Though it’s been commonly accepted in Europe and Japan for may years, it’s finally creeping into common knowledge here in the U.S. that the medium of comics, or “graphic stories”, is not limited to — a: an audience of kids, and b: stories about steroid disasters in leotards grimacing and punching each other.
Comics is simply a medium, one that can be used to convey or talk about essentially anything, including reportage.
A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge is a graphic story about the disaster (both natural and political) of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
The story is published by Smith Magazine and written and drawn by Josh Neufeld, a member of the ACT-I-VATE comics collective and author of The Vagabonds, with consulting and editing from Jeff Newlet and Miles VanMeter.
A.D. was initially published as a webcomic, which you can still read online at Smith Magazine, and has now been released in book format.
There is a video interview on the making of the story on YouTube.
[Via Salon]
So what about “Underground comics”?
Are those marginal then?
Or were they only a thing of the sixties?
Is there a huge canyon between underground and mainstream?
I ask this as I always thought (being a european) that american underground comics already did what european comics developed only in the seventies.
True, in europe (especially France) the comics literally grew up together with it’s audience, gradually, over a number of decades. As a result, there’s no gap between genres and ages in europe.
Big gap in the U.S and A?
Yes. I’m a big fan of 1960’s underground comix (the term artists and readers used to refer to them at the time), and have quite a collection of them (including the art for an unpublished one by me and some friends of mine). However, underground comix, with the possible exception of some public awareness of Robert Crumb, were never mainstream.
Even among comics “fans” in the U.S., awareness of them was minimal, and lost in the glare of the superhero comics that dominated the popular market. Underground comix had a tremendous influence, though, on many American comics creators, and through them changed the medium indirectly in many ways.