Alexander Street Press | Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels

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Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels
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Underground and Independent Comics is the first-ever scholarly online collection for researchers and students of adult comic books and graphic novels. Beginning with the first underground comix from the 1960s and encompassing modern sequential artists such as Dan Clowes and Los Bros. Hernandez, this resource shows the evolution and development of an art form. From the shocking and explicit work of young artists exploring newfound freedoms to intricate and beautiful designs of aesthetic craftsmanship, the comic book has shown itself to be a medium capable of both the offensive and the sublime. This collection documents the entire spectrum of underground and independent North American and European comics and graphic novels, with 75,000 pages of original material from the 1960s to today along with more than 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal.

Comics have become an increasingly popular area of academic study, and yet most libraries have only a small selection of graphic novels in their catalogue. Underground and Independent Comics solves this problem, collecting thousands of comics—many extremely rare and hard to find—in one, easy-to-use online collection. Included are the early works of visionaries such as R. Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams, and Vaughn Bode, alongside modern masters such as Peter Bagge, Kim Deitch, and Charles Burns.*

With Alexander Street’s Semantic Indexing™, users can find comics by subject, keyword, character, format, genre, writer, inker, and more. Scholarship never before possible is now just a few keystrokes away. Users easily can find answers to such queries as:

Show me examples of self-portraiture in underground comix created between 1963-1973
Show me examples of African-American characters in works by Jaime Hernandez
Show me comics drawn and written by women during the 1970s
Show me comics dealing with homosexuality between 1990-2000
Show me examples of anthropomorphism in the works of Vaughn Bode
Compare Robert Williams’ depictions of Chicago with those of Dan Clowes

Also included in this collection are the complete transcripts of the senate subcommittee hearings sparked by Dr. Frederic Wertham's The Seduction of the Innocent, hearings that birthed the Comics Code Authority and, inadvertently, the underground comix movement.

Underground and Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels is available through annual subscription or one-time purchase of perpetual rights, with prices scaled to library size and budget. Email sales@alexanderstreet.com for trial access and pricing information.

* Authors targeted for inclusion