This book includes all of the cartoonist's work from Zap Comix #12 through #15; stories published in the horror anthology Taboo; the three appearances of his outrageous, race-bending character Meadows from Weirdo; illustrations for Grimm and Andersen fairy tales; as well as book jackets and album covers. Plus, dozens of privately commissioned paintings, including the Seven Deadly Sins (Just Say Yes!) and inner landscapes peopled with pirates, ogres, leprechauns, Cyclops, the Baby Jesus, and his favorites players, Captain Pissgums, Star-Eyed Stella, and the Checkered Demon. It also includes an even score of remarkably rendered paintings, both unpublished and virtually unseen, that he created between the 2006 publication of The Art of S. Clay Wilson and The Night the Lights Went Out in 2008, when Wilson’s career spiraled out of control.

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This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

A complete narrative history of the weird and wonderful world of Underground Comix! In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of MAD magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture. Their “comix,” spelled that way to distinguish the work from their dime-store contemporaries, presented tales of taboo sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of society. Embraced by hippies and legions of future creatives, this subgenre of comic books and strips often ran afoul of the law, but that would not stop them from casting cultural ripples for decades to come, eventually moving the entire comics form beyond the gutter and into fine-art galleries. Author Brian Doherty weaves together the stories of R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Spain Rodriguez, Harvey Pekar, and Howard Cruse, among many others, detailing the complete narrative history of this movement. Through dozens of new interviews and archival research, Doherty chronicles the scenes that sprang up around the country in the 1960s and ’70s, beginning with the artists’ origin stories and following them through success and strife, and concluding with an examination of these creators’ legacies, Dirty Pictures is the essential exploration of a truly American art form that recontextualized the way people thought about war, race, sex, gender, and expression.