| Published at the height of the American counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, underground comix---comic books produced and distributed outside "mainstream," corporate dominated channels---lampooned and offended middle-class sensibilities with outrageous images of sex, drugs, and violence. Scholarly and historical work on underground comix follows a narrative that underground comix promoted individuality and authenticity, rebelling against the conformist "mainstream" culture of the 1950s and opening up new space for personal expression in the comics medium. But it says little about how or why comix found such an enthusiastic audience, or how their gleefully bawdy---and often misogynist---images actually subverted the dominant culture.;Compounding this lacuna, existing scholarship tends to focus on the great work of great artists, despite the fact that much scholarship has demonstrated that understanding artists and their artwork only reveals a small part of what a text means to readers. Meaning is influenced as much by how someone reads as by what is actually in that text. Moreoever, what is in the text rarely dictates completely or absolutely what is taken away from it, as readers tend to selectively take-up or modify ideas. So despite underground comix' reputation, we actually know little about for whom they were subversive, why they included so much sexist material, and how we might understand the effects of their circulation.;This dissertation presents findings from interviews with a sample of people who were reading underground comix at the height of their popularity. It supplements these findings with gender-informed rhetorical analysis of a selection of underground comix. Both in readers' accounts and in its textual archive, this project finds that underground comix emphasized and encouraged "authentic" individuality at a time when young people perceived that opportunities for individual expression self-determination were in decline. However, this project also finds reasons to question comix' claims to subversiveness, arguing that readers' accounts---and, especially, the underground comix that I analyze---in fact rely on a deeply masculinist and patriarchal conception of personal agency that has been part of the American ideal for a very long time. Far from freeing readers from the weight of history and ideology as many scholars of underground comix (and respondents to this study) might claim, then, underground comix rather reinscribe the age-old normative myth of the self-generated, self-sufficient (male) agent, sometimes called "The American Adam." This reinterpretation of underground comix and their importance to the USA's cultural history has important implications for how we understand their legacy and their revolutionary potential. |
