Okay, so I have been reading a blog on here by username Lotus which has a simular theme to what mine has, and that is the exploration of underground comics. It seems he is having a bit of troubles articulating exactly what he is talking about when it comes to underground and has even gone as far as musing that MAD Magazine (the one published by Time Warner) could be considered underground. I don't want to slam him though, as I think the exploration has merit, otherwise I myself wouldn't be writing on the topic. I also give him credit for creating discussion around what is or isn't considered underground. I have already gotten into the exact definition of the underground comic in another blog entry, so I won't dive into it here.

What Lotus got me considering however was the why. His explanation pretty much comes from the point of view that people have a choice to make and that is either between self publishing or having your comic published by a bigger entity.

Seriously though, do we really have a choice? Do we make that big of a decision and say "Well I could get my stuff distributed over the world and potentially get paid to tell my stories, but I think I will publish it myself for creative freedom sake". That's horseshit. We don't have choice in the matter. If we are going to tell the stories we want to tell to the general public whether they be commercially viable or not, we have to get them out there somehow. The only way to do this is to self publish, unless by stroke of luck (not skill, I assure you) your pitch/idea gets picked up by a larger entity. The chances of this are pretty slim. I think most of us "undergrounders" graze this possibility once and a while but end up hitting reality hard once we have come off our cloud.

I am not disagreeing with the notion that Lotus offers in his blog that there are creative freedoms not commonly found in mainstream comics that you can exercize in the underground scene. I am notorious for having cock in my comics and in my most recent issue of Mercy Seat there is a picture of me deficating on a pile of my own comics (exquisitely drawn by Chris Peterson). I believe we do these things because we can get away with it, we have complete control over what goes in so why not go balls out? However initially we do this because there are no other options.

Of course, you could say that we do have a choice in self publishing or not. To that I say no we don't. We underground fellas and gals (yes there are gals- check out Blind Eye by Kasmaya Jaxsonne) are a busy bunch. If we weren't doing something with ourselves we would go crazy, and the fact that our overactive imaginations nag at us with hundreds of ideas doesn't help so we have to tell our stories. Or I guess we could go watch television, but how then would we convince all of our friends and family that the heavens do actually revolve around our heads (thanks for that-Mr. Talbot).

I hope this creates some discussion and I knwo half of it is semantics. However there are those of us who do underground comics that don't feel that lumping us in with "indy" or "small press" justifies our role. To  comic muggles we do comics, and that is fine because these people don't really get the whole dynamic. However for those on Zeros2Heroes we deserve our own label as it were. You wouldn't introduce your friend from Sudan as being from Africa, would you? One is a distinctive identity within the geographic entity- as is the undergrounder.