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Glenn Head on Underground Comics

by Edward Carey November 2008When Glenn Head started out in underground comics, back in the seventies, he foundhimself on the streets of Southside Chicago trying to make ends meet. Under these direcircumstances, he met many of the paragons of underground comics, including RobertCrumb. Head told Comics Culture of his inauspicious beginnings, of meeting Crumb onthe streets of Chicago, and how he would eventually come to be editor of “HotwireComics” in a candid interview at his studio in Brooklyn.After being exposed to Crumb’s work while still inhigh school, as well as that of other undergroundcomics which he had found “totally mind-blowing,”he bounced in and out of art school in the lateseventies, at a time when underground comics artistswere looking for work. Many of the head shops inwhich underground comics were distributed wereforcefully closed down due to laws against sellingdrug paraphernalia and the direct market for comicshad yet to come about.“I was at the Cleveland Institute of Art, which was probably a big mistake. It was a very stuffy kind of place and I wasn’t really ready to settle down andtake art school seriously anyway. So, I dropped outand hitchhiked to Chicago in the fall of ‘77, knowingno one and with no money and it was kind of aharrowing experience. I ended up panhandling andliving on the South Side of Chicago. It was verysurreal; I met various people, including MuhammedAli, on the street, on Michigan Avenue,” said Head.He managed to get some work at

Playboy Magazine

through the art director at the time,Skip Williamson, and met Crumb shortly thereafter. He said, it was a surreal experiencemeeting heroes like Crumb, Jay Lynch, Marty Powell “and other cult figures of the era”while living on the street. Crumb came across much like he did in the biographical film[by director Terry Zwigoff] on his life [“Crumb”].“He appeared a lot like he did in the movie [“Crumb”], because in the movie he doesn’tappear like he does in his comics. He’s such a gifted cartoonist that he makes himself look pretty appealing, even at his worst in his comics. It’s a thing of becoming asympathetic narrator, which you’re gonna have to do if you’re doing undergroundcomics. In person, when I met him, he was kind of unpleasant. He wasn’t a nice guy. He

Hotwire #2, inside cover art by Glenn Head

was the kind of guy that when he shakes your hand, he reaches down to you a little bitand it was kind of funny,” said Head.Underground comics were on the wane by the late seventies, due to the closing of headshops and a glut of material, putting many of the artists in dire circumstances, whichHead said that Crumb was bitter about. Growing up in a middle-class background inBrooklyn, this was enough to “put the fear in me” and Head moved back to New York,eventually enrolling at the School of Visual Arts, where he met Art Spiegelman, who wasteaching there.He also met many of his contemporaries while there whom he would later work with, likeKaz, Mark Newgarden and Drew Friedman, and many other artists of the time. This wasaround the time that Spiegelman was putting

RAW

Magazine

together with his wifeFrancoise Mouly.Spiegelman is currently touring to promote the re-release of

Breakdowns

, with a newintroduction and afterword by the artist, entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*!” He also advises Mouly on her new line of hardcover comics for young readers,TOON Books.At the time though, the only way to publish underground comics was self-publishing,which is what Spiegelman did with the help of SVA, according to Head.“By this point, the world of [underground] comics essentially didn’t exist in terms of any publishing houses. Fantagraphics wasn’t even on the map yet, but they soon would be.The only way to do comics and get them out there was through self-publishing and that’swhat Spiegelman was doing with, it was like grant money, from SVA. So, he would haveone of the artists, I guess Jerry Moriarty, design a back cover for the magazine and thenthey’d get money and they’d be able to publish it. That’s pretty much how I learned abouthow to do comics and that was also how I learned about editing, which I didn’t reallyhave any interest in, but we were always in this group dynamic working on ananthology,” said Head.One of the early anthologies Head and his fellowartists put out was one called

Bad News

, ananthology lost to time, which “kinda disappeared” but had a lot of great work in it. Mark Newgardenand Paul Karasik were editors, but it was also“kinda group edited in a way.”“When you have a bunch of guys like that together,that are in art school, and they’re all trying to topeach other in terms of doing better work and knifethe other guy for doing bad work . . . so there was alot of heavy critiquing in other words. That’s sortof how it came together,” said Head.

Cover of

Avenue D

, by Head published by Fantagraphics

Though a couple of the artists had already graduated SVA, like Drew Friedman,

Bad News

had grown out of a Spiegelman art class, an independent study course that theywould come by and work on. There were three issues altogether.After some time away from comics, Head self-published

Avenue

originally in theeighties as a “grungy black-and-white comic” through distributors like Last Gasp and instores. Fantagraphics later published the color version, which had a few different comicsin it. At the time, the only artists published by Fantagraphics, according to Head, werethe Hernandez Bros. and maybe a couple of books by Drew Friedman and Kaz. He hadto work a part-time job, as well as at a film studio, to make ends meet.In the late eighties, Head said that the anthologywas “the only way to go.” The graphic novel boomhad yet to make its mark and comics weren’t widelydistributed in bookstores. Every artist wanted to get published in one of the two biggest anthologies,Spiegelman’s

RAW

or Crumb’s

Weirdo

, publishedout of New York and San Francisco respectively.Head finally got a strip published in Weirdo.“I’d been sending them my work for quite awhile.It’s kind of funny, because it was accepted that itwas kind of a competitive thing to get into

RAW

,which I had never made it into, but it was alsoequally competitive to get into Crumb’s

Weirdo

.People around here kind of pissed on that comic, because it was kind of grungier, but in fact, in itsown way was really good. Both of those anthologieswere really groundbreaking, because a lot of peoplewho hadn’t been seen came up through there. That’swhat they were about,” said Head.Head talked about his affection for the anthology format, but had some doubts about itsfuture and said that they’re no longer needed to break in new artists.“The anthology has been around for quite awhile. If you have followed the history of thecomic book format . . . there were EC Comics, the horror comics, and in a way that mayhave been one of the earlier anthologies, because they were really these books that had amash-up of different cartoon styles that one editor would be dealing with and that waskind of the beginning of it, and from there, it went onto [Harvey] Kurtzman’s

MAD

,which also had a lot of different styles hitting up against each other. And from there, youhad underground comics, which did this with

Zap

and

Insect Fear

and some other onesand continuing through into

RAW

and

Weirdo

and

Snake Eyes

as well, also

Blab!

I reallylike that format, because of the collision of different styles and voices. I think that’svisually fascinating to look at when you have all those different styles coming up together

Cover of Weirdo #25, art by R Crumb

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Glenn Head on the Underground Scene

An interview of comix underground artist Glenn Head from October 2008, originally published at www.comicsculture.net (now defunct). He discussed his career, how he met Crumb and... (More)

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Upload Date:	10/13/2009
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Tags:	Fiction comics comix underground san francisco glenn head artist hotwire avenue d robert crumb Fiction comics comix underground san francisco glenn head artist hotwire avenue d robert crumb (fewer)