Underground comix and the first adult comics market

The American comic book of the early 1960s was a newsstand product. It was printed cheap, shipped in bundles by national magazine distributors, and sold off wire racks in drugstores, bus stations and supermarkets. That one fact set the ceiling on what a comic could contain, because the distributors would not carry a book without the Comics Code seal printed on the cover. The Code years are usually told as a story about censorship. They are really a story about shipping.

Underground comix got around the whole apparatus by ignoring the racks.

Head shops were the entire business model

From the late 1960s there was a retail network that had nothing to do with magazine wholesalers: head shops, record stores, poster shops and campus bookshops selling counterculture merchandise. Papers, patches, posters, pipes. Small comics went into that network alongside everything else, sold cash and carry, usually non returnable.

Zap Comix appeared in San Francisco in 1968 and is the marker most histories use for the start of the wave. Within a few years small West Coast presses were printing dozens of titles for the same shops. Rip Off Press and Last Gasp both came out of that period, and the Print Mint in Berkeley moved from posters into comics. None of them needed a distributor’s permission, because none of them used a distributor.

That is the part people miss about the Code. It was never a law. It was an industry agreement administered by a body the publishers themselves paid for, and all of its teeth were in the supply chain. A wholesaler would not touch an unsealed comic book. A head shop owner had no wholesaler and did not care what a seal was.

Cartoonists kept the copyright

Mainstream comics were work for hire. You drew a character, the company owned it, and that was the arrangement for decades. Underground publishers generally left copyright with the cartoonist and paid a royalty on each printing.

It sounds like a small thing next to the money involved at the big two. It wasn’t. A cartoonist who owned the work could reprint it, license it, collect it into a book, or take it to another publisher, and some of them were still earning from material they had drawn in their twenties thirty years later. The underground did not invent creator ownership, but it normalised it for a generation of American cartoonists, and that expectation went straight into the independent comics of the 1980s.

The money at the time was modest. Print runs in the tens of thousands were good, and most titles did far less. What the model bought was not income so much as control over the content, which is the reason the adult work could exist at all.

Why adult material was there in the first place

The comix were not primarily pornography and it is a mistake to read them that way. They were provocation, and the list of things they went at is close to a list of what the Code prohibited: sex, drugs, religion, politics, gore, authority. Breaking the rule was frequently the whole joke. Once you are outside the system there is no reason to observe the system’s limits, and a lot of early comix read as a cartoonist testing exactly where the new edge was.

A fair amount of what came out of that in the early 1970s is ugly, and the people who said so loudest were the women working in the same scene. Trina Robbins edited an all woman comic in 1970, and Wimmen’s Comix followed from Last Gasp in 1972. That strand matters more than its print runs suggest, because adult comics that treat power between characters as something both of them agreed to descend from it far more directly than they descend from the shock material. Writing that dynamic on the page is still the genre’s hardest problem.

The two things that ended it

First, the law changed shape. In 1973 the Supreme Court decided Miller v. California, which set obscenity against local community standards rather than a single national test. That moved the risk onto the retailer and made it geographic. A shop in one city could be prosecuted over a title that sat unremarked on a shelf two states away. Shops got careful about what they stocked, and careful retailers order less.

Second, the shops themselves went. Through the second half of the 1970s, state and local drug paraphernalia laws closed head shops in large numbers. The comix had no other route to a reader, no newsstand fallback and no bookshop presence to speak of. Print runs collapsed, publishers shrank or folded, and the wave was effectively over by the end of the decade.

What it left behind

The direct market. Comic shops ordering non returnable from specialist distributors grew out of the same infrastructure and was working by the mid 1970s, and that is the channel that carried adult and independent comics for the next thirty years. The ownership norm survived too, and so did the format habits: small page counts, black and white interiors, a print run sized to a known audience rather than to a rack.

Mostly what survived is the lesson. Adult comics have never been stopped by a censor with an argument. They have been stopped, repeatedly, by whoever controls the way the book reaches the reader. The rest of this history is that same fight with different intermediaries, and the craft pages are about what you do with the freedom once you have it.