654 UNDERGROUND AND ADULT COMICS
other Vertigo titles. Th e books under the Marvel Max imprint and the occasional adult
title from Image Comics, such as the tongue-in-cheek adventures of a super-powered
prostitute in Th e Pro, often seemed sophomoric compared to the Vertigo books. As DC
and Marvel tested the boundaries of what was allowable during the 1970s and 1980s, the
code was repeatedly relaxed. Eventually, it became irrelevant. Marvel opted out in 2001,
and DC only submits selected titles intended for young readers.
Kitchen Sink, Last Gasp and Rip Off Press survived beyond the 1970s by diver-
sifying their off erings, including reprinting classic comics material and publishing the
emerging alternative comics. Th e underground comix tradition has been most directly
sustained by the alternative comics that began to appear in the mid-1970s as under-
ground comix were fading away. Alternative comics are self-published or small-press
works that resist the clichés of mainstream genre fi ction in order to present a personal
vision, but ( unlike underground comix) they are aimed at the general culture rather
than a particular subculture.
In 1976, Harvey Pekar, a fi le clerk in Cleveland veterans hospital, decided to chronicle
his daily frustrations and occasional triumphs in an ironically titled comic book, American
Splendor. Pekar used old jazz records to entice acquaintance Robert Crumb to draw his
script. American Splendor is one of the earliest examples of the type of comic book that
has come to be referred to as alternative comic.
Arcade magazine was created by editors Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffi th to compete
in a mainstream magazine market, but the magazine never got distribution beyond the
dwindling underground outlets. Arcade’s cancellation in 1976, after only seven issues,
is sometimes pointed to as the end of the underground movement. Yet Arcade can also
be viewed as a transition from an underground vibe to an alternative aesthetic that was
more evident in the experimental RAW. Spiegelman and future wife Françoise Mouly
published the fi rst issue of this comics anthology in 1981. In RAW #2 Spiegelman began
serializing Maus as a mini-comic insert. Th e 11 issues of RAW contained work by both
underground stalwarts and emerging alternative cartoonists, such as Gary Panter and
Charles Burns. About the time RAW was being conceived Robert Crumb created the
anthology We i r d o to fi ll the void left by the collapse of the underground comix industry
and the cancellation of Arcade. Crumb featured work by a number of his underground
contemporaries, but he also sought out undiscovered talent. When Crumb passed the
editorship of We i r d o to Peter Bagge the book took on more of a punk sensibility and
became an important venue for the work of new wave cartoonists.
Arcade, RAW, and Wierdo were rooted in the underground comix, but they created
an alternative to both the underground and the mainstream. Former superhero fan Gary
Groth was converted to this new aesthetic; he not only championed alternative comics as
publisher and editor of Th e Comics Journal, but in 1982 his company, Fantagraphics, began
publishing innovative comics aimed at an adult audience. Th e fi rst off ering was Love and
Rockets, in which the Hernandez Brothers told character-driven tales with a Latino per-
spective that was unique in American comics. With an attitude that was often considered
elitist, self-aggrandizing and antagonistic toward the mainstream, Fantagraphics made
