Literature of Comics: Day 6

          The Yellow Submarine, 1968, is a very trippy film. I have known this film for basically my whole life due to my dad. He loves this movie, his last birthday my sister and I got him a yellow submarine card for father's day. I appreciate the variation in techniques and the Beatle songs are great. The Yellow Submarine was made to be done as quickly as possible, using rotoscope and looped animation, because it was created at the height of the Beatle's fame. Everyone expected the Beatles to be forgotten, but this is probably the most successful, experimental animated film. This film is very 60s - early 70s, with a lot of art movements portrayed throughout. The bright colors, surrealism, pop art, art nouveau collage, graphic shapes, live action film loops, and a lot of profile portraits. Whenever I watch this movie, I remember the Power Puff Girls episode where they spoofed this film. Mojo Jo Jo gathers the villains and creates the group, the 'Beat Alls', and I felt so smart when I was little and understood the reference compared to my peers who had no idea.
          Under ground comics were also very influenced by many genres. This basically starts with College Humor Magazines. These comics were funded by students, and it was always fighting against the admins. These would become more and more scandalous, pushing the boundaries, and would be fought against by the legislature. The harbor lampoon is one of the few humor magazines that is still around. At this time, around the country, there was an under ground press movement.People would walk in with their comics in hope to have them published, and often had a large circulation. Political stories were very common, often about civil rights and anti-war. These were distributed by hippies. Eventually the underground comics became more organized and more widely known. Rock music and concerts was another movement occurring at this time. Thus the business of making Rock posters was growing. Robert Crumb comes into the picture due to this. Crumb is a nice boy from baltimore, and his brothers and sisters and he are raised by strict father and a mentally ill mother. He later gets a job at American Greetings making strange humor cards. At this time, they basically all took LSD, but at the time they could get it from a physician. He was not a hippy, most artist weren't at the time. He later goes on a road trip to San Francisco, and he sent work to Zap, and they lost it. Many years later they found it and published it as Zap number 0.