Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection

Description

Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection brings together the legendary four issues of Anarchy Comics, the underground comic that melded anarchist politics with a punk sensibility, producing a riveting mix of satire, revolt and artistic experimentation in the late-70s and early-80s. This international anthology collects the comic stories of all thirty international contributors. Full of radical politics, superb artwork and a great sense of humour, this book is utterly unique and, as comic legend Alan Moore puts it, A brave and brilliant collection."

Jay Kinney was an active participant in the underground comix movement from 1968 through the 1970s--he cofounded the romance comic satire Young Lust, founded and edited Anarchy Comics, and contributed to numerous other comics. He served as editor of CoEvolution Quarterly before founding Gnosis. He is the author of Hidden Wisdom, The Inner West, and The Masonic Myth, and recently contributed a chapter on underground comics to Ten Years that Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978. He lives in San Francisco.

"60's counterculture, supposedly political, mostly concerned itself with hedonism and self-focused individualism, as did the underground comix it engendered. Jay Kinney's and Paul Mavrides' Anarchy Comics, to which all the scene's most artistically and politically adventurous creators gravitated, was an almost singular exception. Combining a grasp of Anarchy's history and principles with a genuinely anarchic and experimental approach to the form itself, Anarchy Comics represents a blazing pinnacle of what the underground was, and what it could have been. A brave and brilliant collection." --Alan Moore, celebrated comic writer and creator of V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and numerous other comics and novels "Anarchy Comics was an education I never got in school. I learned more deep truths about the way human megatribes operate (while at the same time being greatly amused by the superb art and writing) than from any textbook. Decades later, the insights I gleaned from these brilliant comics still affect the way I view global events." --Mark Frauenfelder, founder of boingboing.net "Thrill to this recently disinterred archeological fragment from a lost civilization about to be reinvented. Anarchy Comics is a dream come true." --Mark Rudd, founding member of the Weather Underground and author of the recent memoir, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen "In the late '70s and early '80s we briefly had a comic voice that told our history (IWW, Spanish Civil War, Kronstadt), illustrated our culture (Brecht, communes, Yippies), and skewered our nemeses (Lenin, Mao, Trotsky), all with a large but necessary dose of self-deprecating humor. That was Anarchy Comics, and finally we can read it again!" --Josh MacPhee, co-editor of Signal, founder of justseeds.org "Anarchy Comics, revisited here, with an ardent introduction by its principal editor, Jay Kinney, was a wonder of the underground comics world. Perhaps it might be better described as a wonder of the fading comics world, because times had grown difficult for the genre and Kinney was pulling out the stops to show off what was really funny and insightful in the genre at large, extending them into another era. Anarchy belongs to the last third of the twentieth century, and yet has lost none of its power for today's troubled world. Go to the original, reader--look and learn!" --Paul Buhle, founder of Radical America and Cultural Correspondence, editor of the Encyclopedia of Radical Art