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In the early 1960s, Andy Warhol declared war on the academy by promulgating pop art--the idea that comics, commercial labels, and industrial logos were as worthy of being considered art as any painting or sculpture. This new "art movement" was applauded by a philistine culture that had long felt insulted and browbeaten by the sort of cultural elites who summered in Paris and embraced difficult European abstraction and radical avant-gardism. Warhol's announcement had strong repercussions in the halls of power, where the bohemian affection for European modernism was already a hot topic in the intelligence community. Art was considered to represent one of the main ideological battlefronts in the capitalist war against social equity. Postwar emancipation movements, inspired by the work of Alexander Rodchenko and bankrolled by the Soviets, simmered in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. Therefore avant-art--seen as a highly influential area dominated by the left and possessing a potential to wreak international havoc on willingness to cooperate with imperialist world domination--was aggressively co-opted by the ruling class. Cultural institutions in war-torn Western Europe were infiltrated, and soon most of the region's art magazines were CIA fronts, with many art critics and artists enjoying the largesse of the agency's payroll--whether they knew it or not (the money was often diverted through "legitimate" art-world sources). In their attempt to counter the USSR's influence over the leftist artist class, the "company" fostered abstract expressionism, which was USA's apolitical, "spiritual" version of Euro-style nonrepresentational sculpture and painting. Still, it was just a New World version of Slavic modernism. It was not a game changer. Pop art, however, was. Once announced, pop was a huge relief to the spooks in government who had been assigned to fixing the fine-art game. Since pop had distinctly American roots, no longer was the US artist a pretender, a stepchild, or an also-ran. And with pop, Warhol cemented New York City's claim to being the center of the postwar art world. As opposed to modernism's perceived difficulties and abstract expressionism's supposed mysticism, pop art was immediately understandable, witty, and inclusive. Snobby Europeans had long thought of the USA as a cultural trash heap, and pop art declared that, yes, it was true--and that the trash was in fact beautiful. Pop art was really a renamed, high-priced institutionalization of the gay world's camp aesthetic, the send-up of mundane vulgarity that was popular with the homosexual subculture. Camp was a vague and esoteric ideology that guffawed at emotional involvement or any sort of seriousness and that prized the garish and naive. Camp was infatuated with comic-strip villains, artifice, and all the ridiculous vestiges of an idiot culture. And comics, originally the newspaper industry's snare for illiterates and morons, were at the forefront of pop. Pop art was a massive success, inspiring fashion trends and TV series such as Batman and The Green Hornet. The theme to Batman even became a monster hit in the mid-'60s, with several charting versions. Brigitte Bardot had her own pop art anthem with Serge Gainsbourg. It was called "Comic Strip," and it featured a chorus of spoken comic-book sound effects. The effeminate mod movement's premier rock 'n' roll band, The Who, declared themselves a pop-art group, saying, "We're not just pop art on stage, but pop art all the time." Fellow mod group Creation penned a song entitled "Biff, Bang, Pow" and soul singer Gate Wesley recorded a song called "(Zap! Pow!) Do the Batman." Pop art could be said to be the most enduring visual aesthetic of the 1960s. The new movement permeated graphic design and fashion as well as music and TV. It was via pop art--and then broader pop culture--that comics evolved from their larval, Neanderthal origins and were thrust into the world of middlebrow tastes, high powered rock 'n' roll, and sophisticated sexuality. It was no longer an embarrassment for a self-respecting aesthete to be seen reading Brenda Starr. Instead, it became a signifier of a modern sensibility. Marshall McLuhan championed the comic as a "cool" medium. But let us not forget that at the roots of modern comics lie pop, and at the roots of pop lie camp, which is the little-discussed ancestor of comics as we know them today. As readers of contemporary comics, we owe much to the camp movement. It gave us license to consume comics. It moved the comic out of the closet. But how did camp come about? To answer that question, we must briefly trace the history of homosexuality. And to do that, we must travel back to the time just immediately after prehistory. This era, before the ascent of Christianity, is known today as antiquity. The people of antiquity--both those who were ignorant of Christ and those who lived before his time--were pagans. In their world, antiques were everywhere. So was sex. There was no TV, no rock groups, no internet. People would spend their time mashing grapes, picking figs and olives, weaving, staring at the stars, telling stories, and fornicating. The last was the easiest of all these endeavors. Therefore, people did it a lot, not only with one another but also with any available animal or object. Men, women, goats, sheep, chickens, children, cats, vegetables, great white mares--anything at all was considered fair game. Since ancient man lived with beasts, he witnessed the brutality and caprice of the animal world's sex play, and so the pagan's fantasy life was lousy with centaurs, satyrs, and were-things--the imagined offspring of the everyday carnal encounters between man, mammal, fish, and fowl. And since humans implicated every living creature within their polymorphously perverse web of nonstop coitus, they imagined that all creatures were spending their time similarly, and so they theorized hybrids like the sea-goat, the unicorn, Pegasus, and the hippogriff. The gods themselves were said to have the heads of beasts on human bodies, as evidenced in Anubis, Bast, Ganesha, and more. It was a violent, erotically charged landscape. Few records exist of this time, as people were too tired to write anything down, and what was written down was later destroyed by sex-loathing Christians who feared its power to tantalize the masses. Pagans engaged in sex with one another as well, regardless of the similarity of their genitals or the dissimilarity of their ages. Their morality was of an order now lost to us because in a pantheistic culture such as theirs, there are several gods, who were thought to live in a society that paralleled that of the people. Each god had distinguishing strengths and foibles, and since the pagan's gods were of varied proclivities, humans' diverse inclinations were tolerated by other humans. There was also no central religious authority, but instead many diverse temples consecrated to different deities, each one with a particular perversion. The ancient world eventually came to feature a handful of monotheistic religions, but they were wildly unpopular and notorious for their self-righteous making of rules. Instead of several gods with different personalities and myths, monotheism featured one god who was a fearful, faceless abstraction. There was the Persian cult of Zoroaster, the ancient Egyptian cult of Aten, and the Jewish cult of Jehovah, which had deviant offshoot sects of its own. One of these was called Christianity. Religion was central to the lives of the ancients just as television and comics and the internet are to us now. The emperors and kings of the time therefore tended to rule in tandem, or at least at the pleasure of the various deities. Egyptian pharaohs were divine themselves, as was Alexander the Great. But Roman emperors were merely semi-divine, enjoying divinity for a few ceremonial hours at a time. Rome was, of course, the great power for several centuries preceding what we call the "Dark" or "Middle" Ages. After extraordinary expansion, the Roman Empire was thinned and weakened by its many foreign occupations. Conquest was easily accomplished, but maintaining rule over the wilder tribes--the Germanic people and the various Goths--was difficult. As Rome incorporated various and sundry cultures, its leadership recognized monotheistic religion for what it is: a useful tool in teaching fealty to a central authority. Christians, unlike religious pagans, were absolutely intolerant of difference in belief and ideology. Their morality was unequivocal and emanated from a central source. They had only one god, who was humorless and had no face, name, characteristics, or identity. He was simply a force who punished those unwilling to submit to his will. Not only would the institutionalization of such a religion yoke new subjects to a foreign imperial dictatorship, but next to such a horrible master as God, the emperor would appear sympathetic--the good cop in a fearsome power-sharing duo. The plan worked for a time. The Romans couldn't have imagined just how thorough the Christians would be in their despotism. The Roman Empire, known for such practices as decimation, seemed milquetoast next to the barbarity, repression, and lunatic perversions of the Christian church. The Christians outlawed everyday behavior, pathologized it, classified it, and criminalized it. Eventually everyone was labeled a pervert or a scoundrel of some sort. Kinks were the major source of revenue for the Catholic Church, as each acolyte was compelled to compensate an angry God with alms and penance for their acts of sodomy, their wet dreams, or their erect nipples. Sex, the original universal pastime, was recast as an outlaw affair. Which brings us relatively close to the present day. Due to centuries of Christian socializing, sex in the Western world is now impossible to conceive of without some imagined transgression involved. The population invents intricate systems and obstacles to facilitate hard-to-get erections. Affairs, ogling, pornography, and prudishness are a few. Homosexuality is another. In the past, homosexuals, being an illegal minority, had to go underground. There they developed a highly sophisticated system of codes through which to speak to one another--not unlike Freemasons or needle freaks. One of these codes, particularly prevalent in theater productions and musicals, was the camp aesthetic. Camp made fun of cheap morality and emotions and was a survival tactic for the gay people who had to endure stultifying Christian hegemony. When Warhol announced camp, under the new banner of pop, as a new art movement and fashion trend, its die-hard adherents must have winced privately, though their camp ideology would have prohibited them from expressing anything more than a bon mot, perfectly delivered with blasé contempt. A keystone of camp is that nothing is to be taken seriously. It prohibits intellectual--and, even more so, political--thought. Susan Sontag followed up Warhol's dissemination with an essay, "Notes on Camp," which let the intellectuals know that camp was it, trash was fun, and high culture wasn't cool anymore. With this pronouncement, the USSR's Schroeder-esque (Schroeder as in Charlie Brown's aggressively classicist piano-playing pal) "high art for the masses" program, which had appeared extremely progressive in the '50s, suddenly seemed hopelessly fuddy-duddy. When Warhol declared the ascendancy of pop art he probably didn't realize that he would contribute to the decloseting of millions of adult goons who had been reading comics in secret. Now they read them proudly in public, the way people once read Dostoyevsky, and they eventually would be allowed to pin them to the walls of the Whitney and Guggenheim museums in NYC. Most films produced by Hollywood are now adaptations of comics--either traditional superhero fables or so-called underground misanthropy. Ironically, the genesis of the comic was the sort of drawing featured on the walls and stained glass of Christian churches, which used pictures to instruct the illiterate on moral and pious behavior. And when capitalism displaced Christianity as the West's religion, comics were utilized in a similar way to instruct the peasants in gender roles, patriotism, and justice, all through characters such as Superman. When the middle class was signaled by Warhol to consume--and then eventually produce--comics unabashedly, camp's pop deconstruction of the comic informed its new life, as did a camp sensibility of subcultural esoteric elitism. Thus began the era of underground comics. Underground comics, rather than being lessons in ideology for poor people, reflected a new morality--that of the privileged "creative class." Louche degeneracy, contempt for humanity, self-centred navel-gazing, and existentialism were the characteristics of the generation of comic artists spawned by the camp revolution. The new comics were individualist in the extreme: often autobiographical bouts of narcissism disguised as self-loathing confessionals. But central to camp ideology was anti-seriousness, and therefore an anti-art attitude. Similarly, Art School Confidential by superstar comic artist Daniel Clowes neatly sums up the attitude of the cartoonist toward the perceived idiocy and pretentiousness of the art world. The new cartoonist-identity was that of an outsider, ignored or actively persecuted, victim of the art establishment and the mores of bourgeois culture. This was a profound re-assignation--since the denizens of the high-art world had historically laid claim to a similar self-image, and since comics were of course the ultimate populist mass-media art form. Underground comics have grown from their sordid and combative camp-inspired origins into a respectable industry. They have shed many of their initial gay-inherited affectations such as outrageousness, vulgarity, and hatred for all mankind. Now they typically resemble something more akin to the gentle post-hippie craft-ism of the middle-class do-gooder. The paper is archival and the drawings tend toward Zen inksmanship. The stories are often about relationships. Form trumps content. The comic, instead of being a campy launchpad from which to lacerate humanity, is held in high regard as a sacred institution, with the forebears of comicdom being revered as heroic themselves (just look at Crumb and his Bible stories). But we know that burning within this serene, highly personal, self-referential, and contented exterior is the contemptuous, reactionary bitchiness of pop, the movement that--by rehabilitating American capitalism for the world via art--not only liberated us from straining our brains but also helped vanquish human movements for social justice forever. ZAP! BLAM! POW!

Ian Svenonius, Notes on Camp, Part 2