Comix
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Writing about underground comix in the comics and animation journal Funnyworld in 1971, underground comix creator and publisher Denis Kitchen proclaimed that “by ridiculing the outmoded social system we live in, we are quickening its demise. And in its place, hopefully, will be established a society in which no ‘underground’ is necessary” (quoted in Schelly 2015, 484). The optimism in that statement is admirable, if not—given today’s social, political, and cultural struggles—enviable. The key to understanding comix is, of course, the x. Robert Crumb is usually given credit for swapping the second c in comics to the x in comix when, in early 1968, so the story goes, he was peddling Zap Comix from a baby carriage (or shopping cart) in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. First and foremost, the new spelling was a rejection of the North American comics industry and its restrictive and prudish Comics Code, a self-imposed system of censorship by mainstream comics producers that severely limited what types of stories, words, and images could appear in mass-market comic books (see Nyberg in this volume). A potent signifier, the x invoked a rejection of the code in favor of unbridled, libidinous, and uncensored expression. It foreshadowed...
This essay may be found on page 59 of the printed volume.