The Greatest Team-Up Never Told? Paul Buhle Theorizes the New Left and Underground Comix

Abstract

In the late 1960s the writer, editor, and activist Paul Buhle imagined an ambitious political future for underground comix. Across a series of articles - but especially in the 1969 essay "Komix Kountermedia" - Buhle proposed that the comix were the latest turn in a dialectical history of US comics and they promised to provide the space in which a popular anticapitalist sensibility might be forged. Buhle was inspired by a range of critical thinkers such as C. L. R. James, Antonio Gramsci, and Theodor Adorno, and he saw his Marxist-infused analysis of comix as an American analogue to the work in cultural studies being undertaken in Britain. "The Greatest Team-Up Never Told?" provides a summary of Buhle's theoretical coordinates and his hopes for the role that comix might play in the revolution to come.