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Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix
Book chapter

Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix

Corey K Creekmur
Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, pp.19-33
Routledge, 1
2015
DOI: 10.4324/9781315775340-2

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Abstract

Race remains a blind spot in critical discussions of underground comix, despite a few isolated essays that have addressed the otherwise neglected topic. Even recent, attention in comics studies to multicultural, ethnic, and racial representations, especially of African Americans, tends to neglect the important historical example provided by underground comix, which pointedly addressed many of the controversial topics that were then impossible to depict in mainstream comics produced and distributed under the strict restrictions of the self-imposed Comics Code. In other words, might be in a position to not simply decry but to better understand the ways in which, as significant forms of cultural expression, underground comix often embodied the larger counterculture's limited engagement with the promotion and celebration of racial and ethnic diversity commonly as multiculturalism. Again, in order to escape the stalemate that simply defends or denounces the depiction of racial difference in underground comix, to emphasize that any critical understanding of this dilemma must seek historical grounding. Race remains a blind spot in critical discussions of underground comix, despite a few isolated essays that have addressed the otherwise neglected topic. Even recent, attention in comics studies to multicultural, ethnic, and racial representations, especially of African Americans, tends to neglect the important historical example provided by underground comix, which pointedly addressed many of the controversial topics that were then impossible to depict in mainstream comics produced and distributed under the strict restrictions of the self-imposed Comics Code. In other words, might be in a position to not simply decry but to better understand the ways in which, as significant forms of cultural expression, underground comix often embodied the larger counterculture's limited engagement with the promotion and celebration of racial and ethnic diversity commonly as multiculturalism. Again, in order to escape the stalemate that simply defends or denounces the depiction of racial difference in underground comix, to emphasize that any critical understanding of this dilemma must seek historical grounding.
 African Americans Blue Beetle Underground Comix Movement Critical Understanding Countercultural Aesthetics Underground Comics multiculturalism Goodman Gallery Lowbrow Comedy Disney’s Animated Feature Film Collective Subconscious Crumb’s Work racial representations Robert Crumb Comic Book Medium historical grounding American Comic Book counterculture South African Cartoonists controversial topics Audacious Work Underground Cartoonist Notorious Eccentricities Middle Class Fantasy ethnic diversity White Male Artists Mad comics studies Larger Counterculture Leonard Rifas Hippie Subculture

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