Very sad news: Underground comic pioneer Spain Rodriguez has died at the age of 72. Cause of death was cancer.

Along with R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez was among the handful of comic artists that I gave a shit about. I didn’t read comics as a child, but in my teens I couldn’t get enough of Zap Comix and virtually anything published by the Print Mint in Berkeley. I remember discovering Rodriguez’s work in the East Village Other when I first visited NYC in 1968. His anti-fascist, Marxist super hero Trashman was the first counter-culture comic strip I recall reading. My 17-year-old brain was scrambled by the idea that comic books could be so overtly subversive and dangerous. This was pop culture for a new consciousness. The images and messages were as indelible as the ink they were printed with.

It’s close to impossible for me to find the words to express how important Crumb, Wilson, Rodriquez and Bill Griffith were in helping to alter the ways in which teenyboppers like myself viewed the world. To say they were “mind-opening” is an understatement. Zap, Snatch, Despair, Big Ass were an assault on every wall built up around every taboo that any young hipster might be grappling with. Honeybunch Kaminski, The Checkered Demon, The Furry Freak Brothers, Zippy and Trashman shattered the status quo and the societal hangups that oppressed us. One of the most disreputable art forms was actually pretty fucking profound.

Yeah, some of us were actually liberated by comic books and mad geniuses like Spain Rodriguez. Devouring a new issue of Zap while sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park was like receiving an affirmation from the comic book Gods that all my twisted little thoughts weren’t so unnatural and uncommon. I was not alone. There were others out there like me who thought the unthinkable and wrote about it and drew pictures of it and sent it out into the world for no other reason than to declare that it was all okay. And by making it okay, we could all move on to the real shit of changing the fucking world.

Here’s Spain discussing his book Che: A Graphic Biography, which was published in 2008.