Introduction

In the mid-1960s, periodical comics once again seemed to be a nationally significant form of popular culture. Oriented around the superhero genre, and particularly the innovations at Marvel, comics were hailed as enjoying a close relationship with young adults: journalists proclaimed that universities were full of readers whose unease with society was mirrored in Marvel’s insecure superheroes. Capitalising on this media attention, writer and editor Stan Lee publicised the modishness of his company and heralded the ‘Marvel Age of Comics’.

By the end of the decade the Big Two inserted the New Left and counterculture into their comics, a ‘relevancy’ movement that saw superheroes confronting drug use, labour unrest, Native American land rights, and environmentalism. Once more, the press latched onto the newsworthiness of this trend, though the comics themselves – sometimes shrill, sometimes touchingly sincere – rarely called for absolute structural change in the liberal capitalist order. A more unruly tryst between comics and the counterculture was underway in underground comix. The comix appeared as part of early 1960s campus culture and enjoyed a boom between 1968 and 1972, with production centred on the San Francisco Bay Area and benefiting from the region’s critical mass of countercultural consumers. Despite the underground label, comix were serious business: popular titles sold hundreds of thousands of copies. The work of superstar artists such as Robert Crumb was widely visible across the country, not only in comics but also on T-shirts, posters, and record sleeves (Crumb drew the cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s 1968 platinum-selling album Cheap Thrills). Ranging across political positions that included Marxism, anarchism, and libertarianism, the comix depicted nudity, sex, drug-taking, and violence in ways unthinkable in a newsstand comic. A variety of trade press editions were published before the 1960s were over, sidestepping the most outré material but nonetheless assuming a consumer base continuous with the publishing houses’ existing adult readership.

Many characteristics associated with the graphic novel were apparent in mainstream comics between 1961 and 1972: adult readers, controversial social issues, and long plots shuttling between multiple narrative tracks. Despite this, not many texts were published that would now be labelled ‘graphic novels’.