Underground Comix Covers of the 1960s and 1970s

The covers that announced a new kind of comic book: self-published, sold in head shops and on street corners, and made with no Comics Code looking over anyone's shoulder. A cover earns its place here when the comic behind it changed what the underground could do, whether it launched a publisher, a character, a feminist or autobiographical strand, or a court fight. The gallery runs in order of publication, from Jack Jackson's God Nose in 1964 to Harvey Pekar's American Splendor in 1976. Several photos show later printings, which kept the original cover art. It stops before 1980, so successors such as Raw and Gay Comix sit outside it. These were adult comics. Most of the covers are tame next to what is inside, but a few lean on crude sexual jokes, and the books themselves are for grown-ups only.