Feminist Underground Comic Scene Archive following Miller v. California, 1973 to 1981

Underground Feminist Comics

Periodical

Feminist sexual speech under obscenity law and a male dominated underground comix culture, 1973 to 1981, four first printings from Joyce Farmer, Lyn Chevli, Melinda Gebbie, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Farmer and Chevli issued Pandoras Box Comix in November 1973 through their own Nanny Goat Productions, five months after the Supreme Court’s Miller v. California decision gave local jurisdictions broader authority to prosecute allegedly obscene material. Gebbie’s Fresca Zizis and Kominsky-Crumb’s two Bunch’s Power Pak Comics carry that challenge into solo work centered on sexual violence, family conflict, female desire, body image, marriage, and pregnancy.

Archive of four underground comic books, 1973 to 1981, each in color pictorial wrappers with black and white interiors, approximately 10 x 7 inches. All are first printings.

[1] Chevli, Lyn, as Chin Lyvely, and Joyce Farmer, as Joyce Sutton. Pandoras Box Comix. Laguna Beach: Nanny Goat Productions, November 1973. First edition. 32 pages plus wrappers; cover price 50 cents. The title is printed without an apostrophe; the indicia identifies the book as formerly Tits & Clits Comix number beta, credits copyright 1973 to Chin Lyvely and Joyce Sutton, and records its dedication to the U.S. Supreme Court. Stories about the Perfectly Permeable Peters Sisters move through poverty, lesbian life, sexual dissatisfaction, shoplifting, marriage, and a massage parlor, while the visible pages “I WON’T be a GOOD GIRL” and “VIRGIN-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB” parody standards of chastity, bodily propriety, and heterosexual success.

[2] Gebbie, Melinda. Fresca Zizis. Berkeley: Last Gasp, 1977. First edition. 32 pages plus wraparound color wrappers; cover price $1.00. Gebbie’s first solo comic opens with “Portrait of a Rapist” and “In Debasement,” whose heading announces a story of ugliness, cruelty, and humiliation and states that female rage appears throughout while men suffer most. The contents continue through “Blind Date,” “Dime Dancer,” “Marymalady, Spider Girl of Oakland,” “Daddy! Save Me,” “Momzilla,” and “Bloody Lather Rape,” combining autobiographical material, sexual fantasy, violence, and grotesque feminist satire.

[3] Kominsky-Crumb, Aline. The Bunch’s Power Pak Comics. No. 1. Princeton: Kitchen Sink Enterprises, September 1979. First printing. 32 pages plus wrappers; cover price $1.00. The first of the two Power Paks follows Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical avatar through “Blabette ’n’ Arnie,” a 17 page family history, “The Many Loves of Valerie Feldman,” “Dancing Bunch and the Birth of Mr. Bunch,” “The Bunch Has a Friend,” “Blabette’s Best Customer,” and “Yusef the Hairsucker.” Kominsky-Crumb’s introductory page calls the book mainly autobiographical and describes the tortured stories and degrading sex lives of the Bunch, her family, friends, and pet beneath a photograph and her Winters, California address.

[4] Kominsky-Crumb, Aline. The Bunch’s Power Pak Comics. No. 2. Princeton: Kitchen Sink Comics, August 1981. First printing. 32 pages plus wrappers; cover price $1.50; one of 7,500 copies printed. The “SPECIAL CALIFORNIA ISSUE: WINE & CHEESE & SELF-HATRED!” contains “Why the Bunch Can’t Draw,” “Bunch ’n Bob Take Separate Vacations,” “A Portrait of the Bunch,” “The Saga of Stuie Spitzer,” “Of What Use Is a Bunch?,” “Up in the Air with the Bunch,” “Grief on Long Island,” and “Anatomy of the Bunch Body.” An editorial page records Kominsky-Crumb finishing the issue during her pregnancy and asking readers to send baby material; the same page prints letters that alternately attack and defend her deliberately abrasive drawing.

Chevli and Farmer began Tits & Clits Comix in 1972 to publish women’s accounts of menstruation, birth control, orgasm, and heterosexual dissatisfaction without the conventions of commercial pornography or the misogyny of male underground titles. Pandoras Box appeared after Miller v. California, and Farmer brought fresh copies to her former Laguna Beach bookstore, Fahrenheit 451, on December 4, 1973, the morning after its owners were arrested for selling underground comix. Local officials described retailer prosecutions as a route to publishers; Chevli and Farmer dispersed their inventory across Orange County and halted Nanny Goat’s publishing work until 1976. British customs later seized Fresca Zizis after Knockabout Comics imported it in 1985, and a magistrate ordered the copies destroyed as obscene, extending the censorship history documented by this group across the Atlantic. Kominsky-Crumb had introduced her Bunch persona in “Goldie: A Neurotic Woman” in the first issue of Wimmen’s Comix in 1972; the two Power Paks extend that first person method across her parents’ violent marriage, friendships, sex, domestic life with Robert Crumb, and pregnancy. The number lines in both Power Paks end in 1, and the second issue’s 7,500 copy printing records Kitchen Sink’s reduced commercial expectations for an autobiographical comic by a woman at the end of the underground era.
Light edge and spine wear, scattered rubbing, and mild toning; wrappers remain bright and intact. Overall very good condition. Four first printings documenting how women cartoonists used independent comic books to claim sexual speech, confront censorship, and convert private experience into published autobiography.

Item #23850

Price: $485.00