MARK JUDGE: Raw, weird, and politically incorrect: How underground comics are pushing back against woke culture.
[Libertarian cartoonist Peter Bagge] also makes a telling comment — that when comics were underground, it wasn’t something that any creator “was going to lose a college professorship over.” In the age of the woke, that has changed. In the fall of 2020, for example, Phoebe Gloeckner, the author of the graphic novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl and an associate professor at the University of Michigan, was accused of “ curriculum-based trauma ” by students partly because she showed them Crumb’s work. The art itself might not have been offensive, but Crumb and his refusal to accept woke ideology were.
Talking to the New York Times, Crumb “refers disdainfully” to “the wokies.”
“The whole identity politics and L.G.B.T.Q. stuff,” he said, “I agree with it. These people need an equal share. I can’t argue with that. But then people get kind of intolerant about anything that could be seen as triggering.”
The establishment man Crumb and others battled in the 1960s is now the arms-folded college scold.
And so, as with so many other cultural trends, the world of comics has come full circle. Underground comics, at least those willing to buck leftist cultural trends, are once again banned by the establishment. Which means, of course, that they’re right on target.
Meanwhile, overground comics, having gotten woke — well, I think you can see where this is headed: LOL: Corrupt Leftwing Comics “Journalists” Finally Admit That the Comics Industry Is In Financial Trouble.