Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds

Journalist and comic book critic Brian Doherty's Dirty Pictures is the first complete narrative history of the weird and wonderful world of Underground Comix—"a welcome addition to an under-analyzed legacy of the free-spirited 1960s" (San Francisco Chronicle). In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of MAD magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture. Their "comix"—spelled that way to distinguish the work from their dime-store contemporaries—presented tales of taboo sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of society. Embraced by hippies and legions of future creatives, this subgenre of comic books and strips often ran afoul of the law, but that would not stop them from casting cultural ripples for decades to come, eventually moving the entire comics form beyond the gutter and into fine-art galleries.