648 UNDERGROUND AND ADULT COMICS
graphic detail, celebrities, political fi gures, or fi ctional characters using obscene language
and enjoying a wide variety of sex acts, most of which were illegal at the time. By far the
favorite subjects were characters from the newspaper comic strips. By the 1950s, the
eight-pagers were rare artifacts and most of the underground comix creators were prob-
ably only vaguely aware of them as anti-authoritarian ancestors. More direct infl uences
were the early Mad and even the outrageously gruesome and occasionally politically
subversive horror and science fi ction comics of the 1950s, done by creators who were
more likely to have been exposed to the Tijuana Bibles.
Some of those infl uential creators might have also been exposed to the so-called
kinky comics that developed in the subculture of sexual fetishism. One of the pioneers
of these comics was John Alexander Scott Coutts, who changed his name to John Willie
when he moved to New York in the mid-1940s and began publishing the bondage and
fetish magazine Bizarre. Willie’s bondage comic “Sweet Gwendoline” was serialized in
Bizarre during the late 1940s, reprinted by Irving Klaw in the 1950s, and collected in
a graphic novel in 1958. Fetish entrepreneur Irving Klaw also serialized the bond-
age comics of Gene Bilbrew (Eneg), Eric Stanton, and others in his Movie Star News
magazine during the 1950s and published some of their collected stories in book form
through his Nutrix imprint. Th ese kinky comics were not widely available and more
people knew them by reputation than ever saw one. However, they did establish a tra-
dition of drawing taboo sexual practices that a number of underground cartoonists
gleefully continued.
Th e tap root of the undergrounds goes back to William Gaines’s infamous EC
line that included Vault of Horror, Crime SuspenStories, and Mad. For approximately
fi ve years the EC writers and artists crafted tightly plotted, but lurid, short stories
that delighted their adolescent fans (including virtually all of the future underground
cartoonists) and shocked polite society. Th e gore, violence, sensuality, and occasional
political commentary of these works strained against and often violated the boundaries
of what was considered good taste until EC became the primary target of the of the
wrath of censors in the form of the Comics Code Authority (CCA). When most of
Gaines’s titles were denied code approval and distributors refused to carry them, EC
stayed afl oat on the back of one title—Mad, which shifted to a magazine format and
thus moved outside the purview of the code.
Most of the pioneer underground cartoonists cite the Kurtzman-edited Mad
magazine as a major infl uence on their consciousness and their style. Kurtzman left
EC in 1956 due to a dispute with Gaines over control of Mad. After two failed
attempts to start his own humor magazine (Trump and Humbug, both in 1957),
Kurtzman had a remarkable fi ve-year run editing and doing much of the writing for
Help!, a magazine with even more aggressive and risqué humor than he had employed
in Mad. Kurtzman not only foreshadowed the content of the soon to emerge under-
ground comix, but he provided encouragement and a taste of publication to future
comix superstars Robert Crumb, Jay Lynch, Gilbert Shelton, and Skip Williamson
in the amateur section of Help!.
