So we all know that Zap Comix #1 (1st print from 25 Feb. 1968) was the big one that started it all, but was there one that can be said to be the last of the era? It would probably be from '73-'75, but...
Discussions on a possible last?
I'm offended. You have the British Zap #1 in your avatar, but not the British #0.
Forgot it, sorry, I'll fix it...
great newspaper shortage of 1973 is the perfect place to end it.
Rosenkranz' book covers until 1975. (What was the reason for that date? Did the shortage last 2 years?) Was trying to maybe get a consensus of us "knowledgeable ones" if we could come up with a particular book that we could "loosely" associate with the end?
Didn't Godnoss and Lenny and C Comics come before Zap 1? Or are you saying Zap 1 defines it. Regular Gold includes comics before Action 1, like the Funnies. As for me, I stick with Kennedy and go up to 82 for the end.Why fight the guide.
Of course there were others (Bode's Das Kampf from 1963), but the "heart" of the Golden Age of UG's seems to be '68 to the mid 70's by many...
Arcade was the last hurrah.
Thanks, that would make it Fall 1976 with #7. Or do you mean that #1 (Spring 1975) was the start of the new Age, since your book RV shows -1975 on the cover?
Arcade started with the best of intentions by all parties, and every issue had great comics in them, but the decision to create Arcade itself was a desperate act, a doomed though valiant effort, an attempt to elevate underground comix above their subterranean origins. If Arcade was the last hurrah, then Comix Book started the slide downhill. They passed each other in 1975 while one was going up and the other down. So when did the final straw break the back of the comix revolution? Did it happen in the middle of the series or in the last issue? Someone else is going to have to decide that.
Myself, I'd go with the first issue of Arcade as the end of the golden age. As Patrick said, Arcade was a doomed effort, and in my opinion it was doomed from its very conception, in part because it did "attempt to elevate underground comix above their subterranean origins."
Of course, underground comix could not remain subterranean after 1973 anyway, because the "subterranean" network of distribution (head shops and the like) had been severely weakened after the Supreme Court ruling about communities setting local standards for obscenity. The newsprint shortage didn't help, nor did the flood of crappy comix that attempted to cash in on the brilliance of the UG forefathers.
Really, by 1974 the golden age was entirely over, but the "desperate act" in early 1975 by Spiegelman and Griffith to bring the underground to the mainstream is as good a place as any to mark the end of the era. Arcade was beautifully illustrated, but I think it misfired when it came to half of its content, because it was simply too ambitious and too intellectual.
To go from Zap Comix and the Freak Brothers to illustrated biographies of Joseph Stalin and Don Carlos Balmori is asking too much from most comix fans. And I love Henri Rousseau more than most people, but "A Couch in the Sun" is four dreary pages. And if I have to read an underground comic book version of Goethe's "Faust," I expect to get more laughs out of it than I did in Arcade.
Arcade was indeed launched with the best of intentions, but it was also launched after the death rattle of underground comix had expired.
Hey Patrick,
Received the package today, I'll start looking through them soon...
Thanks again,