Culture

Brian Doherty: From MAD Magazine to Maus

A new history, Dirty Pictures, explores how underground comix revolutionized art and exploded censorship once and for all.

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Brian Doherty is author of Dirty Pictures, a history of underground comic books. | Lex Villena, Reason
(Lex Villena, Reason)

Brian Doherty: From MAD Magazine to Maus

Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix, by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, tells the story of how people such as Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman redefined not just what comic books were capable of but what gets counted as art.

Beginning in the late 1950s and 1960s, the characters Doherty writes about shook up pop culture and the high art world, but they also fought for radical, creative, individualized expression in an age of figurative and literal censorship. In today's world of cancel culture and speech codes, there's a lot of lessons to be learned from their struggles. Nick Gillespie interviews Doherty about all that, plus his previous books such as This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. 

This episode of The Reason Interview was recorded in front of a live audience in New York City on Monday, June 20, 2022, as part of our Reason Speakeasy series, where we host monthly conversations about free speech, creative expression, and maverick thinking. Check out past episodes by going here and look for upcoming events here.

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