Melinda Gebbie’s comics are different from the Underground background she shared with other San Fransisco cartoonists from the 1970s. While Robert Crumb was fixating on big-legged ‘gurls’, and Gilbert Shelton was plucking his Furry Freak Brothers from out of one marijuana-related catastrophe after another, Melinda was drawing the other cartoonists around her, capturing their visages and words on paper and including them as characters in her own world.
Her female characters are as odd in their political and social environments as she is herself. She uses comix storytelling to underline cultural movements which drift like her characters, clothed in a Surrealist tale in one instance, featuring Federico Garcia Lorca playing a guitar in her own kitchen, while Andre Breton and Benjamin Peret entertain her house guests, to a pastiche of Dante and Milton’s circles of Heaven and Hell, peopled by her own contemporary cartooning comrades-in-art.
