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Newave!: The Underground Mini Comix of the 1980s
The very best from comicdom’s DIY/zine heyday! Just a few of the names included herein: Jeff Gaither, Michael Roden, Wayno, Artie Romero, Brad Foster, Fred Hembeck, Mary Fleener, The Pizz, Rick Geary, Dennis Worden, Steve Willis, Roy Tompkins, Tom Christopher, XNO, Clay Geerdes, Bob X, Jim Siergey, J.R. Williams, Jim Blanchard, Norman Dog, Molly Kiely, Mack White, Daniel Clowes, Doug Allen, Art Penn, Sam Henderson, Gary Whitney, George Erling, Bob Vojtko, Doug Potter, David Miller, Jim Ryan, Par Holman, Roger May, Meher Dada, Wayne Gibson, Tom Motley, Marc Arsenault, Ion, Bruce Chrislip, Dale Luciano, C. Bradford Gorby, Robin Ator, Douglas O’Neil, C. E. Emmer, Kurt Wilcken, Doug Holverson, Jamie Alder, Tom Hosier, Steven Noppenberger, W.C. Pope, Jim Gillespie, John Howard, Tucker Petertil, Gary Lieb, Bob Conway, and Jim Thompson.
Newave! is a gigantic collection of the best small press cartoonists to emerge in the 1970s after the first generation of underground cartoonists (such as R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Art Spiegelman) paved the way. These cartoon¬ists, inspired by the freewheeling creative energy of the underground commix movement, began drawing and printing their own comix. The most popular format was an 8 1/2” x 11” sheet, folded twice, and printed at local, pre-Kinkos print shops on letter-size paper; because of the small size, they were dubbed “mini comix.” As they evolved many different artists, one by one, became interested in this do-it-yourself phenomenon. By the 1980’s they became known as Newave Comix, a term taken from England’s Newave rock ’n’ roll movement. An explosion of do-it-yourself artists emerged. Many talented artists went onto bigger and better things, others have disappeared into the fog never to be heard from again. Inspired by the creative freedom of their underground predecessors and unrestrained by commercial boundaries or editorial edicts, their work was particularly innovative and experimental. Here you will find a group of artists who could not get any attention from the mainstream, who were driven by the inner need to express themselves. This group was a pioneering force that still leaves a wake and an imprint on the alternative comix scene today.
Newave! features over 700 pages of comics, as well as a historical introduction by editor Michael Dowers, and interviews with several of the more prominent artists featured, such as Brad Foster, Artie Romero, Steve Willis, Dennis Worden, Bob X, J.R. Williams, Roger May, Tom Hosier, George Erling, and Bob Vojtko. Black-and-white illustrations throughout with 16 pages of full-color.
Newave! is a gigantic collection of the best small press cartoonists to emerge in the 1970s after the first generation of underground cartoonists (such as R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Art Spiegelman) paved the way. These cartoon¬ists, inspired by the freewheeling creative energy of the underground commix movement, began drawing and printing their own comix. The most popular format was an 8 1/2” x 11” sheet, folded twice, and printed at local, pre-Kinkos print shops on letter-size paper; because of the small size, they were dubbed “mini comix.” As they evolved many different artists, one by one, became interested in this do-it-yourself phenomenon. By the 1980’s they became known as Newave Comix, a term taken from England’s Newave rock ’n’ roll movement. An explosion of do-it-yourself artists emerged. Many talented artists went onto bigger and better things, others have disappeared into the fog never to be heard from again. Inspired by the creative freedom of their underground predecessors and unrestrained by commercial boundaries or editorial edicts, their work was particularly innovative and experimental. Here you will find a group of artists who could not get any attention from the mainstream, who were driven by the inner need to express themselves. This group was a pioneering force that still leaves a wake and an imprint on the alternative comix scene today.
Newave! features over 700 pages of comics, as well as a historical introduction by editor Michael Dowers, and interviews with several of the more prominent artists featured, such as Brad Foster, Artie Romero, Steve Willis, Dennis Worden, Bob X, J.R. Williams, Roger May, Tom Hosier, George Erling, and Bob Vojtko. Black-and-white illustrations throughout with 16 pages of full-color.
892 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 20, 2021
A nice collection of underground mini comics from the late 70s to the early 90s. I knew nothing about underground mini comics when I picked this up years ago. Finally decided to read through it. It features interviews with many of the artists who were 'big' in the underground American comics scenes, none of whom I know. Some of the interviews are really interesting and informative, especially for a person who knows nothing about this stuff. A lot of the comics are pretty good, too. The writing is nothing special, sometimes it's stupid, sometimes funny, sometimes absurd, but the art is usually high quality. These drawings span the gamut from traditional, to comic-y, to surreal, to grotesque and perverse. The better ones tend to be the ones with no words, no story, just great drawings to spin the wheels of your mind to. The DIY ethos is discussed at length by every artist who is interviewed, and that spirit is clearly one they hold to strongly.
April 10, 2011
Like another reader below, I wanted to love this book. It's a worthwhile read if you're at all into mini comics (gonna call 'em comics instead of comix, as I've always just hated that x for some reason), and there are some good, informative interviews herein, particularly with Clay Geerdes, who godfathered a lot of the early work of these artists and sounds like a real stand up sort of fellow. It is also important to document eras in comics publishing for posterity (particularly in self-publishing, which is so ephemeral), before the work is lost in the recesses of time. I love that this volume is the size of the classic minis (approximately 6 x 5) - very clever, very apropos. But to be honest, a lot of the stuff in this nearly 900 page book just isn't very good. In particular some of the earliest work is downright amateurish in form and function; later the art gets a lot better but too much of the content remains sub-adolescent "let's draw puke and shit" sort of stuff. Still, there is a lot of really good work in here from folks I'd never heard of (Harry Lyrico's "White Boy Goes to Hell" was particularly impressive) and from old reliables like Dennis Worden, Roy Tompkins, Bob X, Wayno, and Steve Willis. It's also fun to see early comics by such esteemed cartoonists as JR Williams, Daniel Clowes, Peter Bagge, etc. Though the 70s and 80s minis were quite the boys club - wot a surprise - there's some great work in here from Mary Fleener, and probably the best piece in the entire book is Molly Kiely's haunting, evocative mini- bio of Louise Brooks, which closes things out on a very high note. Final Rating: 3.4 out of 5. I would definitely like to see a sequel, one that covers the scene in the 90's.
February 23, 2020
A huge collection of small press comixs that came in the wake of the original underground scene. There are over 980 pages of material here, containing a lot of material by people who went on to produce amazing work in the field, Rick Geary, Peter Bagge, Johnny Ryan, Mack White etc. It is an interesting collection of material from a medium within a medium where the artists were free to experiment with no editorial oversite. That being said it is hit and miss in quality, but does contain some excellent work.
July 18, 2012
Some of the comics are fun, some pointless, but most are very free-feeling. A funny look at a particular period of juvenilia, some of it trying to break out of hippie stylings of the previous decade, some just wallowing in them. Pretty impressive how much artistic effort went into some of the mini-comics collected here. Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), the names I recognize tend to have the comics I like best: Mary Fleener, J.R. Williams, Rick Geary. Maybe that's a sign of the quality that made them bigger names in the field, or maybe it's my own bias affecting my taste. Mack White was a new discovery for me though, I want to find more of his stuff soon.
I was not particularly interested in the interviews and pretty much skipped them entirely after reading a few. They tended to say a lot of the same things and the content was pretty dull: I xeroxed this, it was a good way to get my name out, the mini-comics scene got more organized in year so-and-so, it was no way to make money but it was a lot of fun, yadda yadda yadda...
Something struck me funnily about the gruesome comics of XEX HEX (pp. 612-634). The gross-out monster look had a familiar feel, showing bunches of mutants and zombies and and throbbing skeleton-and-enlarged-brain aliens and rotting corpse-people in a surreal horror universe. Yet every time there's a female character thrown into this horror-verse, she may have surreal touches like a batman mask or rotting clothing, but her figure is "perfect," with completely spherical boobs in a push-up bra, tiny waist and curved hips, smooth skin, and fully made-up lips. It's not easy to draw this, as a few subsequent artists following these pages demonstrate -- it takes some real drafting skill. But it's as if there's some unwritten Frank Frazetta rule in place: no woman may be mutilated unless she be utterly grotesque (like the nose-faced witch on page 621). Otherwise she must be totally, ridiculously sexualized, even if she might be vaguely threatening.
It's simple enough, you've seen it a billion times before in a billion places in alternative and underground comix. It would be simple enough to write it off as young male artists being horny and immature and incapable of holding themselves to a higher standard of weirdness. Maybe in an ideal artistic universe they would not just treat "male" characters as having infinite, multiform diversity of grotesque qualities and would not hem in their "female" characters as simple wank fantasies with occasional Freudian phobias about predatory female sexuality tacked around the edges like a filigreed afterthought. But it almost seems as if there is something else at work, that by making such a snap judgment about these Basil Wolverton wanna-be's (without the guts to make their girls gross too), I'd be missing out on some psychological phenomenon that may go deeper than I'm giving it credit for. But I can't put my finger on it.
I was not particularly interested in the interviews and pretty much skipped them entirely after reading a few. They tended to say a lot of the same things and the content was pretty dull: I xeroxed this, it was a good way to get my name out, the mini-comics scene got more organized in year so-and-so, it was no way to make money but it was a lot of fun, yadda yadda yadda...
Something struck me funnily about the gruesome comics of XEX HEX (pp. 612-634). The gross-out monster look had a familiar feel, showing bunches of mutants and zombies and and throbbing skeleton-and-enlarged-brain aliens and rotting corpse-people in a surreal horror universe. Yet every time there's a female character thrown into this horror-verse, she may have surreal touches like a batman mask or rotting clothing, but her figure is "perfect," with completely spherical boobs in a push-up bra, tiny waist and curved hips, smooth skin, and fully made-up lips. It's not easy to draw this, as a few subsequent artists following these pages demonstrate -- it takes some real drafting skill. But it's as if there's some unwritten Frank Frazetta rule in place: no woman may be mutilated unless she be utterly grotesque (like the nose-faced witch on page 621). Otherwise she must be totally, ridiculously sexualized, even if she might be vaguely threatening.
It's simple enough, you've seen it a billion times before in a billion places in alternative and underground comix. It would be simple enough to write it off as young male artists being horny and immature and incapable of holding themselves to a higher standard of weirdness. Maybe in an ideal artistic universe they would not just treat "male" characters as having infinite, multiform diversity of grotesque qualities and would not hem in their "female" characters as simple wank fantasies with occasional Freudian phobias about predatory female sexuality tacked around the edges like a filigreed afterthought. But it almost seems as if there is something else at work, that by making such a snap judgment about these Basil Wolverton wanna-be's (without the guts to make their girls gross too), I'd be missing out on some psychological phenomenon that may go deeper than I'm giving it credit for. But I can't put my finger on it.
February 17, 2010
A thick anthology of mini comix (as the title would imply), but one who's title doesn't do it full justice. No mention on the front or back covers that the anthology includes interviews with people who were key to the surge in popularity of mini comix (an area I was previously ignorant of, apart from being aware of their existence), including essays by Clay Geerdes, who seems to have been the inspiration for the majority of contributors to the collection to create their own comix. Also, the anthology's first 200 pages or so consists mostly of comix originally published in the 1970s--a decade when many of the contributors here said they began, so the title is a misnomer.
Apart from those quibbles, the DIY ethos is palpable and exciting here, and the quality varies. Lots of Wolverton and Crumb imitators here among the more singular voices. I'm still biased toward stories rather than the panels that make up much of these comix, but I think I can at least appreciate the comix on their own terms--and there are some gems here, my favorite being Molly Kiely's bio of Louise Brooks, which manages to convey tragedy within the narrow confines of the mini genre. Enough blather from me--I'm sure the experts will expound at painful length, far more intelligently about the subject than I.
Apart from those quibbles, the DIY ethos is palpable and exciting here, and the quality varies. Lots of Wolverton and Crumb imitators here among the more singular voices. I'm still biased toward stories rather than the panels that make up much of these comix, but I think I can at least appreciate the comix on their own terms--and there are some gems here, my favorite being Molly Kiely's bio of Louise Brooks, which manages to convey tragedy within the narrow confines of the mini genre. Enough blather from me--I'm sure the experts will expound at painful length, far more intelligently about the subject than I.
April 15, 2010
I give this 3.9 stars, actually. I wanted this to kill, but it didn't. It just didn't. You should still read it if you like comics and subculture, but, errrr, ummmm, that's all.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews