Week 6: Underground Comics

Wow! So, we read a bunch of bold and daring underground comics this week. As the name suggests, many of them were rampant with racism, sexism, and other politically inappropriate stuffs.... But they were fun anyway! I am kind of reminded of the Gekiga movement, because those artists wanted to differentiate adult comics from mainstream family-friendly ones. These underground comics pretty much tell us that anything really goes. We can tell any kind of stories in the form of comics because..... why not?

Anyway, I read  Girl Fight Comics, and (pardon my language) Tits and Clits. Both of them have female protagonists and both of them are about women doing whatever they want. Girl-and-girl relationships are common, and men are often portrayed as immoral and perverse, sometimes no more than a thing for sex. Moreover, they often portray single women finding ways to deal with their sexual needs. While the snippets of stories appeared to be rather nonsensical and self-indulgent, they are strangely liberating. I can only imagine that in those days, women had even less rights compared to now, and were expected to adhere to even more strict social conventions. As such, these kinds of underground comics that depict free-spirited women must have raised quite a lot of eyebrows back then. Maybe, it will still do the same even now, considering how regulated publications and medias are.

Back to the comics, while they are crudely drawn and direct, I enjoyed their honesty and sarcasm. These women are not modest nor righteous. They want money and sex, lots of them, sometimes while balancing their role as a mother and wife. Of course, I am not saying that all women are sex-crazed, money-hungry, and scheming people. It's just that it is generally more frowned upon when females display such behavior, as opposed to men doing the same. These strong sense of anger and hunger for freedom are probably the driving force behind many underground comics artists. They want people to listen, and one way to do that is to amp up the shock value.

Though to be fair, as I read other underground comics, some of them appear to be crude for the sake of being crude. No real statement or message, just to shock and offend people with blatant sexism and racism. But then again, there is really nothing wrong with that because the readers have the choice to either not read them, or to be offended. The important thing is how underground comics created more diversity in the area, and how it dispelled many people's assumption that comics are for kids. Without the underground comics movement, it is hard to imagine the existence of edgier and grittier graphic novels that we get to enjoy now.