Anarchy Comics

Description

Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection brings together the legendary four issues of Anarchy Comics, the underground comic that melded anarchist politics with a punk sensibility, producing a riveting mix of satire, revolt and artistic experimentation in the late-70s and early-80s. This international anthology collects the comic stories of all thirty international contributors. Full of radical politics, superb artwork and a great sense of humour, this book is utterly unique and, as comic legend Alan Moore puts it, A brave and brilliant collection.'

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 13 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604868180
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 94 Mo

Extrait

THE COMPLETE COLLECTION Edited by Jay Kinney

Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection Edited by Jay Kinney

© Jay Kinney, Paul Mavrides, and respective artists and writers 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978–1–60486–531–8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913634

Cover design by Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides Interior design by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ForewordPaul Buhle IntroductionJay Kinney

ANARCHY COMICS #1 Front coverJay Kinney Inside coverJay Kinney & Gerhard Seyfried Too RealJay Kinney Nestor MakhnoSpain Rodriguez Smarmy ComicsJay Kinney The Quilting BeeMelinda Gebbie Blood and SkySpain Rodriguez Gilbert Shelton’s Advanced International Motoring Tips Liberty Through the Ages: KronstadtÉpistolier & Volny What’s the Dierence?John Burnham Owd Nancy’s PetticoatCliord Harper Comic strip parodiesJay Kinney Some Straight Talk about AnarchyPaul Mavrides Inside back coverJay Kinney & Gerhard Seyfried Back coverGerhard Seyfried

6 7 9

23 24 25 30 32 33 37 44 45 49 50 52 53 57 58

ANARCHY COMICS #2 Front coverRuby Ray & Jay Kinney Inside coverJay Kinney & Gerhard Seyfried Wobblies!Steve Stiles Believe It!Sharon Rudahl Kultur DokumentsJay Kinney & Paul Mavrides The Black FreighterCliord Harper (& Bert Brecht) DurrutiSpain Rodriguez Romantic! AnarchyPeter Pontiac Radical ReectionsJay Kinney Liberty Through the Ages: The Yippies at the Exchange Épistolier & Trublin Quotes from Red EmmaMelinda Gebbie Inside back coverJay Kinney Back coverPaul Mavrides

ANARCHY COMICS #3 Front coverPeter Pontiac (& Guy Colwell) Inside coverJay Kinney (& Paul Mavrides) No ExitJay Kinney & Paul Mavrides Anarchy in the Alsace: The Revolt of the Rustauds Épistolier & Trublin WildcatDonald Rooum The Act of Creation According to BakuninAlbo Helm What Is Government?Cliord Harper (& Pierre Joseph Proudhon) Radical ReectionsJay Kinney Roman SpringSpain Rodriguez (& Adam Cornford & Jay Kinney) Naked AvengerSteve Laer Walkie TalkieGerhard Seyfried Awake, Purox, Awake!Gary Panter Benjamin Peret: Poet as Revolutionary Melinda Gebbie & Adam Cornford The Treasure of Cabo SantiagoSharon Rudahl Who’s in Charge Here?Greg Irons Men stripsDavid Lester At Home With . . .brooke Lydbrooke New Age PoliticsJay Kinney Pest ControlMatt Feazell Inside back coverJay Kinney Back coverPepe Moreno

59 60 61 66 67 75 79 84 86

87 90 93 94

95 96 97

105 109 110 112 116 117 123 124 126

128 131 135 139 140 140 141 145 146

ANARCHY COMICS #4 Front coverPaul Mavrides Inside coverPaul Mavrides Armageddon Outtahere!Paul Mavrides & Jay Kinney On the Night of March 3, 1982Cliord Harper You Rule the World!Norman Dog 1871Spain Rodriguez Public EnemyMelinda Gebbie Mr. HelpfulNorman Dog Executive TerrorismS. Zorca Korporate-RexR. Diggs Anarchy = PanarchyHarry S. Robins One-page stripByron Werner Cover-up LowdownPaul Mavrides & Jay Kinney Back coverPaul Mavrides

CARTOONIST BIOGRAPHIES

OUTTAKES, SKETCHES, AND NEW COMIX Cover Outtakes and Roughs Anarchy ComicsFamily Album The Amazing Tale of Victoria WoodhullSharon Rudahl Sketchbook Drawings and OuttakesJay Kinney

147 148 149 159 163 167 177 180 182 184 186 188 189 190

191

202 206 209 212

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This anthology, like the comics collected here, has been the result of the collective efforts, past and present, of numerous collaborators. The folks at PM Press deserve a special vote of thanks for carrying through all the details associated with publishing a book with enthusiasm and professionalism. In particular I wish to acknowledge Ramsey Kanaan, who tirelessly championed this project until I was înally persuaded to excavate the past and return this material to print. Hats off as well to Craig O’Hara for keeping an eye on our deadlines and attending to all sorts of practical matters; to Scott Braley for scanning the four issues in exemplary fashion; to Romy Ruukel for her copyediting expertise; to Gregory Nipper for his proofreader’s eye; and a special thanks to Brian Layng of briandesign for his crisp and readable book design. Thanks as well to Paul Mavrides, long-time collaborator on many comix and projects—particularly the comix collected here. Paul pitched in on coloring our art featured on the cover, just as he took up the editorial torch in seeingAnarchy#4 through to completion some twenty- îve years ago. Ron Turner of Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, the original publisher of Anarchy Comics, was instrumental in sustaining the comic during the course of its îrst incarnation. Thank you for your patience and generosity, Ron. I wish to acknowledge Adam Cornford and Yves Frémion (Épistolier) for their moral support, writing skills, occasional translation work, and editorial collaboration. We could not have done it without you. On a personal note, I wish to thank my wife, Dixie Tracy-Kinney, for her support during theAnarchyyears and over the decades since. It’s been a long strange trip and it ain’t over yet. Last, but hardly least, I wish to thank the artists and writers who poured their souls into the comix collected here. Spain Rodriguez, Clifford Harper, Melinda Gebbie, and Paul Mavrides in particular served as our “regulars,” producing deeply affecting art for all four issues, and they deserve special acknowledgment. But every contributor, no matter how many or how few pages they created, was essential to the project and helped make it what it was. A special thanks to Sharon Rudahl for sharing her previously unpublished biographical story about Victoria Woodhull. It is satisfying to see theAnarchy Comicstradition live on. In this era of increasingly outlandish intellectual property laws too often deployed in the interests of corporate greed and power, it is easy to forget that the hallmark of underground comix was the principle that the artists and writers involved owned the rights to their own work. Accordingly, all stories and strips inAnarchy Comicswere copyrighted in the names of their creators. This holds true for all of the material in this anthology as well, whether reprinted or new. Should anyone wish to reprint material from this publication—for whatever purpose, be it commercial, political, or aesthetic—they are requested to contact the respective creators c/o PM Press. My înal acknowledgment is to the readers ofAnarchy Comics of years past and brand new. These comix were produced for your enjoyment and stimulation; they certainly weren’t produced for the paltry sums of money involved. An attentive reading will reward us all, all over again. Jay Kinney

ANARCHY COMICS REVISITED

Anarchism, a timeless notion of freedom sans the coercion of an unwanted State, became a social movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. As a practical force, anarchism has been a combative competitor to social- ist movements, as well as communist movements and governments, and has signiîcantly inuenced education, the arts, and cooperative enter- prise. Anarchists have launched “free” or modern schools with non- coercive pedagogies, encouraged artistic revolts against formalism, and sparked eorts as sweeping as the kibbutz movement in Israel. Likewise, anarchists have urged freedom from formal marriage bonds, access to birth control technologies, nudism in public places, unpunished use of marijuana, and other liberating measures, oen before these gained pop- ularity or respectability. Anarchy Comicsowes its origin to the rebellious (1978–87) “Underground Comix” phase of comic art, and to the deeper feeling among artists and readers alike that the New Le movement and counterculture of the 1960s-to-early-1970s had reached their limits. Anarchism, with a small if enthusiastic historic following in the United States, enjoyed at this time a moment of revival, not as so much as an organized political force as a cultural aect, particularly in the growing punk subculture.Anarchyfounder Jay Kinney, a few years younger than the architects of the Underground Comix movement, had already estab- lished himself editorially withYoung Lust, coedited by Bill Griïth (later of “Zippy” fame, syndicated in daily newspapers). Kinney was a con- trarian by nature and a satirist, but also an autodidact interested in the history and philosophy of anarchism.

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ANARCHY COMICSTHE COMPLETE COLLECTION

Sadly, the Underground Comix phenomenon was drawing to a close at the moment ofAnarchy’s 1978 launch. “Head shops” with drug para- phernalia had closed by this time, oen under pressure from local police, taking with them a key marketplace for these o beat comics. The wide- spread feeling of youthful rebellion had turned inward anyway, the playful dreams of sharing worldly goods in a renewed Garden of Eden shattered by global power politics and rising rents and drug burnouts. The Age of Reagan was just around the corner, aer all. Anarchy Comicsmight be taken as a salute to cynicism, but the live- liness, the humor, and the intriguing art (a good portion of it by Kinney himself and his editorial and artistic collaborator, Paul Mavrides) carried a sense of verve. All the joking was balanced by a healthy dose of graphic stories about historical episodes when Anarchism or libertarian social- ism took the world stage. Strips by the famed Spain Rodriguez, and those by French comix writer “Épistolier” (Yves Frémion), demonstrated that history can be as entertaining as humor. In eect, Kinney was pulling out the stops to show o what was really funny and insightful in the comix genre at large, extending it into another era.Anarchy Comicsto the last third of the twentieth belongs century, and yet has lost nothing of its power for today’s troubled world. Go to the original, reader, look and learn! Paul Buhle

Paul Buhle was the founder ofRadical Americamagazine and publisher ofRadical America Komiksedited by Gilbert Shelton. Now retired from Brown University, he has edited ten comic art volumes and a biography of Harvey Kurtzman.

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“Every joke îs a tîny revolutîon. If you had to deine humour în a sîngle phrase, you mîght deine ît as dîgnîty sîttîng down on a tîn-tack. Whatever destroys dîgnîty, and brîngs down the mîghty from theîr seats, preferably wîth a bump, îs funny. And the bîgger the fall, the bîgger the joke. It would be better to throw a custard pîe at a bîshop than at a curate. . . . The truth îs that you cannot be memorably funny wîthout at some poînt raîsîng topîcs whîch the rîch, the powerful and the complacent would prefer to see le alone.”¹ George Orwell

INTRODUCTION

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life and times ofAnarchy Comics, a comic book, yes, but much more than a comic. In its brief time among us, just four issues in nine years, it combined humor and politics in a provocative manner rarely seen before or since. Its special virtue was that it transcended any one category: underground comix, punk zine, or anarchist propaganda. This anthology tells its story and collects all four issues—some long out of print—along with related sketches, story ideas, roughs, and other visual artifacts previously hidden away in sketchbooks and îles. Allow me to set the stage . . . The late ’70s in San Francisco was a time of competing cul- tural impulses. The mythic Summer of Love was long gone, and San Francisco’s reputation as a Hip Mecca had morphed into its newer iden- tity as a Gay Mecca. The local underground comix movement that had garnered national attention in the late ’60s and early ’70s (with best- selling, independently produced titles such asZap Comix,The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, andYoung Lust) had peaked by 1975, yet the main S.F. underground comix publishers, Last Gasp and Rip O Press, contin- ued to operate, and a generous handful of cartoonists still lived around town, looking for work wherever it could be found.²

1 Quoted in theBig Red Joke Book(London: Pluto Press, 1968). 2 See my essay on the underground comix scene in S.F. inTen Years That Rocked the Cityedited by Chris Carlsson (San Francisco: City Lights, 2011). For the best overview of the under- ground comix movement as a whole, I recommendRebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963–1975by Patrick Rosenkranz (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002).

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