SOURCE: "Up from the Underground: Notes on the New Comix," in Mass Culture Revisited, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1971, pp. 423-43.

In the following essay, Abel interviews underground artists like Art Spiegelman, and notes when underground comic books first came to the attention of Middle America.

For the great majority of Americans, probably the first news of underground comics—or comix, to speak a properly underground English—came with the arrival of a late 1970 issue of Playboy which signalled the advent of "The International Comix Conspiracy." The blurb for the article, which was by Jacob Brackman, was no less sweeping: "obscene, anarchistic, sophomoric, subversive, apocalyptic, the underground cartoonists and their creations attack all that Middle America holds dear." Moreover, since Playboy is a liberal magazine—pubic hair was being liberated from the tyranny of the air brush around this same time...