試作２

For the purposes of this Article, the term "comic" is used generically to capture the wide berth of forms-comic books, graphic novels, comix, mini-comics and zines, editorial cartoons, and so on-that are being published and read by mainstream audiences. Will Eisner, credited as the first graphic novelist with his iconic 1978 book, A Contract With God, was a pioneering influence, including his comic art curriculum at New York's School of Visual Arts ("SVA") starting in 1974. Eisner elevated the status of comics-as-art, preferring to call the comic form "sequential art."
The serialized thirty-two-page comic book and superhero genre may be perhaps the most iconic image of the comic form that dates back to the 1930s, yet that hardly captures the comic art world today. The graphic novel, for instance, as a long-form comic, has become a stalwart of the publishing world and accounts for one of the most dynamic market segments for new books being published-both fiction and nonfiction-over the last twenty-five years. Today, comics, in a multiplicity of forms and fashions, represent the fastest-growing sector of the publishing world. In the first decade of the 2000s, the growth of sales quadrupled from the late 1990s, and estimates for 2020 in North America alone include combined sales of periodical comics and graphic novels worth $1.28 billion. That figure grew by more than sixty percent in 2021, with industry estimates now placing the North American market for comics in excess of $2 billion in annual sales.
The range and diversity of comics today transcend geographic boundaries in what Frederick Luis Aldama refers to as the "global cultural landscape" for comics given the cross-national "pollination" and "physical transmigration of artists and their styles and worldviews." Today, comics represent a highly globalized marketplace of ideas, such as the diffusion of Japanese manga or the Franco-Belgian tradition of bandes dessines. As cross-border interactions between national comic styles deepened, a globalization of comic forms and audiences has gradually occurred. For example, the American underground comix movement was an important U.S. cultural export, which energized the existing European comics industry and led to further transatlantic exchanges. This is clearly depicted by Aldama where he observes: The contact of new generations of European creators with other comic book creators and traditions, such as that of the 1970s underground comix scene, led to radical innovations-both in form and content. In France, Ah! Nana (1976-1978) became the first all-female comic quarterly, bringing across the Atlantic the work of U.S. creators such as Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and M.K. Brown. And, it published its own set of women creators such as Chantal Montellier. They greatly expanded a content traditionally filled with more staid and safe storylines (think Tintin and Asterix) to confront the full-frontal sexism and queerphobic issues faced by women and LGBT communities. In the 1970s, one sees this cross-pollination of an underground sensibility coming from the Americas and spreading across Europe. percent in 2021, with industry estimates now placing the North American market for
comics in excess of $2 billion in annual sales. The range and diversity of comics today transcend geographic boundaries in what Frederick Luis Aldama refers to as the "global cultural landscape" for comics given the cross-national "pollination" and "physical transmigration of artists and their styles and worldviews." Today, comics represent a highly globalized marketplace of ideas, such as the diffusion of Japanese manga or the Franco-Belgian tradition of bandes dessines. As cross-border interactions between national comic styles deepened, a globalization of comic forms and audiences has gradually occurred. For example, the American underground comix movement was an important U.S. cultural export, which energized the existing European comics industry and led to further transatlantic exchanges. This is clearly depicted by Aldama where he observes: The contact of new generations of European creators with other comic book creators and traditions, such as that of the 1970s underground comix scene, led to radical innovations-both in form and content. In France, Ah! Nana (1976-1978) became the first all-female comic quarterly, bringing across the Atlantic the work of U.S. creators such as Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and M.K. Brown. And, it published its own set of women creators such as Chantal Montellier. They greatly expanded a content traditionally filled with more staid and safe storylines (think Tintin and Asterix) to confront the full-frontal sexism and queerphobic issues faced by women and LGBT communities. In the 1970s, one sees this cross-pollination of an underground sensibility coming from the Americas and spreading across Europe.
The explosive ideas and creative energy of the underground comix scene even enervated earlier visionaries from the Golden Age of comics, such as Will Eisner. When Eisner was invited to attend a 1971 Comic Art Convention in Brooklyn "he encountered for the first time the daring experiments of the underground comix movement" and how it "reimagined the medium without filters of any kind." In Jared Gardner's description, "Eisner had little interest in the subject matter of most of these comics-acid trips, sexual fantasies, and radical politics were not to his taste.
But he was thrilled to see how many barriers underground comix had shattered in such a short time."
One comic studies trend that further helps affirm comics' "global cultural
landscape" today is the niche role for professional translators and linguistic theory, such as Ryan Holmberg's efforts to bring Japanese comics to English-speaking audiences. Or independent presses that specialize in multilingual translation and anthologies like KU , which include the Baltic Comics Magazine with issues organized by place (e.g., Portugal, Japan, Brooklyn) or theme (e.g., Dogs, Scientific Facts, Queer Power) and representing cartoonists from around the world.60 In North America alone, major independent publishing houses such as Fantagraphics in Seattle or Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal are producing scores of new graphic novels every month and across a dizzying array of styles and genres.6 1 One particularly vibrant market segment today is the "Young Adult" ("YA") graphic novel, where sales can reach the millions and top bestseller lists. 62 The comics memoir and autobiographical work, in general, is now considered an important literary canon in its own right, with underground classics paving the way such as Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,6 3 Harvey Pekar's American Splendor,64 or Art Spiegelman's Maus (which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992).65 The range and scope of comic memoirs and autobiographical nonfiction is far more extensive than just the graphic novel form.
Taking into account the avalanche of self-published zines and other short forms of serialized content, one quickly sees a flourishing market segment for the comics industry today.
The growth in readership has meant every major New York City publisher now has a specialized product line to focus on comics. 66 And presses such as Fantagraphics (which includes The Comics Journal), have enhanced the overall credibility of comics and comics studies as a profession, not least of all in reissuing compendiums and anthologies of earlier work that may have only been collected by die-hard fans or in random, piecemeal fashion with many original issues long out-of-print. Having access to "complete" series such as Peanuts,67 Wimmen's Comix,68 or Love and Rockets69 is a boon to the kind of scholarly attention this mistakenly "low-brow" art form now commands. But, in addition, it is the variegated growth of small press publishers and distributors that have made "alternative comics" such a rich corpus of output today. The undergrounds were rather unceremoniously launched when Robert Crumb self-published the first issue of the infamous Zap Comix in 1968 and sold them out of a baby carriage on a street corner in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Unlike the big publishing house/agency model of the Golden Age of comics, the new
expanded potential for direct marketing to consumers was hugely liberating for the overall comics industry. Rather than the early days of comics where distribution relied on newsstands and cartoonists worked piecemeal with little incentive for profit- sharing or licensing, the "emergence of a network of comic book shops" during the 1960s and 1970s helped create a "new organized fandom" including a "new market for back issues." 72 Especially for the underground comix, the distribution of content and retail end relied on record stores, head shops, and adult bookstores (one etymological explanation for the name "comix" is the dissociation from the earlier
superhero genre, but another is for the "X-rated" adult content 73). New underground publishing houses that sprang up included Don Donahue's Apex Novelties, Ron Turner's Last Gasp,7 5 and Denis Kitchen's Kitchen Sink Press. In the decades that followed, the business fortunes for such independent publishers waxed and waned along with the comic industry itself, but the scope for small self-publishers and distributors to direct market to comics fans has only expanded through the internet and the huge fan base that revolves around the Comics Convention scene.  A few noteworthy examples of independent underground publishing and "distro" companies that specialize in eclectic and alternative comics today would include John
Porcellino's Spit and a Half (started in 1992)78 and Austin English's Domino Books. The next Part considers additional facets of the undergrounds, including the broader context of social change that propelled them and the legacy effects they created or helped to shape. What the underground comix movement might not have inspired directly, it still indirectly helped to empower the creative artistic freedom that works (usually self-denoted with a preference for the "comix" label), no such demarcation still works well in practice. Increasingly, the alternative comic has become the mainstream, and vice versa. According to Kristy Valenti: The term "mainstream comics" is vestigial, a holdover from the days when comic shops were the only places to find single issues and graphic novels. There were but two types of comic books: "mainstream," i.e., created work for hire and published by Marvel and DC-usually starring brand-name superheroes and other forms of licensed IP-and "independent" or "indy," i.e., more or less not that, published by anyone else.  There is perhaps no better statement of the comic form's new normal than in Scott McCloud's authoritative account: "No ways of seeing are out of bounds." Bart Beaty elaborates on this viewpoint where he observes:
Over the course of the past two decades comic book artists have learned a lot from other artists and they have dramatically transformed the way that
comics are produced and consumed. Cartoonists have adopted new techniques to supplement a great diversity of illustratorly styles. Publishers have embraced new printing formats that better suit non-traditional formats. Audiences have come to expect more keenly developed works that draw on the vast potential of the word-image relationship that is so central to the comics idiom. Most importantly, all participants in the world of comics have come to demand a greater complexity from new work that expresses the personal vision of the comics artist.As the following Part expands further, the ethos of the underground comix movement found in the Bay Area during the late 1960s and early 1970s was a creative catalyst for today's state of the art in the world of comics. In ways familiar to historical institutionalists who study patterns of path dependence and unintended consequences, 90 what first appeared transgressive and dissident, led over time to a range of newly empowered voices and socially legitimate viewpoints regarding rights
and equality in American democracy.

IV. THE 1960s ERA OF SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE UNDERGROUNDS
The 1960s are an exceptional era for studying the transnational spread of activist ideas and concomitant patterns of social change. 9 1 In his macroscopic account of 1968 as a "world-historical movement," George Katsiaficas details the emergence of a new societal epoch with "new ideas and values that become common sense as time passes" and that "qualitatively reformulate the meaning of freedom for millions of human
beings." 92 An important corrective in his view is to stop treating rights' movements as separate phenomenon by focusing more on possible "synchronous interrelationships" they may hold across time and space. 93 In our current age of globalization and in the wake of recent transnational activism such as Black Lives Matter ("BLM") and #MeToo , his stance is prescient and revealing. The potential synchronicity of ideational power across issues and national borders is also an empirical indicator of where changes in social consciousness might be occurring in real time. The role of technology and social media today certainly has its novelties for activism and transnational networks, but communications and transportation innovations during the 1960s were game-changing for activism back then too. 95 As Martin Klimke notes in his study of protest during the "global sixties," there was a "qualitatively new level of sociocultural networking across national borders" that helped enable new patterns of activism to take form.96
In a path-breaking study on activism, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink introduced the concept of "transnational advocacy networks" ("TANs") into IR theory, to account for the epistemic quality of shared principled beliefs and values in shaping world politics.97 They define TANs as "networks of activists, distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values" in issue-areas such as human rights, violence against women, and the environment. 98 As networks, they represent communicative structures that share a "common discourse" and involve "dense exchanges of information and services" to advocate change. 99 Keck and Sikkink develop a detailed account of the historical precursors to modern forms of social movements and advocacy networks such as the legacy of antislavery campaigns and suffrage movements. 100 From a contemporary standpoint, less fleshed out in this work is the general observation that today's era of globalization has scaled up opportunities for transnational activism. Overall, and keeping in mind when this book was published in 1998, social media ecosystems were less far-reaching and ubiquitous than by 2023 metrics, the authors stress the quantitative and qualitative growth in "international contact" measured by advances in transportation and communication. 10 1 One part of this argument that was underdeveloped yet intriguing, is the claim that the 1960s marked a watershed in changing consciousness. As Keck and Sikkink suggestively stated: "Underlying these trends is a broader cultural shift. The new networks have depended on the creation of a new kind of global public (or civil society), which grew as a cultural legacy of the 1960s." Keck and Sikkink anchor today's systemic influence of advocacy networks as a direct (yet roundabout) outgrowth of the activism and dissidence instantiated during the 1960s. The quoted passage above acts as more of a minor aside in the rich empirical analysis found in Keck and Sikkink's book, yet it has a range of implications to consider further from a historical institutionalist perspective of change. They provide fundamental insight into thinking about social consciousness and change in today's era of globalization from a perspective of long time horizons and offer an empirically tractable model to study how the intensification of transnational patterns of activism and rights' movements shapes different national and regional political contexts. In effect, the "long" 1960s reflect a critical threshold where the fusion of cross-border contacts (travel, trade, communication, popular culture, etc.) with a consciousness of activism became more avuncular in terms of potential mobilization as a transnational space and public sphere. Content-wise, the role of the comic book should not be left out of accounting for this cultural shift either. The San Francisco Bay Area cartoonists who brashly skewered cultural norms and flaunted publishing conventions that restricted free expression in any way (such as the Comics Code), created an underground comix movement that had strong transnational diffusion effects. The anything-goes, freewheeling spirit of the undergrounds became a U.S. cultural export for protesters and countercultural ideas that resonated around the world, especially in the other
industrial democracies of Western Europe. In his transatlantic study of student protests in the 1960s, Martin Klimke points out, "the exact processes through which activists from numerous countries established contact, shared ideas, and adopted each other's social and cultural practices are still largely unexplored." The comics medium, and especially at the time, the American-led underground comix movement, is one small but vibrant transmission belt of ideas that influenced the demands for social and political change in that time period by shaping social consciousness.
One of the key common denominators for underground cartoonists was to rebel against the "knee-jerk censorship of the 1950s" in what Brian Doherty refers to as "an inky explosion of the repressed dreams of a free America." 107 Acting as a catalyst to the underground explosion, Robert Crumb's publication of Zap Comix in 1968 unleashed a creative tsunami. 108 As Patrick Rosencranz, the authoritative historian of underground comix, summarizes:
Within five years, there were more than 300 new comic titles in print and
hundreds of people calling themselves underground cartoonists ... . Even after their popularity peaked in the mid-"70s, many of these artists continued
to produce highly personal and potent work. Their unrelenting insistence on
complete artist freedom revitalized the comic medium, and broke it loose from the repressive Comic Code Authority. Comics, long stereotyped as kid
stuff, aggressively reclaimed their adult authority with explorations of
provocative subjects. 109
Art Spiegelman's Maus began in the underground, as did Justin Green's
autobiographical confessional masterpiece, Binky Brown. The underground comix being innovated in the 1960s certainly benefitted from other creative cultural precursors already at work in reacting to the stifling conservatism of the 1950s, including Beat artists, jazz musicians, and other improvisational schools of abstract and pop art.111 The print industry was also rapidly changing, such as with the expansion of the underground press (e.g., the East Village Other, Los Angeles Free Press, Berkeley Barb) or the rock art poster movement (e.g., Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin) which created new networked relations between artists and cartoonists. For example, Robert Crumb produced the classic "cartoon" album cover for Cheap Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1968.113 Drugs, including psychedelics such as LSD, also played no small part for many individual artists as well as the broader "hippie" countercultural scene in general.11 4 And, of course, the Vietnam war and antiwar protest was a major catalyst for activism during this time, including the legitimacy of conscription ("the draft").11 5 In a recent interview with Mary Fleener, an acclaimed cartoonist who first encountered Zap while in high school, she explains the context of the underground comix movement at that time:
I think the current in Zap Comix is of rage, of helplessness, of wanting to just
do something outrageous because everything was just so fucked up. Those
comics were coming out, there were civil rights riots, and protests against the
Vietnam war, and people getting their heads beat in . It was a reaction of
just a big middle finger to the establishment. I think that's why it succeeded, because it was a true intent of frustration and rage, and that comes out in creativity, and that's what seems to make people very creative, is when they get ... they only say what they mean when they're angry. 11 6
As Bob Levin elaborates on the timing and context of the undergrounds, "Zap struck America like a roundhouse right to the jaw-or maybe a kidney punch or thumb in its eye." 11 7 Crumb's cartooning in particular was so at variance with the world of comics represented by the 1950s Comic Book Code because he filled the page with "despair, rage, racist caricatures, dirty words, naked bodies, non-linear stories and the touting of drug consumption as the only sensible response to a world that was insane." What made his comics so much of an influential lightning rod was that "his iconography includes every taboo imaginable." 119 And unlike many other comic anthologies that had a revolving list of contributors, Zap was built as a small coterie of artists, beginning with Zap #2 and rarely changing over the three decades that issues were published. 120
In trying to understand the extraordinary times the 1960s represented for social, cultural, and political change, very few academic accounts place much stock on the role of comics and the comic art of the undergrounds. 121 This omission deserves correction, since certainly comics fit Klimke's description of what cultural ideas were being exchanged and radicalized: "New aesthetics emerging in art, music, film, and fashion joined with hippie ideologies and lifestyles and merged into a new set of symbolic forms." 122 The transgressive ideas germinating in the underground comix scene from the 1960s and 1970s helped pave the way for today's growing appreciation
of implied fundamental rights and equality. The irony of this is that much of the undergrounds were chock full of lurid and hypersexualized material deemed pornographic, misogynistic, and violent. 123 The cartoonists, publishers, and distributors at the time-the entire comics industry basically-were heavily male-dominated. 124 As Trim Robbins, the trailblazing feminist comix creator, recalls: Life in the Bay Area was creative and exciting, and comix were the art form of the future. The big problem, if you were one of the few cartoonists of the female persuasion, was that 98% of the cartoonists were male, and they all seemed to belong to a boys' club that didn't accept women. 
But in a twist befitting Ralph Ellison's insightful notion of America's unwritten
underground of history, this male-centric, lecherous, and machismo subculture would gradually help transform the social consciousness of rights and equality, as well as reshape the comic art industry as we now know it. Not only did the underground comix movement stimulate changes to the gendered basis of the comics publishing world, it more broadly helped shape today's cultural norms of feminism and gender consciousness, including women's rights regarding reproductive autonomy, workplace discrimination, and domestic violence. By the start of the 1970s, a women's liberation counter-reaction to the Zap collective's work included anthologies such as
ItAin't Me Babe Comix (1970),126 Wimmen's Comix (1972-1992), and Tits & Clits (1972-1987).127
It Ain 't Me Babe, published in July 1970, is considered the first all-woman comics anthology, with the inside cover declaring "conceived by the women's liberation basement press," and, "any resemblance to chauvenist [sic] comic characters living or dead is strictly admitted." 128 As co-founder Trim Robbins recalls, capturing the spirit of the endeavor, "[b]est of all was the center story, written by the Babe collective, in which the famous cartoon characters Juliet Jones, Petunia Pig, Little Lulu, and Betty and Veronica break out of their molds, dump their boyfriends, and become feminists.
The art was done by Carole, last name lost because we dumped our 'slave names' and used only our first names." 129 In a recent assessment of the Wimmen 's Comix series, seventeen issues in total involving roughly one hundred women contributors, Margaret Galvan finds this "sense of defiance" a key element of the collective even though the majority of contributors were only featured in one or two issues. 130 The richness of the body of work is "the wealth and range of contributors" as a response to "the misogynistic attitude that pervaded the world of underground comix." 13 1