SOURCE: "The Underground Roots of Fact-Based Comics," in Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, University Press of Mississippi, 1989, pp. 48-57.

In the following essay, Witek discusses the underground comic books of the late 1960s and 1970s as a reaction against the 1954 Comics Code, focusing on the publications Skull and Slow Death Comix.

E.C.'s Mad magazine was able to evade the strictures of the Comics Code only because in 1955 publisher William M. Gaines shifted the format of his biting parodies of American media and social customs from a standardsized color comic book to a black-and-white magazine. Otherwise the grip of the Code was ironclad; by the late 1950s few comic books were sold in America without the distinctive Comics Code Authority seal of approval. The Comics Code Authority is an independent board established in 1954 by the comic-book industry...