472 POLITICS AND POLITICIANS
Stories and Charlton Comics’ Fightin’ Army portrayed the confl ict as a noble and
necessary struggle against the forces of communism. Th e Cold War was an important
backdrop for Marvel’s revitalization of the superhero in the early 1960s: Th e accident
in space that gives the Fantastic Four their powers is the result of their urgent mis-
sion to beat the Soviets to the Moon, and superheroes such as Iron Man and Captain
America found themselves facing off against communist enemies far more threaten-
ing than those so easily trounced by the Fighting American. However, as Matthew J.
Costello observes, by the end of the 1960s, the Cold War consensus was beginning
to fray, and “the virtue of the government also [became] more ambiguous” (74). Both
Marvel and DC found that they could not keep representations of real-world political
unrest out of their comics, but their responses to it were always carefully calibrated.
Frequently, superhero comics presented exaggerated versions of right-wing and left-
wing responses to political issues, with the star of the book advocating a moderate
middle ground. Batman and Spider-Man both found themselves confronting mili-
tant activist groups with whom they sympathized but whose methods they deplored
( Amazing Spider-Man #68, 1969, Batman #230, 1971). As Bradford Wright observes,
“in an American society facing deepening political divisions, Marvel’s superheroes
worked to preserve what remained of the vital center. DC’s superheroes tended to
take the same position” (235).
Although mainstream comics were constrained in their ability to respond to the polit-
ical upheavals of the day, a new model of comics creation and distribution was emerging
in the late 1960s, one that off ered its artists enormous aesthetic and ideological freedom:
underground comics , or “ comix .” Because they were primarily distributed through
venues such as “head” shops and record stores instead of through news vendors, and
were thus free of the restrictions of the Comics Code, the undergrounds had license to
off er graphic depictions of sexuality, violence, and drug use. Comix creators gravitated
toward pointed satire of American mass culture and politics as well. Th e underground
comics as a group off ered no single coherent political vision; many were only “political”
in the broad sense that their celebration of the counterculture functioned as an implicit
critique of mainstream American values. However, within the diverse and idiosyncratic
group of underground creators were several artists who placed politics at the center of
their work. Th ese included Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, whose Marxist hero “ Trashman”
waged revolutionary violence against a fascist United States government in a bleak,
dystopian future. Skip Williamson regularly satirized leading political fi gures of the day
in the pages of Bijou Funnies (1969–70); he also brought together a group of under-
ground cartoonists to create Conspiracy Capers (1969), a comic dedicated to defending
the Chicago Seven. Explicitly political anthology titles including Slow Death Funnies
(1969) and All-Atomic Comics (1976) leveled criticisms at a variety of powerful and
destructive forces in American life, including the nuclear power industry and corporate
agribusiness. Female underground cartoonists such as Trina Robbins and Lee Mars
published a wide array of titles that brought feminism to comics, including It Ain’t Me,
Babe (1970) and Wimmen’s Comix (1972), which dealt with political issues of particular
