650 UNDERGROUND AND ADULT COMICS
such as the 1971 Air Pirate Funnies with a parody of Disney characters that embroiled
Dan O’Neill and his fellow Air Pirates in a decade-long legal battle.
As a comix scene developed in the wake of Zap, it was only natural that it gravitated
toward the counter-culture center, San Francisco. In the summer of 1968, Shelton
packed up his old Plymouth, headed west and joined Jackson, Dave Moriaty, Fred
Todd, Janis Joplin, and other transplanted Texas who were becoming known around
San Francisco as the “ Texas Mafi a.” When the Texas Mafi a bought a used printing
press in hopes of printing rock posters for fellow University of Texas dropout Chet
Helms’s Family Dog Production, it was the beginning of Rip Off Press, which quickly
became a major publisher of underground comix, publishing such titles as Hydrogen
Bomb Funnies and Freak Brothers.
Before Rip Off Press, Th e Print Mint was the dominant publisher of underground
comix. Th eir large print runs and practice of paying royalties to the artists for every
edition made it possible for some cartoonists to make a living from their comix. However,
as more cartoonists questioned the aesthetic judgment and accounting practices of Th e
Print Mint, other publishers entered the underground scene. When Wisconsin-based
cartoonist Denis Kitchen became disgruntled with Th e Print Mint he started Kitchen
Sink Enterprises in conjunction with Krupp Comic Works in 1970.
At the peak of the underground phenomenon in 1973, there were over 300 comix
titles in print; a Comix Convention was held in Berkeley, and it was not unusual for a
book to sell 40,000 copies, and the most popular titles achieved six-fi gure circulation.
Yet, by the mid-1970s, the death rattle of underground comix was unmistakable. With
the end of the confl ict in Vietnam, youth subculture was no longer galvanized by the
anti-war movement, and by the mid-1970s many former fl ower children had started
families, taken jobs, and were paying mortgages. Th ey were less receptive to the counter-
culture messages of the underground comix. Th e informal distribution system was also
under siege. Th e 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Miller vs. California reaffi rmed that
obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment and made it more dangerous to
sell the more explicit underground material. As more states attempted to make it against
the law to sell drug paraphernalia, many of the head shops that sold underground comix
were forced out of business.
Even the creators themselves were changing. Th e informal cartoonists’ cooperatives
of the late 1960s had become publishing companies, and the subculture had become an
industry, with less distance from and less revulsion for mainstream comics. Hoping to
tap into the underground market, Marvel publisher Stan Lee convinced Denis Kitchen
to edit the 1974 Comix Book for Marvel. Comix Book featured work from top under-
ground talents, but because the stories were too tame for the underground audience and
too bizarre for the mainstream fans, Marvel only published three issues before Kitchen
Sink took over publication for the fi nal two issues.
Both the revolutionary and risqué aspects of underground comix were continued,
at least to some degree, by former underground cartoonists taking subgenres of the
underground comix to new audiences, by comics in a magazine format that allowed
