Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Underground comix sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Underground comix (1960s – 1970s), no earlier influence is recorded for it; it runs alongside two parallel movements, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Funk art and Psychedelic art; it fans out to one movement it went on to influence, a well-established link: Lowbrow.
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books that are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality, and violence. They were most popular in the United States and in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s.
Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Barbara "Willy" Mendes, Trina Robbins and numerous other cartoonists created underground titles that were popular with readers within the counterculture scene. Punk had its own comic artists like Gary Panter. Long after their heyday, underground comix gained prominence with films and television shows influenced by the movement and with mainstream comic books, but their legacy is most obvious with alternative comics. Read more ↗