A Brief History of British Underground Comix

Underground (or alternative) comix are often thought of as an exclusively American 1960s west coast phenomenon, growing out of the underground press of that time, and best represented by the likes of Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton and Art Spiegelman. This is fair enough, as the explosion of American underground comix (around 1967-68) pre-dated the UK scene, which at that time was still centred around one newspaper (International Times) and one mag (OZ).

One of the first British underground comix was Nasty Tales, an International Times spin-off edited by Mick Farren, who wasn’t just a magazine publisher but a real renaissance man, playing blues-based psychedelic rock with his band The Social Deviants, before moving to Los Angeles in the 1970s to write science fiction novels. While Britain had a thriving psychedelic music scene, it took longer for strong artistic talent to emerge, so a fair bit of the content of Nasty Tales was reprinted from American underground comix.

The most well-known early UK underground comic was Brainstorm Comix (Alchemy Press, 1975), which was published by Lee Harris, the proprietor of the Alchemy head shop on Portobello Road (which is still there, but now sells mainly clothes), to showcase the work of Bryan Talbot, who had contributed comic strips to Harris’ dope mag Home Grown.

Brainstorm effectively launched Talbot’s career in comics, running for 6 issues and featuring his character Chester P. Hackenbush, the Psychedelic Alchemist, and sold quite well, by counter-cultural standards.

Other stuff had been going on at that time in Birmingham, centred around the Birmingham Arts Lab. One of the Arts Lab’s leading lights was Hunt Emerson, who produced one of the earliest home-grown underground comix in the form of Large Cow Comix (Ar:Zak, 1974), which set the tone for his later surrealistic excursions for Knockabout Comics, Fiesta, Fortean Times and the Beano.

Funded at one point by an Arts Council grant, the Birmingham Arts Lab would launch a number of different comics, including the anthology title Street Comix (1977-78) and Heroine, the first all-girl UK underground comic. It also launched careers, with future Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell contributing to Street Comix.

Another underground cartoonist who would go on to become a popular illustrator for the Guardian was Clifford Harper. While the work of Talbot and Emerson drew inspiration from science fiction and the surrealism of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip, giving it a modern 70s twist by adding sex and drugs to the mix, Harper brought radical left politics to the world of comics with his self-published Class War Comix (originally published in 1974, before getting picked up by the US underground comics publisher and distributor Kitchen Sink Press in 1978). He still describes himself as a “militant anarchist” and in 1987 created an illustrated book on the subject for Camden Press. When not creating his beautiful faux woodcut illustrations for mainstream journals like the Guardian or Radio Times he has helped to organize the London Anarchist Book Fair.

During the 1980s the main publisher of alternative comics (and underground reprints) was Tony and Carol Bennett’s Knockabout Comics, which is still based on Acklam Road, just up the road from where I grew up in Notting Hill. Publishing libertarian literature by Crumb, Shelton and Emerson at the height of Thatcherite repression, Knockabout had the misfortune of being busted for obscenity on a number of occasions, notably for distributing American cartoonist Melinda Gebbie’s semi-autobiographical comic Frezca Zizis. The book was found to be obscene by the UK authorities, and all copies seized and burned, an experience Ms Gebbie made wry and poetic reference to in a 4 page comic strip published in Anarchy Comics #4 (Last Gasp 1987).

By the end of the decade, with the startling popularity of VIZ (the comic that spawned a thousand imitators, all trying to cash in on the trend for toilet humour), the Scots weighed in with their own bawdy offering when Dave Alexander, Frank Quitely and a few others got together to publish the first issue of Electric Soup in 1989. The comic ran for about three years, even securing distribution from VIZ’s own publisher John Brown at one point, before the bubble burst. Quitely has subsequently gone on to become a successful comics illustrator, producing work for 2000ad and DC/Vertigo. Alexander has stayed in the underground, continuing to draw the MacBam Brothers for the stoner comic Northern Lightz (1999-2005) and new adult humour mag’ Wasted.

Which is more or less where I entered the story. Well, better late than never!

Grayling Goes With the Flow

In an article defending his New College of the Humanities, Professor A.C. Grayling argues that he is not in the “vanguard of the marketisation of higher education” being pursued by the current Tory/LibDem government because:

“The part-privatisation of the publicly funded universities has been going on for years, though it is now doing so at an accelerated rate.”

Thank you, Professor Grayling, for cleverly sidestepping the main point held by nearly everybody who is concerned about or actively opposed to public sector cuts: that just because something is already happening doesn’t make it right or sensible, especially when that something happens to be the erosion of the public sector. As one of the article’s respondent’s eloquently put it “Education is not a commodity to be financially valued and traded.” The assumption that it is has been a major contributor to the widening gap between the richest and poorest we have seen over the last three decades.

Grayling adds: “Many universities seek overseas students at full fee, and most of these are now requiring staff to recruit as many more overseas students as they can in a bid to supplement revenue.”

This courting of wealthy foreign students is happening mainly because universities are already strapped for cash. But you do not solve this kind of problem by going with it. If anything, acquiescance to such a policy has the potential to lay the groundwork for a future of xenophobic resentment, from foreign students forced to pay much higher fees and, in effect, to subsidise UK nationals, and from British students denied places because their university of choice was more interested in chasing money from abroad. This is not a good direction to take, yet it has been relentlessly pursued by successive UK governments.

To quote Grayling again:
“Since 1970, general public sector pay has risen in real terms by more than 40%. University pay in the same period has risen in real terms about 4%, if that.”

A big contributor to this backwards slide may have been the attack on teaching unions that began in the 1980s, making it harder for them to protect the livelihoods of teaching staff, and by extension, the quality of public education. Again, you do not solve this problem by going with it.

Taken as a whole Grayling’s article suggests that, despite his stated sympathy with the situation faced by publicly-funded universities in the UK (such as his former employers Birkbeck), his main motivation in starting the independent NCH is merely to exploit the current situation, rather than pose a genuinely inclusive alternative.

Bear in mind that no where in the article does he even attempt to defend the £18,000 a year fees the NCH will charge, choosing instead to focus his attention on the New College’s charitable trust, which will apparently offer free or discounted access to around 30% of new intake.

A nice gesture, certainly, and one he can clearly afford to make!

Addendum: Curiously, Grayling made some interesting statements about free higher education in the Guardian back in 2009, which you can find quoted here.

Paddy "Pudsy" Morris R.I.P.

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Paddy Morris, a Scottish underground cartoonist who signed his work "Pudsy", who died suddenly (and far too soon) of a heart attack. He had contributed his uniquely funny brand of stoner humour to counter cultural comics and magazines ever since the early 1970s when his work appeared in OZ and Nasty Tales. He was also a contributor to Dope Funnies, and in more recent years to Bad Press’s Northern Lightz and Jim Stewart’s Ganjaman. He will be sadly missed.

Paddy “Pudsy” Morris
1949-2010

Reflections on "Missing"

In 1973 Charles Horman was an American journalist working in Chile, where he wrote for the periodical FIN and made a home with his wife. He was a Harvard graduate, the only child of successful New York businessman Edmund Horman. In the days following the fascist coup of September 11 1973, he became one of many people “disappeared” by the CIA-backed military dictatorship.

Both his father and his wife spent a month trying desperately to uncover his whereabouts. This painful and heart-wrenching experience would later become the subject of the award winning film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, who played Horman’s father and wife respectively (both of whom worked closely with the director Costa-Gavras on the film). It remains to this day a powerful, brave and very moving film.

For its unflinching depiction of the casual brutality of life within a fascist dictatorship, where the army is allowed to operate with impunity, Missing remains an important piece of history, but it is equally important for its timeliness. Filmed under conditions of secrecy in Mexico, and released in 1982 while Chile was still under the control of the junta, it was banned there until after Pinochet eventually relinquished power eight years later. It was also subject to a (failed) lawsuit, brought against Universal Studios and the film’s director by the former US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis, who was depicted but not named in the film, and two others.

It is worth remembering the nature of totalitarian governments, as they are effectively engaged in a one-sided war with their own (captive) populations. This is not something which those of us who have grown up in rich, democratic countries can ever really understand, but the complicity of our own governments in events such as those depicted in a film such as this makes it a part of our shared history whether we like it or not.

One of the most telling things we get from a film like this is some of the subtle ways in which the prevailing attitudes of governments can become internalized by the individuals who grow up under their shadow. Time and again we find, in the early stages of the coup, the American expatriate characters saying to each other “they can’t touch us, we’re Americans”, a delirious self confidence which captures in microcosm an attitude manifested in far more deadly ways by the United States government in its foreign policy, its willingness to intervene in the affairs of weaker nations if they perceive it to be in their “national interest”.

Sadly, this foreign policy shows little sign of changing any time soon, but as an optimist I still look forward to a day when the United States can shed its super-power image and stand as a democracy among democracies. Missing stands as an example of the dangers that can befall ordinary people when power runs away with itself and starts to think of itself as being so unquestionable as to be "super".

Autonomous Art

This vibrant mural adorns one of the side walls of the Art Studio at the Hounslow Community Land Project, an autonomous eco village in the suburbs of west London.

I was most impressed by the spirit and initiative of the villagers, so much that I wrote a piece about it which will be appearing in the forthcoming issue of New Internationalist magazine.

The article can be read here.

Wasted #5

The fifth issue of Wasted, the shiny new adult humour magazine from Bad Press Ltd, will by all reports be published in the UK sometime in July. The current issue 4 is as sordid and funny as ever, despite the move to grayscale interiors. Personally, I don't think it matters, as long as the gags and jokes are good! My own character Amber appears alongside the likes of Tales of the Buddha, Lusi Sulfura and Johnny K*nt. Also appearing in issue 4 is a strip of mine featuring the degenerate duo Rathead & Phlegm, which was nice. Feel free to make full use of the subscription form above to save traipsing to your nearest comic or head shop.

A Visit To Highgate Cemetary

In brilliant summer sunshine we walked south from Highgate station, along streets flanked by grand old Victorian mansions, most of which are now broken up into flats. True to its name, Highgate lies on high ground, and every now and then we would catch a glimpse between buildings of one of the most beautiful, panoramic views of London to be had without having to walk all the way up Parliament Hill. Every time a road turned or a new side street joined the solid rivers of tarmac which flow across the low hills of this north London suburb we would gasp and stop, before pressing onwards towards our somewhat macabre destination: Highgate Cemetery.

Unusually for a cemetery Highgate’s east section carried a charge of three pounds a head. In order to get our monies’ worth we therefore chose to spend a full day exploring the tomb clustered wilderness which provides the final resting place of so many of our heroes.

Principle among them being Douglas Adams and Karl Marx, and what an interesting comparison they make! Adams’ gravestone is so modest and simple compared with Marx’s looming bust, as imposing in its way as the vast Soviet bureaucracies created in his name.

The amount of people buried here who have fought in their own ways for peace and social justice is quite remarkable. How much this has to do with the presence of Marx himself is an interesting question. It must be said that quite a number of notable left wing activists have secured plots which directly face his resplendent bust with its resounding proclamation to the “workers of all lands to unite”. One of them is Paul Foot, a keen agitator for social justice, orator, and contributor to Private Eye and Socialist Worker. His modest gravestone states in terms almost as simple as Adams’ that he was a “writer and revolutionary”. There is also a quote which I recognised as being by the Romantic poet Shelley, but couldn’t recall the poem in which it occurs. It is the final lines from ‘The Mask of Anarchy’:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few

It is a testament to the enduring appeal of Karl Marx and his philosophy of social equality and revolutionary change that he appears to be the most popular of all the east wing’s inhabitants. A number of factors prove this to be true. There is the fact that a sign advertising the presence of his mortal remains, complete with a small picture of the tomb, is pinned to the main gate. There is also the fact that nearly every foreign tourist who stopped us that day did so to ask where to find the final resting place of the Father of modern Socialism – Marx.

But Highgate cemetery bursts with notable individuals. The Pop artist Patrick Caulfield’s stylish gravestone states with stark finality: “DEAD”. I was delighted to discover the grave of the actor Sir Ralph Richardson, who performed many great roles, but who I know for his endearing portrayal of the Supreme Being in the classic Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits. My girlfriend, being a native Australian, was equally delighted when we discovered that the Australian-born artist Sidney Nolan was included on the list of notable inhabitants in the map we picked up at the main entrance. We spent a good hour or more searching for Nolan, sadly to no avail.

It is perhaps a small irony of history that one of the tombs overlooking the bust of Marx should belong to a political philosopher whose defence of individualism and laissez faire capitalism stand in diametric opposition to the state-controlled bureaucracies and centralized monopolies Marx’s own ideas inspired. Herbert Spencer’s works include Social Statics and The Man Versus The State, and he was one of the foremost proponents of social Darwinism. It was Spencer who attempted to turn Darwin’s theory of natural selection into a scientific vindication of industrial capitalism. And perhaps most significantly, it is Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin, who is responsible for coining the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.

I feel it important to record our pleasure at finding Marx and Spencer in such close proximity.

Amended February 2016.
The photographs appear courtesy of my wife Jane McPherson.