Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975 (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Moving from year to year and town to town, through a revolving cast of artists and publishers, this story of revolutionary 60s art-making seeks to capture some of the frenzied scope and communal bonhomie that made the hippie counterculture click. The big names here are Robert Crumb, Robert Williams and Art Spiegelman, who emerge from the postwar era of conformity and repression into a period of broad cultural experimentation and self-discovery. Once the text moves beyond boilerplate mythmaking about San Francisco in the free love era, an interesting portrait begins to emerge-of ambitious, committed artists seeking to push their own boundaries, and with them the boundaries of society at large. In its detailed account of an art that celebrated sweating burnouts and libidinous creeps, the volume gives all the anecdotes and minutiae a reader might want. Lavishly illustrated with pages and panels from the underground press of the time (at least one per page), the book serves as a solid reference point for the developing styles of hippie draftsmanship. Crumb and co. round out a decade one-upping each other in degrees of explicitness and self-revelation, and leave behind a massive inheritance for future generations of doodlers to draw from. Illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The most lasting artistic legacy of the 1960s hippie movement, other than its music, is its eye-poppingly transgressive underground comics--black-and-white pamphlets that spread the counterculture message of sex, drugs, and rebellion to freak and straight alike. Rosencranz thoroughly documents the phenomenon, providing a year-by-year account of the underground scene, from 1968's Zap #1, which artist R. Crumb sold from a baby carriage on the streets of Haight Ashbury, to its crash in 1973 in the wake of obscenity rulings and a crackdown on head shops. During the period, the comics' subject matter mirrored countercultural concerns as they shifted from peace-and-love to antiwar, feminist, and other political messages. Rosencranz's writing may lack flair, but with personalities this colorful (the artists themselves provide fly-on-the-wall reminiscences) and art this outrageous (reprinted on nearly every page) to write about, who needs it? Many underground veterans, especially Crumb and Art Spiegelman, continue to produce significant, high-profile work, but their most lasting influence is seen in today's alternative-comics artists, who followed them in placing artistic expression above commercialism. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books; 1 edition (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560974648
• ISBN-13: 978-1560974642
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 9.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #935,395 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Inside Scoop, January 1, 2004

By	Denis Wheary (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you don't know what a comix is, maybe you should go on e-bay and buy yourself a copy of ZAP. While you still can.

For those who are familiar with underground comic books, Patrick Rosenkranz has provided an amazing amount of background information about the creators and the times that produced what could be viewed as the trashiest and/or the most significant cultural artifacts of the second half of the 20th Century.

Unlike previous histories and articles that simply reprint the more or less shocking comic pages and regurgitate the same old information, misinformation and opinions about the hippies and their graphic art, Rebel Visions is based on Mr. Rosenkranz own interviews and correspondence with the first wave of underground comix creators. In lengthy footnoted quotes, the artist/writers are finally allowed to tell their own strange and wonderful stories. And by following the stories organized in yearly chapters, I cames to understand something of the birth, bloom and demise of a phenomena that never made the transition to mainstream product or the 1980s.

Rebel Visions also presents a significant amount of previously unpublished art for the connoisseur as well as an exhaustive index for the scholar.

A word of warning: these comic books are not, and never were, intended for children. Most of the comix displayed and discussed in Rebel Visions were all about breaking taboos, about freedom of expression in the face of a repressive mainstream culture and not about tittilation. That came later. If you're interested in cartoons, graphic art, the counter culture, art, politics, the sixties, propaganda, freedom and censorship, as well as the usual sex, drugs and war, check it out.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, August 19, 2009

By	Willard D. Markhardt "art dog" (madison WI) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution (Paperback)

I've seen several of these books and I think this is the best of the lot. I was very impressed with the total vision of the book.