Week 6: Underground Comics

I have to say, I was not the least bit prepared for our recommended reading this week at all. Mr. Natural started out like almost any other humorous comic I've seen before, but I quickly came to understand about midway that it was anything but.

For one, I was very surprised that it was published with uncensored genitalia. Or that it had so many crude jokes. Or that there were so many tropes involved that people would consider offensive. Or basically the entire book in general.

I was absolutely astonished by the way it went from quite the standard slapstick humor prevalent in Western comics to being downright sexual in just a few pages. Perhaps I am somewhat prudish, but there were many moments while reading the book that I felt so uncomfortable in what I was seeing that I actually had to balk a bit and wonder if I hadn't just read it all wrong.

It started out innocuously enough, too, with a humorous, if somewhat irritating and insensitive, man just harassing people. This in itself is pretty standard in most comics. But then they went on to show uncensored genitalia, and featured a number of characters doing wholly inappropriate things. As a kid who’s grown up reading Garfield, Foxtrot, and Calvin &Hobbes, seeing a cartoon of an old man manipulating a giant baby to essentially give him multiple blowjobs was so astonishing that I actually had to close my laptop for a minute or two.

Regardless, I suppose that I can appreciate how revolutionary drawing and publishing a comic like this is (even if, for the most part, I found it rather distasteful and unnerving). But perhaps that was the intention? To make the reader utterly dumbfounded with the audacity of what is in the comic? To shatter the barrier of ‘what is socially acceptable to print’? While I do appreciate and approve of comics being more liberal in what they show in terms of sexuality, I also think that this crosses the line just a little bit.

Whatever its purpose, I can’t deny that it certainly left an impression on me. While you probably won’t find me twiddling my thumbs in anticipation of reading the next Mr. Natural comic anytime soon, I definitely will have strong impressions of it in my mind for a long, long time to come.