Mary Wings, Dyke Shorts (1979)

Dyke Short by Mary Wings, 1979.

 

Jack Kirby, The Eternals (1976)

The Eternals by Jack Kirby, 1976.
 

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, The Bunch's Power Pak Comics #1 (1979)

 

The Bunch's Power Pak Comics #1, by Aline Kominsky-Crumb (1979).

Revelatory, ground-breaking autobiographical collection of comics stories. Aline Kominksy's confessional, scrawly cartooning is made up of a great variety of agonized linework, full of contrasting hatching and stippling give a sense of real texture to her drawings. All her figures are awkwardly posed, stuffed into ill-fitting clothing, with huge noses, blubbery lips. And what these figures do and say! Oh my! The stories here chronicle Aline's early life and upbringing and depict taboo subjects like her parents having sex, Aline sitting on the toilet, her love-hate relationship with her mother ("Blabette") and Aline confessing all her most non-flattering, innermost desires and vanities, all in abject, brain-searing detail that influenced a generation of comics makers.

The critics: "Aline depicts this all with a critical eye, sometimes commenting directly even when she doesn’t need to (e.g. , a panel showing the Bunch receiving money for her report card is accompanied by a narrative tag labeling the moment her “first training in capitalist greed and opportunism”) . The approach creates a tension between Kominsky’s need to grow out of those elements of her upbringing that are offensive to her and the self-obsession implicit in her continuing autobiographical drive."

--Bill Sherman, “Underground Comix: Memories and Studebakers” (The Comics Journal #55, 1980).

Tom Veitch and Greg Irons, The Legion of Charlies (1971)

The Legion of Charlies by Tom Veitch and Greg Irons (1971)

The classic Underground depicting twin horrors of the 1960s.

The Critics: "Contains long story written by Tom Veitch, older brother of Rick Veitch, drawn by the near legendary Greg Irons, comparing Charlie Company doing My Lai massacre in Viet Nam to the Charlie Manson family LA area murder rampage. Quite heavy duty graphic in the true depiction of the carnage. Both stories run unique in that one story runs along the top panels while the other story runs along all the bottom panels. Also contains Dave Sheridan art. Very EC horror & war comix inspired. Highly recommended!" --Robert Beerbohm, Facebook post, 2021

Nicole Claveloux, La Main Verte (1978)

 

La Main Verte by Nicole Claveloux (1978).

A groundbreaking psychedelic collection of existentialist stories.

The Critics: "Claveloux's pen hatching is fulsome, gathering modeled presence on the paper; her colors are bright, clashing gouache, layered in separate blotches, often defining form through a secondary, contourless outlines. Backgrounds are frequently sprayed on in gradients with airbrush. These hand-fashioned transitions lend to her horizons a kind of psychic intensity that reminds the reader of that these are internal projections." --Matthias Wivel, "The Green Hand and Other Stories," The Comics Journal, 2017.

Claire Bretécher, Les Frustrés (1975)

Les Frustrés by Claire Bretécher (1975).

The first collection of Bretécher's long-running weekly humour comic strip ("The Frustrated Ones") chronicling the anxieties and conflicts of the French middle class.

The critics: "Although Bretécher is on weekly display in an avowedly political (leftist) magazine in France, and although her rumpled, big-nosed, and slightly androgynous characters spend much time discussing matters political, it would be wholly false to construe her to be a political satirist. As a matter of fact, she has frequently asserted that politics bore her. Rather, as a social satirist, she examines the effect of life upon people—and politics, like pseudo- and anti-intellectualism Freud, mothers-in-law, and contact lenses, is just one more thing the human animal has to cope with on a daily basis.

Claire Bretécher’s stance is solidly individualistic. She pokes more fun at the left-wingers than at the conservatives, but this is presumably because the latter have been so thoroughly discredited in French circles that it would be tantamount to flogging a dead elephant to take them on. Besides which she, like most anyone else over there, probably navigates mostly in liberal waters and thus finds more first-hand material there to laugh at. Similarly, feminists catch a lot of flak from her, but more for their inanities and superficialities than for any deep ideological disagreements she might have with them." --Kim Thompson, "Claire Bretécher: Triumphant Despite Traitorous Translation," The Comics Journal #42, 1978.