Week 6

The Underground Comics were... interesting, to say the least. I read a bunch of them, but I thoroughly studied the Air Pirates comic.

One thing that I found interesting in many of these issues of Underground Comics was the variety. A lot of the issues compile comics of many different artists; some are very visually unappealing, and others, are really pretty to look at. Some of the really horribly-drawn comics made me wonder if some of the artists behind these comics were rejected comic artists, who sellout to making Underground Comics. The Zap Comicx are a good example of not only this artistic variety, but also content variety. The issue of Zap that I read had some stupid comics with the occasional raunchy humor, but it also contained extremely explicit content that depicted intense acts of violence and graphic sexual material, as well as political commentary. The political commentary was presented in a way that I would expect. The strip in the issue of Zap that I saw showed depictions of society around the world compared to the "perfect" America, so you get the racist stereotypes, or whatever. It didn't really phase me.

The graphic material in some of these Underground Comics was actually kind of...funny to me? I'm one of the weird types who enjoys really dark humor, and I don't get offended by anything, really. Especially in Air Pirates, I thought the content was genuinely humorous. I normally don't find explicit sexual content to be appealing, but the comics that deliberately parodied the Disney characters were taken to such extreme levels, that it ended up being funny to me. Yes, the content was very edgy, but it was pushed to such a high level of absurdity, that I found it amusing, to an extent. It was something that I would have expected from one of the older, more explicit (and better) episodes of South Park. Anyone could make a stupid pornographic comic, but it becomes creative when it involves sex with an anthropomorphic caterpillar woman with fifty vaginas. Stuff like this is so stupid and bad, that it ends up being funny, which I am guilty of thinking.