaghetti-browed, weird women and you know, kids seeing it between the age of nine and 11, you know, just like it just blew a circuit in their heads and they, as they articulated it like it, again, it showed them like they had a sense that there was something not on the level about adults and politics and advertising and even comic books themselves and Mad sort of helped, you know, rip that veil of illusion from their heads in cartooning, especially early day, the Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Will Elder, Wallace Wood, just highly skilled and vivid cartooning and that these people are cartoonists, you know, is key. They thought and saw, you know, visuals meant a lot to them and just the way these people reproduce reality and magnified it and mocked it and satirized it and just turned them all into artists and it turned them all into cartoonists, which was another through line through this is in the late 50s, early 60s, it was when abstract expressionism ruled arts education. So a lot of these people actually tried to do an arts education thing and some of them actually got arts degrees, but they all felt completely alienated because they believed in drawing, they believed in good line work and good draftsmanship, which was completely devalued in the world of art in the time that they were getting educated. So abstract expressionism was, there really should be nothing on the page that was humanly recognizable as human or a shade- Yeah, it's all about color and form, yeah. Not about draftsmanship at all and these people all wanted to be great draftspeople and some of them were, some weren't, but- What was going on in the, I mean, talk about it in like, you know, the book cover has partly the comics code symbol somewhere on it, kind of obscured. What happened to comic books in the 50s that kind of degraded them as a cultural form? Yeah, yeah, that's key. Spain Autor, I guess, has a great riff about that, that I reproduced in the book. So yeah, and Madd started his comic book in 52 and a couple of years later, a much written about, so I don't need to get into it much here and I don't get into it that much in the book, a sort of wave of anxiety about what comics we're doing to kids swept the nation and there were Senate hearings and big books about the seduction of the innocent Frederick were them, you all probably have heard of that. And so E.C., the publisher of Madd, who also published a bunch of high-level science fiction horror comics that most of these kids loved as well. Madd had to become a magazine and then Harvey Kurtzman, the guy who created it was squeezed out. All the other E.C. comics just disappeared entirely. The comics code was self-imposed by the industrious sort of a way to get the cultural heat off of them. It was not explicitly a governmental act, but it was a reaction to the threat of governmental acts. But it's like the movie writings of the 60s, right? Where it was kind of forced on the Hollywood. Right, but also like they had no option because comics were thought of as for kids. Like there wasn't an option, then if, yeah, we'll rate it and so these are for kids and these are not for kids. It was just like, no, we have to rate it to say that it is for kids. And there was a whole list of things they could not do. They could not question authority, make police seem bad. They couldn't talk about zombies. Yeah, yeah, there was a lot specifically aimed at horror comics and E.C. people think specifically E.C. You couldn't use certain words and titles. Like the word zombie was verboten until sometime in the 70s or 80s, right? Like that's why there were Marvel comics that would talk about zuvenbies. Because zombies were out, right? Yeah. And so in Spain, Rodriguez has a great little riff about how that like seeing is like he thought America stood for freedom. And then through these comic books that he loved, he felt the hypocrisy of the whole system was revealed and it made him want to be a rebel and like he literally joined a motorcycle gang. He was a comic artist who was also a biker gang guy and it led him on this whole life of transgressive, you know, wild art because he was offended that the land of the free was a land of hypocrisy and he felt what happened to the comic books he loved was made that seem true to him. So in a way, I mean, one of the things I loved about the book is that it fills out a kind of parallel journey in comics that you saw in literature and poetry with say like the beat movement who were also rallying against the phoniness and the prefab nature of mass culture by all kind of acting and dressing exactly the same way, but rebelliously, right? And the same thing with rock and roll and things like that. Talk about the ways in which the, what was the primary act of rebellion? Because part of it is just, you know, talking about things that are not supposed to be talked about in pleasant company, right? Oh yeah, I mean, you know, I didn't, I got derailed a little, I started talking about the business model and that's actually key to this is, you know, Krum found just fellow hippie weirdos to print and the very first, you know, the first guy involved in the attempt to print it was a girl named Charles Plamel who was a kind of minor figure in the beat scene as well. So there's kind of a direct lineage between comics and the beats through the man who owned the multi-lif that printed the first issue of Zap. And the idea was, you know, if you worked for a comic book, a normal comic book company, you just were doing work for hire, you worked for a company. Comics, underground comics did not work that way. You know, the artists drew what they wanted to drew. They found publishers and printers who were willing to print it and they retained their copyrights and they were paid more in theory. They were paid on an author model of, you know, you were paid royalties based on sales and there'd be multiple printings whereas in the normal comic book world, you just got paid for a page and you didn't own any of it anymore. So they imported largely just out of like a kind of hippie grooviness and crumbs willfulness, the model of literary publishing to the world of comics. And of course, the people publishing them, you know, the company's stories are told in here as well. You know, the most prominent ones are Last Gasp, Rip Off Press, Kitchen Sink Press. There were some smaller ones but there was a print mint, you know, those were the dominant ones. The artist kind of, force is not the word but they made, they found people of like minds who were willing to do business that way. Like as far as I could tell, no one who wanted to get in the business of printing and distributing underground comics questioned that. It seemed like, yeah, natural, of course. You drew it, dude, it's yours. Yeah, we're here to help you print and publish it. And you know, obviously there's stories of artists complaining about them not getting paid exactly as much as they should, as always happens. And then there's stories, some of which are in here, of the publisher saying the artists were a bunch of whiny bastards and they don't know what they're talking about. And like they think I had some secret warehouse of comics selling out the back door, you know, no way. But it's actually striking compared to say like typical printing or the music industry for sure. Like you don't hear the same stories of artists getting ripped off. Not wholesale, you know. Like I said, a lot of the artists do think that occasionally there'd be another 10,000 printing that maybe I didn't get told about. I think that was probably true on the margins, but for the most part, no. And in fact, some of what shapes this book was shaped by what you had access to, like print mint, one of the big ones. Their papers do not exist anymore that I could discover. Ripoff presses literally blew up in 1986. They had their warehouse above an illegal fireworks factory that literally exploded and destroyed. There's something out of beautiful about this. All of their records, yeah. Last gas still exists. And I tried to talk them into letting me into their files and they just didn't. But Kitchen's Impress, Dennis Kitchen was still alive, donated his company's papers to Columbia. So I got to go through them and Dennis and I saw the record, it's true. He was so bending over backwards to keep these people supported. Like he would give them money that they hadn't earned yet. He's like, oh, you know, whatever. Here's, you know, whatever you need. This is the paid rate. If you need more, tell me and you'll get it. And yeah, the publishers generally were very nice to the artists and the artists mostly appreciated it. So let's talk about Zap specifically. And in the copy of Reason that is out there, there's an excerpt from Brian's book that is about Zap comics. And I guess just as a starting point, and I'm kind of backtracking myself, there are multiple stories in here where people bring something to a printer and the printer just is like, this is obscene garbage and I'm just destroying it. Yeah, there. So this is part of the world that, I mean, it's hard. Even, you know, whatever we're talking about in terms of censorship or repression of speech. I mean, like today, which is real and important to talk about, but like compared to back then, it's an unimaginable country. Yeah, and as I alluded to earlier, people actually literally were arrested for selling these and frequently as Nick alludes to a printer. You know, there was the publisher who was the business entity, but it gets a little complicated. But most of the publishers did not own a printing press. The publishers are jobbing out the physical thing to some other company. And it was often quite a trouble to find the one who would not just say, you know, we looked at this thing that you just pay this to print and not only you're not getting it, you're not getting your plates back. You know, screw this, this is obscene. So they found a handful of people, Shannon in the Midwest and Waller in San Francisco, who they ended up relying on because they could be relied on to actually go ahead and print the thing. There was a funny one, Shannon in the Midwest was pretty cool about most of the Pornie comic books. But then Kitchen Sink was trying to publish a feminist Pornie comic called Wet Satin. And that pushed the guy too far. He was someone who everyone agreed was normally a very First Amendment defending guy, but he found Porn created by and for women. And I didn't talk to the guy himself, but the sort of the paraphrase of what the publisher remembered the printer saying is like, well, you know, the male stuff, that can be seen as kind of funny, but like this is, he's feeling there was something about the feminine mentality that he did not want to understand that was being expressed in Wet Satin. So he refused to print it. And Kitchen had to have it printed in San Francisco. So yeah, it was a difficult world to publish things that people thought of as naughty. And that's, you know, why the book has the title it does. I will tell you that some of the artists in the book I've already heard from resent the title. And I can understand why they might resent their great artistic expression being reduced to this concept. But the fact, which I've said to some of them, we'll say to more is literally underground comics were incredibly aesthetically diverse. The level of craft was diverse. The level of intention was diverse. The level of subject matter was diverse. But literally the one thing that is the through line true of every single character in this book is that they either drew publisher distributed what the mores of the time considered dirty pictures. And that was important. You know, I alluded to this earlier that it is, it can get a little intellectually indefensible sometimes if you actually look at some of these comics including like Zap issue for the most censored and the most arrest causing underground comic of all. Some of you are like, what the, you know, why? Why would you draw this? And the New York Times asked Crom about the story in that issue in particular. And he's just like, I don't know. I was just being a punk. You know, there is. What was the story? Can you paraphrase? Yeah. Embarrass everyone here. Yeah. It's called Joe Blow. And it's basically, it's an incest riff, you know. It's just a bunch of drawings of a family having incest and sort of punchline-y way it ends. It sort of twists to the sort of social realist parody where the parents are like seeing their kids go off and like, oh, our children are gonna, you know, be the vanguard of the future or whatever. It did, you know, we talked about this a little. There is a lot about 60s and 70s culture that I think is difficult for people who, you know, were, grew up past it. That there was a sense, an explosive force in being able to draw and say things that everyone in the world was not telling you, you couldn't draw or say. Like if you kind of came of age in the 80s or 90s, there was very little that you probably felt you couldn't draw, say, or publish. I think now in the 20s, it's kind of turning around a little bit for some different reasons, which we don't get it like that sense of we shouldn't say or publish certain things. It's coming back a little for different reasons. And so maybe someone who's 10 years old now is gonna get that sense again. But yeah, and it is difficult to get across, oh no, there's really intellectually interesting. It's like, oh no, it's just, you know, a cock shooting come or whatever. But like that stuff meant something to you when you were told you couldn't do it. And this kind of explains why Ed Sanders, the poet and member or founder of The Fugs who later wrote a Charles Manson book, et cetera, but he had a journal called, or a magazine called Fuck You, A Journal of the Arts in the early 60s. And that's like, wow, that's kind of revolutionary. Whereas now we're people like Terry Southern to name check like other, you know, pathbreaking 60s people who just don't seem very funny anymore. Letting Bruce is actually kind of like that. Yeah, and I think that's, you know, there's not a lot of aesthetic critique in my voice in this book, which is probably a great idea for various reasons. But yeah, I think it could be fair. Like if someone's like, oh, let's sit down and read a bunch of underground comics from 68 to 71 and like, are they greater, are they amazing? A lot of them would kind of, I think in graphic expressiveness terms, they still hold up very, very well in, sometimes in storytelling terms, not so well, but there was a lot of that repressed id energy coming out that is appealing to me and has proven appealing over the years to enough people that luckily, you know, Abrams thought this book exists and I'm glad they did. Did I get derailed? Yeah, well, before we go back to Zap, you know, specifically as a kind of publication, just to kind of dilate on that a little bit more, I mean, when you talk about the artistic expressiveness, it struck me and again, I was kind of transposing this into other kind of forms that broke out, you know, underground comics seemed like the velvet underground or something like where, you know, you have the Beatles doing like, you know, pretty incredible stuff and everything, but it's like, it's so shiny and it's so perky and bright and like parents can listen to it and little kids can listen to it and hippies, like, you know, acid heads can listen to it and then there's the velvet underground, which is doing something very different and dark, but meaningful and important. I mean, yeah, the rough dirtiness, absolutely. Like, yeah, I, when I first encountered, you know, I am not a lifelong, I'm a lifelong aficionado of comics. I'm not a lifelong aficionado of underground comics because a subway shop in Gainesville, Florida in the mid-70s, this is, I cannot verify this, this is just a memory, but I have a memory and that this existed fits my understanding of the culture, so I believe my own memory. It's like 75, 76, had like a mural in the style of like S. Clay Wilson or Robert Cromby, you know, cause like underground comics were still kind of a big thing then and I just remember finding it, it made me feel weird, you know, I didn't, I don't like it, I don't like it, I don't like it. And then I became a comics fan. It should be, it's a cartoon, it should be funny, it should be nice, right, but there's, yeah. Yeah, it's just saying something about the world and about adulthood that felt scary and unpleasant and then, you know, I became a serious comic book nerd as a kid and I began subscribing to the comics journal when I was like 11 and they would write about the undergrounds and print these images and yeah, I just, I was scared of this stuff. I was exposed to it too early and there's some other anecdotes of this from cartoonists in the book, like it can be very off-putting and then you dig a little deeper and maybe if you were, you know, a sensible person, you'd be even more off-put, but I was not more off-put. So, I'm intrigued. We go from Mad Magazine in the early 50s which is, you know, satirizing and parodying, you know, advertising and Broadway musicals and big movies and stuff like that, the way the news gets taught, et cetera. Zap is created by Robert Crumb, the first kind of underground comic book, not the first underground comic. Talk a little bit about Zap and why that's so important. Sure, Zap, again, is just widely recognized as the best and it was the best and it was the first and then it was great because it was Crumb and then Crumb slowly over the years allowed six other artists to join and there's a lot of great controversy that I find interesting, called in the book about whether they should make it open to all underground cartoonists, which Crumb wanted to do. But Crumb, I told you, he was bullied by his brother. Crumb kind of, all through his life, has allowed himself to be bullied by the people around him and he allowed his partners in Zap to bully him into not letting anyone else in. But I'll read the names of them to you and if you know this stuff, you'll see, oh yeah, okay, I see why Zap would be the greatest because it was Crumb and S. Clay Wilson and Rick Griffin, who came from the psychedelic poster scene, Victor Moscoso, also from the psychedelic poster scene, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, who invented the Fabulous Very Freak brothers and Wonder Warthog and Robert Williams. Robert Williams is one of the great success stories of comics. He is the one who has moved on to the most prominent career in gallery art. He became a painter and sort of the founder and leader of what's called the Lowbrow Art Movement, a great success story. So these guys, they were just all great. You know, there's a great quote from Crumb in here when he was fighting with his Zap partners later and sort of trying, Crumb was constantly trying to escape. He just wanted to quit, you know, he, Crumb, he's an interesting character. He's constantly letting other people tell him what to do and feeling like he wants to escape and he was complaining and bitching about his partners in Zap. But he said, you know, I gotta admit, every issue is a fucking masterpiece of graphic wizardry and that's what it was. I mean, they were. These guys, you know, look them up if you don't know their work, like especially Moscosso and Griffin and Williams as well, I'd say the ones you just like, they can do things with ink on paper. That's just extraordinary to look at. And there was a great mix to, you know, Williams sort of explained it to me pretty well when I interviewed him. He's like, Zap was a mix of everything comics could do. Like Moscosso and Griffin were more on just the like, there wasn't really stories you could follow, you know, though if you were high, you maybe thought there were. It was just lines and ink flowing and forming things. And it wasn't abstract in an abstract expression in a sense, but it didn't feel like storytelling. It just felt like, ooh. And then Crumb and Shelton were more about storytelling and Wilson and Rodriguez kind of, you know, balanced on the edge of it. So it had the storytelling aspect, the graphic wildness aspect, just seven guys who are all incredibly good at it. And, you know, they kept at it, you know, until 2016, I think the last issue came out. And yeah, they just did it really well. And again, that's not my judgment. It is my judgment as well, but it's sort of the judgment of history and the judgment of the market. Like Zap sold enormously better than any other comic, which is why the issue of should we let other artists in it became important. Because if you let another artist in it, that other artist is gonna do better than they could not being in Zap. And Crumb was forced to, you know, not let his other friends in and made him mad. Speaking of Crumb, you know, and I suspect a lot of people know him from the documentary that was made about him, which is what like almost is 20 years old now. 95, I'm pretty sure. Wow, yeah, time flies, right? But you know, how important was it that he started telling individual stories or kind of obsessing about himself? Like his work became confessional, if not exhibitionist, how did that play out? Yeah, I think it's one of the key moves towards comics, literary respectability now. I mean, a ton of like the well-published, respect will be published comics now or what you'd call graphic memoir, autobiographical stories. Crumb did not invent that, a guy named Justin Green who unfortunately died between me finishing the book and the book coming out. A brilliant, wonderful cartoonist. He invented the autobiographical comic and he's kind of the secret hero of the book, I think. And someone who I hope people learn about and turn to. So Green inspired both Spiegelman and Crumb and Crumb's wife Eileen Kaminsky Crumb to start doing autobiographical work. And that was, I mean, mouse obviously just being mouse was what it was, but just the whole idea that, oh yeah, it's not just stories of talking docs or stories of guys and fighting each other, like comics can be as real and human as anything else. And Crumb, not inventing it but doing it very well, I think was vital to how comics are seen as real literature now. There was anything in Crumb's particular obsessions because he was obsessed with sex. He was, you know, to put it kind of nicely, I mean, he had strange racial views that he was not afraid to put out there. I mean, how much his specific manias or obsessions was that important as much as just being personal? Yeah, it's key to both why the people who love him love them as much as they do. It's key to why some of people were arrested for selling the comics. It's key to why there is a lot of a new generation of cartoonists who whether or not they recognize his graphic ability don't like him and don't really want him to be well remembered is his own defense of it. And you know, as I told you earlier, sometimes he would just say, oh, I was just being a punk. But as he's gotten older and as he's become this guy whose whole life is kind of explaining himself, he's had to explain himself. And what he said to me, and you know, I'm paraphrasing, but it's in the book in the last chapter. He's like, I am, and you can believe this or not, but he believes it. He's like, I am the 20th century man who has no secrets. Like I, everything is out there on the page. It's just whatever was in my mind. And I had the racism of America in my mind and I had the sexism of the like repressed ectomorph incel type who feels that women have this thing he desperately needs and he can't have. Like that, that's his perspective on his attitude toward women. Many women don't share it. And that story is told in this book as well. The Trina Robbins, a great pioneering female cartoonist has had a sort of lifelong sort of war with crumb over this. She recognized something toxic in the way crumb wrote and drew about women and something, and she recognized crumb was actually kind of a genius, but crumb influenced lots of people who were not at all geniuses to sort of do the same thing worse and dumber. So yeah, so crumb is just like, it's just in me and now it's out of me and it's on the page and it's all there and yeah. And I mean, this is again, it kind of reminded me of when you think about rock music or certainly like beat literature or that kind of literature which is when you look back on it now it is hard to escape the overwhelming sexism and oftentimes kind of primitivism or obsession, white obsession with blackness as genuine and authentic or like living a deeper life, but there is that paradox. And if you could talk about it a little bit more with Trina Robbins and some of the other people who are inspired by what crumb is doing but they dislike the content, that seems to have played out in literature and music and other forms of popular expression. Yeah, that article I wrote for reason about it in the start was kind of centered on that and I've alluded to it. There is definitely a lot of backlash about the content of the stuff. It was undoubtedly not, it was violating the mores of its day in one way and now it's kind of violating the mores of the 20s in the 2020s in a different way. Like yeah, there's definitely lots of imagery from early underground comics that super racist and may or may not have been seen as super racist then but I think even a lot of it even then would have been and they were doing it. If you ask them why they were doing it, they would say, oh, it's comedy. That was a thing, you drew black people looking a certain way and they thought it was funny. Some of them have apologized it for later, some of them have not. The sexism stuff definitely and there was a debate and pushback within the community at the time. More about the feminine stuff than the race stuff I'd say this was 80% like a nerdy white dude culture. That's for sure and I know that's of less interest to a lot of people for various reasons nowadays but it existed. There was one black comics pioneer whose story is told at some length and in his book in his own words, a guy named Larry Fuller who chose as his sort of mode of expression super porny, periodically super porny stuff including one of the first gay oriented comics called Gay Heart Throbs. There was a kind of more serious gay comic which is talked about a length in the book called Gay Comics but one prior to that was a kind of more absurd and silly one called Gay Heart Throbs and a lot of these people just thought, well, we're being absurd and silly and it's excessive and it's attractive because it's excessive like people that there's a great Spiegelman quote in here about just sort of the mentality of like the teenage boy in the back of the school room like drawing things, that if the teacher saw them would appalled them and that's definitely a line that runs through all of this. It runs through the white kids, it runs through the black guy, kind of the one black guy and it runs through a lot of the women too. It's like that was kind of the ur thing, that urge to- Really to transgress. Yeah, to shock like people don't like to do it. To talk a little bit about following up on Trina Robbins and some of the women, there was women's comics in 1972 and you quote one comics writer, a woman saying, she showed them to me and I went, ah, this was like mad, gone wild. What was the content of the women's comics and how did that, what was the dialogue with the kind of mainstream male underground comics? Yeah, it was women's comics arose out of, it's 72, the first issue came out and simultaneously these two women in LA were also making an all women's underground comic which they called kind of more undergroundly tits and clits and it actually went to, came out like two weeks before women's comics but they didn't know about it. Women's comics arose out of the kind of feminist consciousness raising scene of the early 70s. It was deliberately a collective, they had a lot of meetings, they talked about their feelings, they all had to come to consensus about everything that got printed which led to certain bad feelings as certain things got squashed by the sisterhood. Eileen Kaminsky who later married Crumb has some very sour things to say about the atmosphere of the feminist collective but most of the women involved and it felt it was very sustaining and they made a deliberate choice and then Lee Mars, one of them talks about it in the book is like we wanted about half of every issue to be artists who had never drawn before. They wanted to be a place where women who probably felt for good reason that there's no place for my comics to be printed like come here sister, yeah we'll publish your comics but as Lee Mars said like that guaranteed and we knew it when we made that choice that it's not necessarily gonna be the greatest because we're going out of our way to be welcoming and to let people who were not professional level yet publish but it was mostly very personal. Lee Mars had a great story in the first issue of just showing a woman in 1972 at work in the sexism she faced at work in the sexism she faced in our relationship. Most of it was very feminist in that sense. Some of it had a kind of more, Trina Robbins had kind of a more airy feminine sensibility. She liked drawing adventures of jungle girls and there was some more mystical stuff. Some of it was more flowery and dreamy. And she ended up, I mean she was both inspired by but then ended up drawing Wonder Woman. So yeah, yeah she actually broke into mainstream comics in a way that kind of almost none of the other of them did and what helps her do that she was a very self-conscious feminist and so she became very interested in the history of women's comics and Trina's there's a little bit of sadness to her story it's told very well in the book. She sort of felt psychologically squozen out, squeezed out of drawing comics because of various little conflicts that are detailed in the book but she sort of transmogrified herself into a historian of female work in comics and she's done tons of great work in the leading work of celebrating and excavating and explaining the role of women creators in comics and that led to her being able to do Wonder Woman for DC for a while and yeah she's, her story is both inspiring and a little sad but. But it's also the, I mean one of the things that this also reminded me of and you hear this a lot if you read about six these communes that were radical and we're gonna redraw all of society and that still meant that the women did the dishes, right? Yeah and they sewed all the clothes and they did this like you know when you look at rock bands and when you look at literary circles and when you look at underground comics artists. Yeah, right, thank you. It's all like, yeah. That, I should have fit that narrative. When you look at the red brigades, I mean even in the weather underground like the girls were cleaning up. Yeah, like the reason why in 1972 this collective of women felt we needed to create women's comics, a comic book only for women is that most, Trina is very eloquent on this like we didn't feel we were that welcome in the comics that the men were put in together. Like most underground comics were anthologies. Like some of them were all written in drama the same person but most of them were anthologies and you kind of had to be in with the editor and you know they would invite the people they knew to contribute pages and Trina felt that her and other women just were not being invited. They had to create their own space and they did. So yeah, the very existence of women's comics arose from that sort of casual sexism. And of course most of these guys saw themselves as groovy guys and revolutionaries or whatever but as you hint that did not quite rise to the level of feminist consciousness for the men. But it is kind of great too just I mean everybody was creating their own space, right? I mean and that's it's amazing as we think about especially if you're interested in punk or a kind of DIY culture that really came online towards the end of the 70s and in the 80s and 90s. Like you see that all here where it's like the powers that be are not gonna hold space for us so fuck it we're gonna create our own. Yeah, it was not quite DIY in the punk sense in that the artists did use the services of publishers and distributors. And later in the 70s as I talked about a little bit the mini comics movement arose out of Underground Comics which took at that next step. It's like well now xerography is cheap and now we have the friend who works at the xerox place and we can just stand there all night and print them and it's like so we're doing something that we're the only people who touched it and that's the real Underground Comics but the actual Underground Comics whose story is told in here like the artists drew them and they owned them and they got royalties but they did mostly job out the printing and distribution to other people. There are a few instances which I talked about in the book where an artist they go well I know where they get the covers printed and I know they're printing the insides at Waller. I can just do this myself. And occasionally an artist would do it and then they just feel like eh, whatever. Kim Deitch talks about, Kim Deitch talks about he self published his corn fed comics and he's like yeah I still have a thousand of them. It's like I don't need anything. Well they discovered the division of labor pretty quickly, right? Yeah, exactly, yeah. So let's talk about Ra and Art Spiegelman. So we go from mad to zap to Ra. What was Ra and why is Ra important? Yeah, so Spiegelman was always kind of the intellectual of the movement despite drawing stories about talking turds and all that. And he... It's kind of a hell of a movement whether you're the intellectual because you draw talking turds. And he was and he and his good friend Bill Griffith who is still successful to this day with the Zippy the Pinhead comic strip that's indicated in newspapers across the country. Like we're gonna elevate this stuff. Like we wanna get out, we don't just wanna be, you know, eye candy for trippers. We don't just wanna be drug humor. We don't wanna just be sex humor. Like comics really can be adult. And they created a magazine format underground called Arcade in the mid-70s when the initial flush of the business success of underground comics was kind of fading by then for reasons told at length in the book. So they got print mint who was, you know, the sort of first king of comics. They were the initial publishers of Zap. They taught print mint and oh, we're gonna do a series magazine, unreally good paper and we're gonna get it next to National Limpoon on the newsstands and it kind of killed print mint because it didn't work. They printed seven issues that are great and people still love them. And to this day, I'll talk to cartoonists who, you know, did not live when they existed. We think that Arcade was it. Arcade was the greatest comic publication that ever lived. So Spiegelman left San Francisco, moved back to New York, married his current wife, Francois Mouly, who is art director of the New Yorker now. And he felt burned out by the Arcade experience and he never wanted to be an editor again. But Francois actually owned a printing press and had an interest in comics, sort of that knowing Art Spiegelman, fed and she kind of, Art almost puts it like he got fooled into it in a way. He thought they were just gonna do one, one issue of rise. Like I knew it was gonna become a periodical I wouldn't have gotten involved. But he was trying to take the concept of intellectually serious graphic comics and break it away from his old coterie. Like this is a very coterie driven story. These people all knew each other. They lived with each other. They dated each other. Like the greatest of them will have a story to tell about the least of them. They were a real team and Spiegelman kind of wanted to break out of that. And, you know, there was only one other like actual old school underground comic guy in the first issue of Raw. He wanted to pivot to find a new generation of artists who could do serious, intellectually interesting art. And the influence that really made Raw different from the undergrounds was the Euro influence that Francois Mouli brought in. There was a lot of that, you know, in Raw. And it worked. Like they discovered people like Suko and Gary Panter and Charles Burns and that they really did incubate the next generation and obviously, Mous was serialized in Raw. I guess that's the most important thing that was out of Raw was Mous. You know, they laid the look and feel of, you know, serious comics from then on. And in a way, it was an intentional pivot. Personally for Spiegelman, he felt it was a pivot. But like, you look at it and like, well, this is, and you look at arcade and you go, yeah, this is, you are kind of doing, you're doing underground comics without your old friends. But that's what this is. I think he and Mouli might reject that interpretation, but I think it's a fair way to look at it. Do you, is it, you know, is it kind of a, and again, I hate to keep dragging it back to this, but what's the hell? You know, kind of in the way that a group or rather something like Rock Music, you know, variously defined 10 years after, you know, 1955 or 1958 say, you know, suddenly you start getting artistic. Underground comics after about a decade, you know, they had a great run from the late 60s to the late 70s. And then suddenly it becomes an art form that is much more varied and much more serious and just much more sophisticated really for lack of a better term. Yeah. And a lot of, you know, a lot of the first wave of cartoonists rejected that. Like there was a lot of- There's a lot of Jerry Lee Lewises out there, right? In V and contempt and like, what the hell is this artsy fartsy bullshit like? I came here to draw talking turds, right? Yeah, comics are meant to be subversive nonsense printed on really bad paper and read on the toilet. Like that mentality is in a lot of the actual artists. And, you know, Spiegelman's an interesting case to have arose out of a coterie and like really risen and become a thing so much greater than any of them could imagine any of them could have been. And a lot of weird emotions arise from that. And, you know, you'll talk to, I didn't end up using this, but there's one old associate of his who was just like, mouse, I can't believe that fucking piece of crap. One of Pulitzer, it's like, yeah. And to me, what I came to think I understood, you know, journalistically is like, you just remember your buddy Artie from 1971 and like you can't, it's like, because mouse is not a piece of crap. So, but this is like the rest of the Beach Boys after smile saying Brian, or after pet sounds like Brian, you know, go back to writing songs about cars and girls. Yeah, yeah. And the people who had that mentality weren't doing much publishable work past 1978. Like their particular nonsense did get kind of squeezed out of the market and sort of the pivot to what would now be known as like alternative comics, right? It's like, we don't call non superhero, non manga comics, undergrounds anymore. Like we kind of call them alternative comics. And the differences, I tease out the distinctions a little bit that the answer I came to, which I think is a pretty solid answer, though I think some of the underground people might reject it is a certain literary sensibility that most of the 60s, 70s, undergrounds did not have got injected into alternative comics. I'd say largely by the Hernandez brothers at Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, like a sort of quality of literary fiction that however great. That's love rockets. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. In there, it's a little hard to describe them because they were not collaborators and they didn't work together, but they drew comics that got published together in a periodical with the same name. So it's complicated. But the work of the Hernandez brothers, you know, there was not many stories in first wave underground comics that like arose to the level of literary short fiction. And then the Hernandez brothers started doing that. And then people like Chris Ware and Daniel Klaus and Alison Bechdel and others who all are rooted in the undergrounds in a way. I make, I think a defensible case that like every great interesting comic that arose from 1980 on absolutely can be traced back to this subversive nonsense. But it was different. It was rooted in it, but it was different in a way that is interesting. And I think it's fair to call it maturation. I mean, there are characters in this book who don't think so and are still like, no, it's not funny. It's not bad. It's not, there's no flop sweat. It is kind of like when you're listening to Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard, like there's no way you're gonna see Genesis or yes in that. But it absolutely, it comes out of something that was only 10 years before, really. Yeah, exactly. And in musicals, there's this pulsing energy to that crazy shit from the 1971 issue of amputee love or whatever that, you know, that raw didn't have. And yeah, but you know. We're gonna open it up for questions in a second. I wanna ask you before we go to that, though. Can you just, you know, you have written, what is this, your fifth book? Okay. Yes. So, and you know, you start with, this is Burning Man. You have Radicals for Capitalism, which is a history of the modern libertarian movement. You did a book about Ron Paul's Revolution, a book about gun laws. What is there a through line to your uvra? Because I think a lot of people looking at this, you know, from a distance might be, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? Or like, yeah. Kind of, you can't answer this question without sounding like a pretentious jerk, but I'll go ahead and sound like- Please dare to be that. Like yeah, there's something that is or is perceived of as outsider-y, but energetic, you know, Burning Man. And I, however much any of you into care about Burning Man, I wrote about, God, I sound like an idiot. I wrote about Burning Man long before, a book about Burning Man, long before it probably made sense to write a book about Burning Man, and especially as I see what happened to Burning Man since then. I had an eye, this is a little different because this is about something that's over in a sense. I had an eye for things that were culturally edgy, underground-y, either artistically or politically, and that just stuff seemed interesting to me. And then, you know, if you're in the market to sell books, you need to look for things that have not been written about a ton. So like the market almost dictates that you have to look for things that are kind of a little bit on the edge of what everyone understands about why it's interesting. And then I find that the personalities who build things are very interesting. Like the people who are gonna start a thing like Burning Man, like be a libertarian in the 50s and 60s, like do weird comics of a nature that no one thought you could do comics. Like these people tend to be colorful, energetic, ridiculous people and contemplating them and talking to them and reading their mail, you know, is fun. Do you think Ron Paul, an obstetrician, would he like tits and clits? No, you know, Ron, you know, of course was going, I don't know, you know, he would say they should, you know, you sure should be free to publish it and sell it. And indeed, I'm glad you mentioned that. There's a funny little anecdote about tits and clits. Like after the first issue came out, Joyce Farmer and Lynn Shevely who created it were at a underground comics convention in Berkeley and they got interviewed by Time Magazine and they're very excited. It's like, oh gosh, we're gonna really break big. We're gonna get in Time Magazine and then the authors like, you're very interesting. You gave us a lot of great stuff but we cannot print the title of your comic book in Time Magazine. And so the comic that would have been tits and clits number two, they kind of, and fun Joyce, you know, who was still alive, wonderfully I talked to was like, yeah, you know, like she admits, oh, we kind of sold out. We just called it Pandora's Box, you know, kind of a lame title and it didn't do anyone. Then they're like, screw that. And then they published like eight more issues of tits and clits from then on. But yeah, yeah, I mean, that's like, they couldn't get press because of what they chose to call their comic. I'll tell you, Brian and I both years ago read for suck.com, which was an early satire site on the web. And I had a piece that was based on something I read for Suck Run in the New York Times and they refused to run, they claimed that they would not credit it as coming from suck.com because of the name. And that was in like 1999. So, you know, which seems like yesterday, but. Let's sort of open it up for questions. Malik will have a microphone and can you? Hi Dick. Okay, there you are Malik. Why don't you, the man right next to you with his hand up. I gotta ask, what do you think of Ralph Bakshi's rendition of Fritz the Cat versus the vision that our Crumb originally had for the character? I'll just sort of tell you Crumb's because my own personal opinion is not worth. Crumb was, you know, super unhappy with the movie. And he, you know, there's a theme in Crumb's life and stories I alluded to earlier, sort of being bullied into things. He tells it's like, I didn't ever want that movie to exist. And like he just kept bothering me and I felt bad. And then he's like, and I never agreed to it. Like he got my wife and lawyer to agree to it. And yes, and I thought, oh, poor guy, you know, whatever. But he, he, he hated it. He, Crumb tells a story. I think Crumb told it. And anyway, the story is in the book. Whoever told it will be clear in the book about he brought some of his zap buddies to see a rough cut of it. And they all just like stalked out silently. Like, yeah, everyone in the underground comics community sort of hated and resented that movie. And then Crumb resented that people thought he made a ton off. He's like, I hardly made anything off of it. You know, randomly, I'd get a check here and there. I think he sold the rights for like 10 grand or something. And then I never saw the money. So, yeah, that was, he has been especially sensitive for most of his career about like total control and not selling out. He did let Viking print a book of his art in 68. And they got really mad because they covered a vagina with a Band-Aid. And he wrote this really crazy angry letter that's quoted in the book about it. And then he let Valentine do a Fritz book. And then for like 30 years, he never did business with a major publisher. And then after the Fritz experience, he mostly has avoided, you know, whatever, what's the word? Like, you know, licensing out his creations for other people to do things. The next question, Malik. Hi, you mentioned the addressing of the racism and sexism and crumb and other underground artists. And you happen to have brought up Bill Griffiths. And how does he get away with drawing a pinhead every week or every day? I mean, is that, and this is a serious question. Yeah, no, I- Because I thought about this. How does, does he address that? No, he definitely doesn't. I'm gonna kind of spitball an answer here. It's not an issue I thought about in the book. Somehow, you know, what minorities arise to a level of cultural attention and respect? Like, it doesn't all happen at once. Like, it's slow and I guess what I'm trying to say is that day may be ahead. That day just hasn't arisen yet. Because, yeah, because I guess no one, there's not sufficient cultural force for respect for people who suffer from microencephaly. That has become an issue. And maybe it will, you know, Griffith is pretty old. He's still doing it and he still loves doing it. I'm sure he wouldn't like to be, you know, canceled from drawing Zippy. But yeah, I guess it's just because no one, no cultural force has happened to arise to push back against it. And I can tell you, as far as I know, like no one has raised the question that you raise. He told no stories about it. I've encountered no stories about it. I think a lot of people probably don't understand that it is a representation of an actual malady that some people have. I think some people might just think, oh, it's this weird cartoon character who's a pinhead. That might be part of it. And as Bill says, like he actually did and he has met people with microencephaly and it informed the character a little bit. But he's like, you can't actually represent how, and I'm gonna use the word pinhead because it's Zippy the pinhead. How an actual pinhead talks, like it's too intense and it's too strange. It's like even more intense and strange than the character is Zippy. That's a very interesting question and I did totally spitball that answer, but I think it's mostly probably correct. Next question. Wait for Malik. You were talking a bit about the sort of dichotomy of how Spiegelman saw underground comics and how the sort of it ain't art crowd saw comics. And you quoted Spiegelman in the book, going a lot more extreme than sort of what you just represented. He said, underground comics is work that'll wake you up allows you to be able to see more, to become more receptive, more alive. That's pretty extreme exclusion of most of the stuff that I think you would call underground comics. What would he call all that other stuff prior to 1978? He knows that's what it all is. What, pardon me, I have to cough. What he was saying and I remember that quote is like, that's what it meant to him. He was aware that there was a lot of other stuff that his friends and associates and colleagues were doing that were called and were underground comics that did not rise to that level. But he's like, that's what it should aspire to be. That's what it ought to be. He, I think I quote him toward the end of the book. He and Cromboth kind of had similar statements, like, yeah, looking back on this stuff decades later, it's like, it wasn't all as great as maybe we thought it was, even the ones who didn't think it was that great to begin with, like they think it's even less great now that there was a lot of just the energy of the transgression and that graphics that look like this, graphics that don't look like something a Dell comic would have printed or a Marvel comic would have printed just are exciting and they're exciting at the time and maybe they're less exciting later. So I think he would just say that other stuff are bad underground comics. And he would admit that he drew a lot of bad underground comics pages as well. You can tell what they are as the ones that he has never allowed to be reprinted in, you know, a book with an A-Mart Spiegelman on it. What was his pseudonym? Skeeter Grant was one of them, Paul Cutrate, I think was one once. Yeah, he did a story for Bizarre Sex and which was a kitchen thing publication and some correspondence I found in Kitchen Papers where Kitchen was, you know, selling the rights to reprint some bizarre sex stuff in Europe and Spiegelman asked and he respected because Spiegelman owned the copyright. Like, don't let them print the Paul Cutrate stuff. Like, I just don't want that stuff to ever be seen again. So did that address your question? We've got time for one more question. Okay, wait for the microphone please. Well, I apologize for my ignorance, but when I was growing up, my mother loved this comic, Kathy. And when you were saying earlier, Brian, that the women were writing comics about work and things and people didn't want to read about them, in the 80s, there was this comic, Kathy, that my mother was in love with. How did Kathy come about from these, from the earlier sort of transgressive women in work sort of comics? I'm gonna skibble a bit because I know Kathy, I mean, I know the strip, Kathy, and I'm aware of Kathy Goose White to draw it, but I am not a scholar expert in Ms. Goose White, and I may even be pronouncing her name wrong. The Kathy who drew Kathy. But you just, and I haven't thought about this at all, but the instant you said that and I started seeing Kathy, I'm like, yeah, Kathy looks like something that would have been in the first two issues of women's comics. And I don't, you know, it's funny, cultural influence is always weird and authors with access to grind can make declarations. Like, I do not know, you know, to get to the bottom of this, I'd have to find the editor at her syndicate who opened that envelope and was like, yeah, we're gonna put this in newspapers across the country because like Kathy is really badly drawn in a conventional sense of the strip and it really was a pioneer in crummy graphics in the pages of a newspaper. And I would not be surprised to find that the editor who chose that had some familiarity with underage comics because like, yeah, that Kathy looks like the kind of stuff, you know, I mentioned Lee Maher saying, yeah, we decided to print amateurs in every issue and that was inevitably gonna make it not as great as it could have been. Yeah, that feels right to me, but I don't know that it's true, but yeah, Kathy, you were right on to think of Kathy and think, oh yeah, that sounds like what you're talking about about these weird, personal, you know, women in work, not super professional looking stuff. Yeah, Kathy is a great example of that. But whether there was a direct line of influence, I'm ignorant about that question and I wish I thought of it because it would have made a good couple of sentences in the book if I could have confirmed that it was true, but I don't know. I guess, just for a closing thought, Brian, you know, you talk about having the book, I guess it's kind of the decade from 68 to 78 which was kind of the high tide of underground comics and they're gone now for a lot of different reasons, including the way that publishing and distribution is done. The need for it isn't quite the same because people can produce and circulate and distribute their own stuff, but can you talk about the culture that they were pushing back on? You know, and again, this starts in post-war America where you know, there's kind of the culture, the establishment, you know, whether it's the Eisenhower, you know, the grayness of the Eisenhower years that bleed into the 60s. Is it partly, you know, the idea that there's an establishment or a single culture has just, you know, it's been destroyed. And partly, I mean, underground comics go away because they were actually really successful in just beating the hell out of the mainstream. Yeah, there's an interesting, these type of cartoonists began in the mid to late 70s to find professional paying work outside the world of underground comics in magazines like Heavy Metal and sometimes National Lampoon, I talk about that a bit, not as much as you might think, but sometimes. And a bunch of sort of low-rent, crummy playboy imitators. Like, and you know, I quote Dennis Kishin in the book saying like, yeah, I almost feel like, you know, we did this because we had to do it. Like there was no other way we could do the comics we wanted or see the comics we wanted, but start our own little publishing companies. And he's like, yeah, I almost feel like, you know, why keep doing it? And he's like, and he did keep doing it for a while and he stopped doing it in a really kind of crazy story. That's in the last chapter of the book when he sold half of his company to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle guys and a bunch of bad things happened. Yeah, so the felt need to do this thing because you can't do it goes away when, you know, you can do it in other places. And some people just get older and, you know, the particular style of how they did things definitely feels passe now, but as you know, the sort of through line in the story is that it just exploded the possibilities of telling story, you know, cartooning. So he's a wood cartooning. And I don't know how to end that sentence like, yeah, the things you're pushing against are different like you the drug humor or the sex humor like starts to feel less vital to everyone. It's like, oh, we've kind of done it. Part of now that part of why you did it is we're doing more drugs, but having less sex, right? So it's like, it all works out. Yeah, yeah, there's kind of an energy to doing things because it hasn't been done. That once it has been done kind of goes away. And then the next thing that hasn't been done is like what the Hernandez brothers did, like tell these like incredibly touching, complicated stories of human beings. And then that hasn't been done. And then whatever the next thing that isn't being done, I probably don't even know about it, you know, it's being done on the internet by cartooning, you know, they're like everything. We live in a world of such abundance that like, and the book sadly doesn't really reflect it because I never, I didn't feel I could learn enough about it to write about it. But like, there's definitely still, I wouldn't even be surprised. I find there's more people doing comics that just look just like a 1971 Underground than there were in 1971, but they're not being printed. You know, you'll just find it on their Instagram pages and like I didn't really address and, you know, I'm afraid I'm gonna run into a bunch of cartoonists who were like, I still do stuff in that great style. And you didn't, I'm like, I didn't know. And that's the thing I just didn't know, but like everything is out there in such insane abundance that like, you know, it's, you know, it's out there. Final thought, you know, if the people in, you know, in dirty pictures were fighting against actual censorship where, you know, guys with guns would impound and put people in jail or, you know, impound copies and burn them and destroy them. What is the nature of the equivalent kind of speech codes or censorship now? And is that as big a threat, do you think? I mean, you're a professional libertarian as well as a historian of, you know, counter-cultural movements, you know, are we in a, you know, is speech much freer now or is it just being corralled in different ways? No one's being arrested for it, but you know, the theme of the reason story I wrote that this book is not like an expansion of or anything, but like researching that story sort of showed me the shape of this story was about that. Like there has been a recent movement of, you know, it's become a very cliched phrase and it's annoying to have it leave your lips, but the cancel culture of concept, right? And that's very real and, but it's not like, no one's being arrested for it. It's just people are being told by other people, we do not appreciate this work that you do and we do not wish to talk about it and we do not wish to honor it. And then sometimes it spreads to anyone who disagrees with this. We also do not wish to promote or honor. I do not, I don't like that as a cultural force. And that's discussed a little bit in the book, but it is a different level of problem than arrest. Like it's just, it's the push pull of culture. Like people do have the right to say and draw what they want and other people do have the right to say, here is what we think about what you have seen and drawn and it's the push pull. So it's good. I mean, it's we're in a better place. We're definitely in a better place for that. I think it's a better world the less people try to even censure as opposed to censor, but there are people could have a legitimate point that I am speaking of a perspective that does not understand the reasons why it's important to loudly express your disapproval of certain things and I would have to grant that that's true. You know, there's things about my gender and my race and et cetera that probably make me unable to really get, you know, why a certain old crumb drawing is something that they would just really rather never see again. And I think the story I wrote and reason talks about that a little bit and I hope treats that viewpoint respectfully. And even like no event, this guy, this really wonderful current cartoonist is quoted in the book and he said more of this to me, but he's just like, look, I love this stuff, but he's like, I would never ever try to say to anyone like you've got to love it too. Are you the things you see in it that you hate aren't there or you shouldn't be bothered by them. He's like, you need to feel and react to things the way you feel and react to them. And that is the constant push pull of human culture and it's a million percent better than anyone being arrested, of course. But the fact that a lot of these people live through the time when people were arrested, I think makes them more sensitive, whether rightly or wrongly, to being told you shouldn't have done what you did. It's like, ah, whatever, you know. People got arrested for this, so yeah. All right, well, we're gonna leave it there. Thank you, Brian Doherty, author most recently of Dirty Pictures. I was gonna read the subtitle, but I guess we might be out of time. It would have been even longer if I had my way, so we'll thank you. I agree, I agree. So thank you very much. I think, thank you all for coming out to this version of The Reason Speak Easy. We hope to see you again in a month or so. And if I've made the book sound more interesting than you thought it was an hour ago and you want to buy one, let me know. There's still some over there where I'd be happy to sell it. So we've got the room for about another six or seven minutes, so grab another drink, tip the bartenders very well, buy a couple of books. Thank you all for coming out and we'll see you soon. Thank you.