Their Trouble With Women



I'm sympathetic to the nature of inquiry embodied by Claire Litton's article about misogyny in underground comix, as well as to many of the ideas brought to bear. Yet while there's probably a great article to be written on the subject, there's too much in this piece setting off the creative history and idiosyncratic argumentation alarms for me to think this is the one.

For instance, I'm not sure how Jay Kinney's quote about viewing other underground cartoonists as older siblings comes close to supporting the previous sentence's assertion about artists copying Crumb's art style and misogyny, except by the sentences' physical proximity. Other arguments that make me want to see a full citation-filled brief in support are 1) the notion floated that Crumb and not, well, nearly everything else going on in culture, drove other artists to chase after violence and misogyny, 2) the suggestion made that underground comics led to the closure of head shops, and 3) the idea offered up that Crumb was deeply afraid of selling out in exactly the way described. That last comes in a one-paragraph profile of Crumb in the early 1970s that reads like a rapidly-constructed, jenga-style stack of assertions more than it does supported analysis.

There are also some missteps (Zap! #1's publication date is wrong, I think) and omissions (Aline Kominsky's relationship with Crumb and his support of her art) that wouldn't be important except, of course, in an article that is seeking to build such a specific and damning case.
 
posted 2:16 am PST | Permalink
 

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