Underground Comics
The weird strand of comics, from the 1960s head-shop underground to the risograph small press. Zap and the American underground and what the 1973 obscenity ruling did to its distribution; Wimmen's Comix and the women who were shut out of the first wave; Arcade, RAW and Weirdo; Fantagraphics and the argument that comics could be criticised seriously. In Japan, Garo from 1964, the alt-gekiga of Tsuge and Tatsumi, heta-uma, and the ero-guro of Maruo and Hanawa. In Europe, L'Association and Fremok. Then PictureBox, Fort Thunder, and the small press that prints on a risograph and sells across a table. The work here includes material that is scatological, violent and sexually explicit; it is described for what it is, and where it has been criticised the criticism is attributed to whoever made it.
A chronological documentary of 1,441 moments spanning 1830–2026 on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-09-20
Eras
- Obscenity, Prosecutions, the 1973 Miller ruling, the collapse of head-shop distribution that followed, and the legal defence that grew up around comics afterwards.
- Underground, The wider American underground between roughly 1965 and 1975, sold through head shops rather than newsstands: Bijou, Slow Death, Rory Hayes, and Justin Green's Binky Brown, which put autobiography into comics before the word was used.
- Wimmen, Wimmen's Comix from 1972 and the women who made it, including Trina Robbins and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, after the first underground wave largely shut them out.
- Gekiga, The alternative side of gekiga: Yoshiharu Tsuge, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Seiichi Hayashi, Sanpei Shirato, and Shigeru Mizuki's stranger work.
- Fort Thunder, The Providence warehouse and the artists who worked in it, among them Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman.
- Riso, Risograph printing and the presses built around it: Kus, Breakdown Press, Colorama, Perfectly Acceptable.
- Fantagraphics, Fantagraphics and The Comics Journal, Love and Rockets, and the publishers who followed in treating comics as a literature to be edited and argued about.
- Angouleme, The Angouleme festival and the off-festival around it, and European festival culture more widely.
- Conventions, Festivals and fairs where this work is sold and the people who make it meet: SPX, TCAF, CAB, Comitia and their European equivalents.
- Exhibitions, Gallery shows and museum retrospectives, and comics arriving in art institutions.
- Raw, RAW, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly from 1980, which serialised Maus and imported the European avant-garde to American readers.
- Arcade, Arcade: The Comics Revue, edited by Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith between 1975 and 1976, the bridge between the underground and what came next.
- PictureBox, PictureBox under Dan Nadel, which published C.F.'s Powr Mastrs and Paper Rad, and brought Takashi Nemoto into English.
- Heta Uma, Heta-uma, bad-but-good. The term surfaced in the Japanese illustration scene of the early 1970s rather than being coined by any one person, and spread widely in the 1980s through Teruhiko Yumura, who drew as King Terry. Its foundational comics work is Jonetsu no Penguin Gohan, serialised in Garo from April 1976 with Shigesato Itoi writing and Yumura drawing. Also Yoshikazu Ebisu, and Takashi Nemoto, whose Monster Man Bureiko Lullaby is drawn in a crude bulging line and is largely about bodies mutating and leaking.
- Association, L'Association in Paris from 1990 and the French wave around it: Lapin, David B., Lewis Trondheim, Joann Sfar, Marjane Satrapi.
- Weirdo, Weirdo from 1981, edited in turn by Robert Crumb, Peter Bagge and Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
- Translation, How this work reached other languages: Drawn and Quarterly's Tsuge and Tatsumi, Last Gasp's Maruo, PictureBox's Nemoto, Breakdown Press.
- AX, Seirinkogeisha, founded in 1997 by former Seirindo staff after Garo collapsed, and AX, which it has published every two months since 1998. Noriko Tezuka was Garo's deputy editor from 1995, then AX's editor-in-chief and the company's president; she died on 12 October 2025 and is the institutional link between the two magazines.
- Minicomics, Minicomics and self-publishing, and the table as a distribution system.
- Documentation, Documentaries, long interviews and journalism about the field, including Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, released in 1994.
- Fremok, Fremok and Amok, the Belgian and French avant-garde, and artists including Dominique Goblet and Fabrice Neaud.
- Zines, Photocopied and self-distributed work, and the distros that carried it.
- Garo, Garo, founded by Katsuichi Nagai in 1964, which paid badly or not at all and printed what nobody else would.
- Doujinshi, Self-published Japanese comics and the fairs that sell them, on the alternative rather than the fan-fiction side.
- Zap, Zap Comix from 1968 and the artists around it: Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin. Crumb's depictions of women and of race have been argued over for fifty years and those arguments are recorded with their sources.
- Shops, The shops and distributors that decided what readers could actually find.
- Webcomics, Where the weird strand went online.
- Ero Guro, Ero-guro: Suehiro Maruo, Kazuichi Hanawa, Shintaro Kago, Toshio Saeki. The work is erotic and grotesque by intent and is described here as what it is.
- Strips, The newspaper strip before the underground, and the formal invention it left behind: Rodolphe Topffer's picture stories of the 1830s, Wilhelm Busch, Winsor McCay, and George Herriman's Krazy Kat, which the underground cartoonists read and cited as the proof that the form could carry anything.
- Satire, The European graphic satire the underground descends from: Simplicissimus in Munich from 1896 and L'Assiette au Beurre in Paris from 1901, where drawing was used to attack the state, the church and the army, and where artists were prosecuted for it.
- Murals, Work painted at building scale, mostly in Brussels, where alternative cartoonists were given walls alongside the mainstream Franco-Belgian names.
- - Toepffer Cryptogame. Sheet of 1830. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Histoire de Mr Jabot par Rodolphe Töpffer. Topffer page dated 1833. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - Histoire de Mr Jabot par Rodolphe Töpffer. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1833.
- - Histoire de Mr Jabot par Rodolphe Töpffer. Sheet of 1833. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Histoire de Mr Jabot par Rodolphe Töpffer. Topffer page dated 1833. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe. Held under the identifier Histoire de Mr Jabot - par R.
- - Histoire de M. Crépin. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1837.
- - Mr Crépin (Réimpression de l'édition de ) par Rodolphe Töpffer. Topffer page dated 1837. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - Mr Crépin (Réimpression de l'édition de ) par Rodolphe Töpffer. Sheet of 1837. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Mr Crépin (Réimpression de l'édition de ) par Rodolphe Töpffer. Sheet of 1837. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints. Held under the identifier Mr Crépin (Réimpression de l.
- - Mr Crépin (Réimpression de l'édition de ) par Rodolphe Töpffer. Topffer page dated 1837. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe. Held under the identifier Mr Crépin (Réimpression de l.
- - Festus Gothique. Sheet of 1840. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Festus Hors texte. Topffer page dated 1840. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - Festus Hors texte. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1840.
- - Festus Hors texte. Sheet of 1840. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints. Held under the identifier Festus-Hors-texte 18 - d090..
- - Le docteur Festus. Monsieur Pencil autographié par l'auteur. Topffer page dated 1840. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe. Held under the identifier Le docteur Festus. Monsieur .
- - Le docteur Festus. Monsieur Pencil autographié par l'auteur. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1840. Held under the identifier Le docteur Festus. Monsieur .
- - Le docteur Festus. Monsieur Pencil autographié par l'auteur. Sheet of 1840. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints. Held under the identifier Le docteur Festus. Monsieur .
- - CH NB Voyage autour du Mont Blanc dans les vallées d'Hérens de Zerma. Plates from the 1843 travel book Voyage autour du Mont-Blanc, drawn by Rodolphe Toepffer on his walking tours through the Alps.
- - CH NB Voyage autour du Mont Blanc dans les vallées d'Hérens de Zerma. Topffer page dated 1843. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - CH NB Voyage autour du Mont Blanc dans les vallées d'Hérens de Zerma. Plates from the 1843 travel book Voyage autour du Mont-Blanc, drawn by Rodolphe Toepffer on his walking tours through the Alps.
- - CH NB Voyage autour du Mont Blanc dans les vallées d'Hérens de Zerma. Sheet of 1843. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints. Held under the identifier CH-NB-Voyage autour du Mont-.
- - Mr Cryptogame Cham. Topffer page dated 1846. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - Mr Cryptogame Cham. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1846.
- - Mr Cryptogame Cham. Sheet of 1846. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Mr Cryptogame Cham. Topffer page dated 1846. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe. Held under the identifier Mr Cryptogame - Cham - btv1b.
- - Rodolphe Toepffer Etude pour un portrait de jeune femme. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1846. Held under the identifier Rodolphe Toepffer Etude pour.
- - Autour de la table histoire de M. Cryptogame. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1849.
- - Autour de la table histoire de M. Cryptogame. Sheet of 1849. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Autour de la table histoire de M. Cryptogame. Topffer page dated 1849. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - Autour de la table histoire de M. Cryptogame. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1849. Held under the identifier Autour de la table - histoir.
- - Topffer, 1854. Sheet of 1854. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Topffer, 1854. Topffer page dated 1854. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - Topffer, 1854. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1854.
- - Topffer, 1854. Sheet of 1854. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints. Held under the identifier Nouveauxvoyagese-p402.png.
- - Histoire de Mr Vieux Bois par Töpffer. Topffer page dated 1860. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe.
- - Histoire de Mr Vieux Bois par Töpffer. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1860.
- - Histoire de Mr Vieux Bois par Töpffer. Sheet of 1860. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints.
- - Histoire de Mr Vieux Bois par Töpffer. Topffer page dated 1860. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe. Held under the identifier Histoire de Mr Vieux Bois - .
- - Histoire de Mr Vieux Bois par Töpffer. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1860. Held under the identifier Histoire de Mr Vieux Bois - .
- - Töpffer Monsieur Pencil, page 10a. Sheet of 1860. Topffer set a running drawing above a line of text and called the form literature in prints. Held under the identifier Töpffer - Monsieur Pencil, 1.
- - Töpffer Monsieur Pencil, page 25a. Topffer page dated 1860. His albums circulated from the 1830s and were pirated across Europe. Held under the identifier Töpffer - Monsieur Pencil, 1.
- - Töpffer Monsieur Pencil, page 46b. Page from one of Rodolphe Topffer's picture novels, drawn on stone in Geneva and dated 1860. Held under the identifier Töpffer - Monsieur Pencil, 1.
- - Max und Moritz. Sequence dated 1864. A fixed cast runs through escalating violence to a flat closing line.
- - Max und Moritz. Busch drawing, 1864.
- - Max und Moritz. Wilhelm Busch page, 1864, text set beneath the drawing in rhymed couplets.
- - Max und Moritz tinted. Sequence dated 1865. A fixed cast runs through escalating violence to a flat closing line.
- - Inada Kyuzo Shinsuke
- - Twenty-Eight Famous Murders, title page. Title sheet for Eimei nijushasshuku, the series of twenty-eight murder prints Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and Utagawa Yoshiiku issued between 1866 and 1867.
- - Gosho Gorozo Battling a Shadow. Gosho Gorozo fights his own shadow, the blood drawn in the thick lacquer-like red the series is known for.
- - Prostitute Ohyaku and a seated ghost. Ohyaku confronts a seated ghost, one of the sheets Yoshiiku contributed alongside Yoshitoshi.
…and 1,391 more moments.
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