Comedian-podcaster Marc Maron wrote the foreword for Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comics, a new collection of the fine drawings of Drew Friedman. I love caricatures and Friedman's were terrific when he burst onto the scene and he has just gotten better and better.
One of the many things that will astound you if/when you buy this book — and you should buy this book and not on Kindle — is the level of detail. I don't mean detail just in creating a drawing that really looks like someone but detail in meticulously surrounding them with an environment and backgrounds that say so much about them.
But I'll get back to what Drew drew. Maron writes that underground comix shaped his worldview. He says they "…laid the psychological groundwork for my entire life and how I see the world." I probably read most of the same ones Maron did and they didn't have that impact on me, possibly because I was born eleven years before he was.
The main impact they had on me came from merely being exposed to lot of diverse worldviews — some banal to the extreme, some brilliant — and most of them personal to an extreme that almost never happens in a comic book created by hordes (or even herds) of people and copyrighted by a corporation.
That some undergrounds were amateurish didn't matter. In fact, some of the crudest-looking ones had the most to say…and enjoying a stranger's free expression can be vitalizing even when their worldview connects in no way with your own. Paging through Drew's book, looking at all the pretty portraits, I found myself thinking over and over, "Oh, so that's what the guy who did that story looks like." (I also discovered that one or two underground cartoonists I thought were black weren't.)
Not to slight Drew's drawings in any way but this book is much more than a collection of great drawings. It's a visit to a time so long ago that some of its prime movers have died of natural causes. The text portions of this volume are very important and if you don't know what was so special about underground comics — or think it was all just R. Crumb and the Freak Bros. — this book will clue you in. Buy it for the artwork. Stay for the history.
Here's a link for purchasing. And for another rave review and some interviews with Drew and his subjects, read what John Kelly wrote.