Week 6 - Underground Comics

            This week I started off by reading Robert Combs’ Mr. Natural. Before I even got very far into the comic the first thing I noticed was its very racist depiction of black people. He gives them extremely large lips and big noses, they almost look like rubber hose versions of monkeys. He also makes them beg for money and gives them ridiculous names like ‘lil Eucalyptus Chile’. The black people in this story also have the stereotypical clipped way of speaking and are just thugs that want to take money from Shuman’s bowl. Other than racism, there is also blatant sexism as demonstrated by Little Johnny FuckerFaster. He assumes, even though it’s a comic, that women will want to sleep with him or engage in sexual activity. He sees the women as just something to satisfy his urges and shoves them to their knees so he can put his genitals in her face. It was also surprising to me that in the aforementioned comic Johnny wasnot allowed to show his genitals but in the comic immediately after, Shuman The Human, Shuman’s are hanging out uncensored. I wonder if that was done on purpose and found it rather funny. In general, it surprised me how sexually explicit they could get away with being like in the Mr. natural comic where he gets oral sex from a mature looking baby and engages in sexual intercourse with it in public. Is the reason underground comic authors write these to get under people’s skin? Probably.