When Comix Ruled

Rebus reminiscing about what mattered in 1973.

Note: A version of this piece I penned about the time in which underground comics mattered, culturally, was published by Style Weekly on Oct. 21, 2009. It originally ran as a sidebar to a feature story about editor Françoise Mouly interviewing artist R. Crumb at CenterStage in Richmond in '09. 

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During the spring semester of the 1972-1973 school year the student newspaper at Virginia Commonwealth University published three tabloid supplements that were inspired by the irreverent, frequently-salty underground "comix" of that age. The first issue of Fan Free Funnies came out near 1973's St. Valentine's Day.

The timing was perfect for Fan Free Funnies. It was created at the zenith of the hippie era in the Fan District. FFF published my first Rebus strip. Before Rebus even had a name he had been appearing as a spokesdog on my flyers touting midnight shows at the Biograph Theatre, which I managed at the time. Rebus was somewhat influenced by R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, in that I went to school on how Crumb used Mr. Natural as a spokesman, sometimes like a carnival barker. However, Rebus was hardly a holy man. Instead, he was an everyman schlemiel with a dog's head.

In that time some local, mostly VCU-trained artists, were making paintings and prints in a style reminiscent of some old animated cartoons of the 1930s and then-current underground funny books. Some of the same young artists also were making short films in Super 8 and 16mm. So the Biograph became a hub of a sort for them.

Not long after FFF came out, my 3-year-old daughter, Katey, asked me a question. “Is Rebus real?”

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

She said, “Like Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck.”

“Sure,” I said, “Rebus is real. But only the cool people know about him.”

The inspirational Crumb was the most celebrated of the underground artists in the days when cartoonists bitterly lampooning the tastes and values of middle class America were making an impact on popular culture. Spontaneously, Crumb launched the movement in 1968, selling his “Zap Comix No. 1” out of a baby carriage on San Francisco sidewalks.

In 1973, in spite of cultural changes that had been in the air for years, mainstream pop culture was still serving up plenty of safe schmaltz and accessible old hat: Billboard's top single of the year was “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree.” A month after the first issue of FFF was published the Oscar for the Best Picture of 1972 was presented to “The Godfather.” Thus, the term “underground,” as associated with art, film and music, still had a yet-to-be-fully exploited edge to it.

Perhaps the best known of the FFF cartoonists was Phil Trumbo (VCU 1972). “Ed Slipek, the editor of VCU's student newspaper, Commonwealth Times, approached me to help create an underground, comix-style supplement,” Trumbo remembers. “I suppose he contacted me because I had done some independent comics and was exhibiting paintings influenced by comics imagery.”

Each invited artist was instructed by Slipek to create a full page, drawn to proportion, in black and white. Some submitted a page of images set within traditional comic strip frames; others wandered into loose, more avant-garde styles. Scans of the three issues of Richmond's 1973 underground comics can now be seen online at the VCU Libraries Digital Collection.

“The journalism department at VCU didn't see that this was journalism,” recalls Slipek (who is, today, Style's senior contributing writer). “The media [advisory] board questioned the fact that we were doing this, but it was very well-received with the students. I'm proud of it because the Commonwealth Times continued to have comics of some sort — it's a lasting tradition that started with us.”

Trumbo left Richmond in 1984 to pursue a career in animation, which eventually led him to the West Coast and his current position as an art director at Hidden City Games. Along the way he picked up an Emmy Award for his work on “Pee Wee's Playhouse” and has been the art director of more than 100 video games, including “Lord of the Rings” and “Spider-Man.” Also a noteworthy musician, Trumbo recently returned home to play a reunion show with the Orthotonics, the influential Richmond band that he played with during his time here.

Charles Vess (VCU 1974) is another award-winning illustrator who contributed to FFF. Vess' art has since appeared in “Heavy Metal” and “National Lampoon”; he's a World Fantasy Award-winner who has worked for comic book publishers such as Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Epic. Other contributors to the 1973 series included Bruce Barnes, Eric Bowman, Michael Cody, Greg Kemp, Nancy Meade, Bill Nelson, Trent Nicholas and Ragan Reaves.

“Fan Free Funnies was a really diverse collection, representing vastly different graphic styles and inventive, experimental approaches to sequential storytelling,” Trumbo remembers. “We were all influenced by the amazing work of '60s underground cartoonists, like Robert Crumb, Rick Griffith, S. Clay Wilson and Trina Robbins and the rest.” 

Note: Scans of the art presented in the three issues of Fan Free Funnies can be found here. 

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