Before
travelling to San Francisco, I googled for information about the famous underground
comics scene of the early 70s and found this article.
I took metro
street car line J from Downtown to Church/24th St station and spent a couple of
hours in Mission District (the epicentre of action in the late 60s and the early
70s) looking for the places indicated on this map of underground comix artists
and companies during the early seventies:
Below are
my pictures of the spots marked on the map. It shows no house numbers but the map was quite easy to read and I hope I managed to capture the
right buildings.
No. 1 marks the place
of Roger Brand (contributor
to Banzai!, Blab!, Candid Press, Insect
Fear, Real Pulp Comics, Tales of the Leather Nun, Tales of Sex and Death,
Yellow Dog and Young Lust; view Lambiek Comicopedia entry here) and Michelle Brand:
No. 2: Apex Novelties operated by Don Donahue (publishers of Zap Comix, Snatch
Comics, Terminal Comics and Mr. Natural among many others). The
building that housed them was somewhere in the middle of this street:
No. 3: Bill
Griffith (best known for his daily comic strip Zippy; view Lambiek Comiclopedia entry here) & Diane Noomin (best known for her character Didi Glitz; check out her website
here) and
Willy Murphy (producer of a series of comics called SF Underground Comix; view Lambiek Comiclopedia entry here):
No. 4: Ted Richards
(check out Lambiek Comiclopedia entry here ) and Teresa “Terry” Richards (view Lambiek Comiclopedia entry here):
No. 5: S.F.
Comic Book Co – America’s first specialised comic book shop operated
by Gary Arlington who was the
key figure in the underground comics movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The shop in
Mission District at 3339 23rd Street was a focal point for the Bay Area's
underground artists:
No. 6: Trina Robbins – one of the few female artists
in underground comics when she started, wife of Kim Deitch. She contributed to
such publications as East Village Other,
Gothic Blimp Works, It Ain't Me, Babe Comix, Swift Comics, Wimmen's Comix,
etc.). Later she was the artist co-creator of Vampirella. Check out her website here):
No. 7: Jay Kinney
(a member of the original Bijou Funnies
crew; check out Lambiek Comiclopedia entry here), Leslie Cabarga (contributor to Real
Pulp Comics, Comix Book):
No. 8: Joe
Schenkman (collaborator on Arcade: The
Comics Revue):
No. 9: Art
Spiegelman (author of Maus, view Lambiek
Comiclopedia entry here), Justin Green (author of the 1972 comic book Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary; view Lambiek Comiclopedia
entry here), Shary Flenniken, prominent contributor to National Lampoon, check out her website here) and Bobby
London, creator of Dirty Duck, view Lambiek
Comiclopedia entry here):
No. 10: Gary
Arlington (operator of S.F. Comic Book Co, see No. 5) and Kim Deitch, one of the key figures in underground cartooning,
referred to by some as one of the godfathers of American underground comics (view
Lambiek Comiclopedia entry here):
No. 11: John Bagley’s Company & Sons – publishers of underground comics:
Last but
not least, here are two pictures of the building that once was the headquarters for Rip Off
Press, publishers of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat
Freddy’s Cat and other famous series. The address is 1250 17th Street in
San Francisco. It is not on the map because it is located in the industrial
area in a different part of the city. The building is now occupied by a company
that sells bookbinding supplies and model making materials:
