(W) James Danky, Denis Kitchen

The impact of American underground comix is profound: They galvanized artists both domestically and abroad, forever changed the economics of comic book publishing, and influenced generations of cartoonists, including their predecessors. While the works of Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman are well-known via the New Yorker, Maus, and retrospective collections, the art of their contemporaries such as Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins, Justin Green, Kim Deitch, S. Clay Wilson, and many other seminal cartoonists who came of age in the 1960s is considerably less known. Underground Classics provides the first serious survey of underground comix as art, turning the spotlight on these influential and largely underappreciated artists.