Tits and Clits and Dicks, OH MY!

The openness and truth of these underground comics are astounding. The artists are telling about their deepest insecurities, intimate fantasies, and fears that really get to the core of what it is to struggle with human urges in a cloistered society. Artists, or people who just had something to say, were using these comics to create a dialogue about insecurities and sex in a society that didn't want to talk about it or even acknowledge it. Even today in American society people are terrified of talking about sex and find these kinds of comics 'lewd' and 'inappropriate'. Most people are scared of their own sexuality, but these women and men who were drawing anything and everything certainly weren't, or at least weren't afraid to talk about their fears. From the comics I read it seems like the women authors tended towards embracing their sexuality and expressing frustrations towards men's and society's attitudes toward women who like sex while the male authors focused more on their fantasies, insecurities around women, and fear of them.

A lot of these comics are laugh out loud hilarious, especially from a female perspective, because they play up the ridiculous expectations of women to be 'pure' and 'proper' and completely free of any sexual wanting. One story in particular shows a woman who becomes obsessed with sex, sells drugs to get money for prostitutes, and in the end she is lead onto the righteous path, but is shown pretty boozed up as the antidote. The lines in it are just perfect, such as the one pictured above, "My God! What'll I do with this vagina!!" They really push the satire with the dialogue and extremes that she goes to in order to get off. Some of these comics are very dark though, dealing with rape. While it is clear that many of these authors did not have much technical artistic training the line quality and mark making that is used in each respective story really seems to match the tone of the story. Satirical stories use traditional styles, romantic stories use smooth swooshing lines, and dark stories use frantic small marks and splotches. Even though they weren't trained, they clearly had a lot of sensibility as to what aesthetic would best support their story. In fact, I really enjoy that many of these are crude because they reflect the raw emotion instinct and lust that these comics are talking about. There is nothing clean about these comics, so the lines shouldn't be clean either.

If you can't appreciate the hilarious sexual antics, at least you can appreciate that these women and men opened up comics and showed that you can do anything with them and that an adult audience was definitely out there waiting to be catered to. One of Crumb's stories in The Book of Mr. Natural actually had a character breaking the fourth wall and saying 'hey look, I could never do this in real life, but I'm in a comic so I can do what I want!'. By really pushing the envelope and telling stories on the border of what is acceptable in society it showed other artists that anything can be explored in this medium, and that it was definitely not just for kids.