UNDERGROUND AND ADULT COMICS 649
It is diffi cult to identify when and where the fi rst underground comic book was
“published,” but a strong case can be made for Austin, Texas, as the birthplace of
underground comix. In the fall of 1962, Gilbert Shelton took over as editor of Te x a s
Ranger humor magazine at the University of Texas in Austin. Th e adventures of
Shelton’s superhero parody, Wonder Wart-Hog, appeared in all but one of the issues
Shelton edited and became the fi rst underground comix “hit.” Just weeks before his
Te x a s R a n g e r debut, the “hog of steel” was presented to a national audience in the
pages of Help!, and via a profi le in Mademoiselle magazine. Shelton, Jack Jackson,
and Tony Bell began publishing Th e Austin Iconoclastic Newsletter (known simply as
THE) in 1964. Six of the seven issues contained a one-page Frank Stack comic, “Th e
Adventures of J” (the name Jesus was spelled out in the seventh installment). Shelton
collected about a dozen of the Jesus strips in a photocopied 14-page comic book that
he distributed to friends in Austin. Th e fi fth issue of THE advertised God Nose Adult
Comix by Jack Jackson, but signed Jaxon. Jackson’s friends in the state capital print
shop ran off 1,000 copies of the 42-page God Nose comic book. In 1968, the under-
ground newspaper Th e Austin Rag published the fi rst of Shelton’s comics about Th e
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, who would eventually become the best known and
most widely marketed characters from the underground comix.
Underground newspapers such as the East Village Other and the Berkeley Barb began
appearing in the mid-1960s. Robert Crumb turned to the underground newspapers
as a promising venue for his LSD-inspired creations of 1967 (including Mr. Natural,
Eggs Ackley, and Angelfood McSpade). Th e Philadelphia-based underground news-
paper Yarrowstalks published a couple of Crumb’s strips in its fi rst two issues during the
summer of 1967. It was underground newspaper publisher Don Donahue who paid
for printing 5,000 copies of Crumb’s Zap Comix #1. Donahue sold the majority of the
print run to Th ird World Distribution from where the books went to head shops and
record stores across the nation.
With issue #2, Zap became an anthology and provided an outlet for the talents of
Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffi n, and S. Clay Wilson. Zap
inspired Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson to convert their humor magazine, Th e Chicago
Mirror, to Bijou Funnies, a comix anthology that published some of the early work of
Art Spiegelman.
A very stoned Ron Turner encountered a copy of Zap and was inspired to create a ben-
efi t comic book, Slow Death Funnies, for an ecology center in Berkeley. Th e ecology center
did not care for the comic, but with the help of Gary Arlington, proprietor of the San
Francisco Comic Book Company, Turner sold enough copies that he began running Last
Gasp Eco-Funnies out of his garage. Trina Robbins convinced Turner to publish It Ain’t
Me, Babe, the fi rst all-women produced comic book. Robbins helped form the wimmen’s
comix collective, which, beginning in 1972, produced seven issues of Wimmen’s Comix
for Last Gasp. Another signifi cant title from Last Gasp was Justin Green’s Binky Brown
Meets the Virgin Mary, the inspiration for many of the autobiographical alternative
comics of the following decades. Turner also began to distribute other publishers’ books,
