Alternative Visions

These three magazines (Raw, Escape and Weirdo) in particular heralded a golden age of new anthologies which blossomed into the 1990s. In America, Fantagraphics took up the torch with a number of exciting titles: Prime Cuts (1987), Graphic Story Monthly (1970), Honk (1987), Snake Eyes (1991) and Pictopia (1991), to name but a few. Other publishers too were important: Drawn and Quarterly's Drawn and Quarterly (1992), from Montreal, and Kitchen Sink's Blab! (1986), a digest-sized annual, were especially good; and so too was Dark Horse's Dark Horse Presents (ig86), which ambitiously mixed work by alternative folk like Eddie Campbell with that of mainstream creators like Frank Miller. In Britain, the anthology tradition tended to be taken up on the news-stands with publications like Deadline and Heartbreak Hotel, though some, like Inkling (Inkling Inc, 1989) and Purr (Blue Eyed Dog, 1993), made an impact in the fan shops. Speaking in overall terms about the quality of these anthologies, it is fair to say that individual issues stand with the great undergrounds as some of the finest adult comics ever published.
On the shelves alongside them, the genres of alternative comics were split into fiction and non-fiction. There were five basic sub-categories in the former: humour (by far the biggest), soap opera, science fiction fantasy, horror and sex. The humour comics were extremely varied, and, in general, built on the formulas developed by the underground. But beyond being satirical to varying degrees, there was no 'party line'. Creators took their own path, and this commonly meant a style of humour that was unprecedentedly bitter, angry and offbeat: 'alienated comedy' would probably be a good description. Three prime examples of such creators were the Canadian Chester Brown and the Americans Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes.