Shock! Knock! Mock! -- The Secret World of Comix

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Once upon a time, transgressive cultural discourse took place principally in union halls, on campuses or among tiny bands of artists, musicians and theater folks. For the past 60 years, however, it also has stalked the pages of comic books -- not "Richie Rich" or "Archie," but the alternative and underground "comix" written and drawn by cartooning anarchists.

The University at Buffalo Art Gallery will offer a peek into the '90's version of this global netherworld with an exhibition of work by insurgent comic-book artist and writer Joe Sacco, whose award-winning documentary work has garnered praise far outside his field.

The show will open on Sunday (Jan. 29) with a public reception for the artist from 7-9 p.m. in the University Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus. It will run through March 7. Sacco will lecture on his work at noon on Jan. 29 in the Center for the Arts Screening Room. The talk will be free of charge and open to the public.

Sacco is considered one of the absolute cream-of-the-crop of alternative and underground cartoonists. This tough-minded breed constitutes the political and artistic progeny of Jules Feiffer and Robert Crumb, the radical godfather of some of the most notorious "toons" published during the Silver Age of comic book art.

Joined at the brain, dastardly writers and cartoonists gleefully wing their brickbats from the cultural margins. That's where artists live. That's how you know they're artists. We duck, but sometimes they hit us right in the head with an appalling visual assault, then in the brain with an agenda destined to horrify young Republicans (and an occasional young Democrat).

Like their predecessors, they use new styles of visual art and borrow old narrative forms -- myth, legend, parable, and even Saturday-morning cartoons -- to make their point. Some stories are fantastical, some hilariously manic, some very gross. And some, like Sacco's, are deeply rooted in fact and about as "comic" as having your foot blown off by a landmine.

knock and mock. They also take aim at terrorism, fools, corporate greed, imperialist governments and life on the lower rungs of the capitalist order.

There admittedly is plenty of the usual sinew and women-flesh in these publications, and some authors write things that'd kill your dog with one sniff. All in all, however, there's a lot of "Zippy the Pinhead" (before he went legit) in them there racks.

Genealogically speaking, Sacco comes from the Art Spiegelman ("Maus," "Maus II") branch of the comic-book family, in that he practices "cartoon journalism." His stories, logged in pen and ink, have chronicled the struggle for an independent Palestine, war mongering and the daily misery and horror of the Bosnian conflict and The Hague war trials.

Satire and personalization are loaded on top of piles of dead bodies and ruined cities. Sacco makes readers see what he sees -- that good and evil are not exclusive categories; that we lie to ourselves about our own crimes; that humans of all races, creeds and nations murder one another every day, then slave to develop more and more efficient ways of doing it.

The sardonic voice of Sacco's comics (some are collected and sold in bound versions) would make mainstream news publications wince and run. The comic-book genre, on the other hand, always has had a wicked edge the political right loves to hate. This is just its latest presentation.

Having traveled to Sarajevo to document the Bosnian war, Sacco wrote and illustrated five self-contained "Stories from Bosnia" that make chop suey of that nation's purveyors of violence -- men who weep when their own are slaughtered, then race to hop into their own sniper outfits. Critic Chris Hedges, writing in The New York Times, described Sacco's Bosnian drawings as "stark, realistic visions of the gray, depressing world of a land mangled by artillery shells and deformed by poverty."

Sacco conveys the banality of this particular evil by showing the same guys ("The Man Who Plants Landmines," "The Great Fighter") in cheesy outfits sweating through mating rituals at the local dance hall. Time after time, in nation after nation, he links deluded concepts of "manhood" with appalling acts of violence and cruelty.

Last year, Sacco's Bosnian stories were nominated for two 1998 Ignatz Awards -- named after cartoonist George Herriman's brick-wielding mouse and conferred for outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning. Sacco received the comics industry's prestigious Harvey Award and an American Book Award in 1996.

This show will feature work from Sacco's Yahoo series (1988-92), several chapters of Palestine and several chapters from Soba, a 40-page book that opens his "Stories from Bosnia" series.