by Marc Maron
First published 2022
Drew Friedman celebrates the artists who transformed comics into countercultural rebellion. His book presents 101 full page portraits of the creators who reinvented an entire artistic medium after R. Crumb launched Zap in 1968. The Underground Comix revolution shattered traditional comic book boundaries and created a major cultural shift. Friedman spotlights figures like Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, Melinda Gebbie, Art Spiegelman, Vaughn Bode, Trina Robbins, Bill Griffith, Harvey Pekar, and dozens more who became icons of this 20th century art movement. Each black and white illustration comes with biographical text by Friedman himself. Marc Maron provides the foreword while historian Patrick Rosenkranz contributes an afterword. The book functions as both visual tribute and historical record, documenting the artists, writers, and editors who blew the lid off conventional comics and helped define a countercultural movement that ranged from Zap to Arcade publications.
Genres: history, art, 20th-century, 21st-century, comics, graphic-novels-comics
Vibes: intimate, thought-provoking, visual
Tropes: cultural-shift, visual-storytelling
Period: 1968
216 pages · Hardcover · Fantagraphics Books