Archives West Finding Aid

Inspired by the controversial EC Comics of the 1940s, artists of the late 1960s San Francisco counterculture community began publishing uncensored comics dubbed "comix," with the "x" standing for X-rated. With drug influenced and politically charged content, these new comix pushed the boundaries in every respect, and within a year of the first major publications in 1967, every head shop in the country was selling underground comix. Early titles like Zap and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers drew a strong following and were reprinted many times over. For a while, the obscenity and copyright infringement lawsuits brought against comics like Air Pirates Funnies and Nasty Tales didn't seem to harm underground sales, but by the mid 1970s the "head shops" were disappearing and the remaining underground publishing houses could no longer turn a profit. Coinciding with the birth of punk music in 1977, the underground genre lost popularity as readers turned to the upcoming trend of New Wave comics. Apart from the work of artists like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, who continued to produce the same style of comix after 1977 as they did at the peak of the movement, experimental and uncensored comics from that time forward came to be known as "alternative comics".

Paul Brians began collecting underground comix in the summer of 1967 when he encountered a copy of Yellow Dog in the Petaluma, California Greyhound bus depot newsstand. Their outrageous content and visual creativity altered the definition of what comics could be, and comix were a major force in the 1960s counterculture. Brians systematically ordered all the major comix that he could identify for the next few decades, until the original publishers began to fade from the scene with the death of the alternative marketplaces that had been responsible for selling comix.

Expanding his interest in modern adult comics, Brians subscribed for several years to Heavy Metal, the U.S. equivalent of Métal hurlant, and those issues are included in this collection.

During the 1980s he did extensive research on nuclear war in fiction, and as part of this process he built the world's most comprehensive collection of fiction depicting nuclear war or its aftermath in the WSU Libraries. In addition he built a modest but unique collection of comic books depicting nuclear war, now included in this collection, though it is a quite distinct collection of mostly mainstream titles.