In the early '60s a number of mainstream gallery artists began incorporating imagery from comics and other declasse popular art into their canvasses. Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein appropriated isolated comics panels which he then greatly simplified and enlarged to enormous size, word balloons and sound effects included. Although to a certain degree these paintings might recognize the surface beauty of a thick, inky-black comic book style brushstroke or the strange commercial/industrial aesthetic of the mechanical printing process itself, the comic's garish subject matter and inherent narrative qualities were kept at bay by Lichtenstein's cool, aloof formalism. The imagery was viewed as pure camp; as having no intrinsic merit save as an ironic commentary by the artist on the banality of comics, popular culture and (perhaps) the art world.

At the same time, an entirely different approach towards comics was being taken by artists such as Peter Saul, Jess, and Philip Guston, all of whom acknowledged the potency as well as the banality of comics iconography. In particular, Chicago Imagist painters such as Jim Nutt, Ray Yoshida and Karl Wirsum found the imagery and peculiar visual devices used in comics and other similar low-art forms (like tattoos, cheap magazine advertising art, etc.) fascinating and mysterious. Both innocent and suggestive, repulsive yet tantalizing, such artwork seemed, in some barely fathomable way, to tap into a seamy forbidden undercurrent In the American culture. The Imagist embraced such tawdry images wholeheartedly, dissecting and reconfiguring them in their own paintings for disturbing and surreal effect.

Now, more than 25 years after the first explosion of comics into the fine art world, cartoonists like Kaz (aka Kasimieras G. Praoulenis) are returning the favor by consciously adopting the post-modernist visual conventions and sensibilities of the avant garde painters and combining them with imagery and a style of drawing deriving heavily from older, more "primitive" comic strips and animated cartoons and using the entire array of expressive, hyperbolic narrative devices unique to the comics idiom in order to create fully functioning comics narratives.

Currently, Kaz bas a weekly comic strip, Underworld running in a number of alternative newspapers around the country and there are four collections of his work available--Buzzbomb, Sidetrack City and Other Tales and two from Underworld--and all contain extremely interesting work.

Buzzbomb has some of the artist's earliest and least accomplished work, but also some of his best, like the expressionistic punk noir "Tot," and the volume's large-scale format and appropriately pulpy paper stock show the better artwork to dramatic advantage.

The fledgling strips that Kaz produced in the early 1980s are mostly single-page gag strips of the sick humor variety and the artwork in them is rather amateurish. Their saving grace is Kaz's creative page layout, often inspired by classic newspaper strips. But even in these early pieces there is a clear thematic consistency with his later work; there is the same concern with overtly "dumb" humor, the macabre (one early page irreverently illustrates fragments of verse taken from old gravestone inscriptions), and with the meaning or meaninglessness of life. Like many other alternative cartoonists who emerged in the 1980s, Kaz's work is also grounded in an aggressive, if not joyful, nihilism and suffused with a thoroughly punk sensibility-especially "Tot." This punkish attitude in comics was driven by the same concerns that originally motivated the punk music scene--a desire to strip away the facile slickness of the commercial product in order to return to what was perceived as a purer, simpler, more primitive style.

Kaz has spoken of his youthful intoxication with the "punk aesthetic" and his own life reflects some of the angry, absurdist disaffection that punk extols. Born in 1959 to disgruntled Lithuanian immigrants who never fully reconciled themselves to a life of exile in America, he grew up in a neighborhood in which the kids were so ignorant of the world that they thought the Lithuanian that Kaz spoke at home to his parents was actually gibberish--some sort of joke that Kaz was trying to pull off. Before becoming a cartoonist, he worked at a number of horrible jobs that OSHA never heard of, in factories suspiciously similar to those that pop up in "Tot" and some of his other comics.

The earliest Tot strips are only so-so, but once Kaz gets rolling they begin to evolve into something more engaging--his drawing and composition becoming strong, bolder and more direct in each episode."Tot" has a raw, expressionistic flavor and is the first strip unmistakably stamped with Kaz's own unique style and personality.

The Tot is a ghoulish, skull-faced mutant baby (?) addicted to cigarettes and cheap wine. The stories take place in the industrial swamplands of New jersey where the sky is eternally black above a landscape dominated by bleak factories and chemical Plants and littered with trash and toxic wastes.

The plots are absurd, surreal things dripping with attitude and film noir atmosphere. In one episode, Tot is brainwashed and conditioned by an ambitious priest to stab the local bishop at the sound of the theme music from "I Dream of Jeannie." Another opens with a quote from the silent expressionistic horror film Nosferatu as Tot races a stolen car across the wastelands until he runs into the Little Bastard (who looks like an animated machine coil with a human head). The Little Bastard quickly recovers and holds Tot at bay with a pistol. Together they elude an evil policeman (who shoots Tot's ear off before perishing in a stream of toxic sludge) and escape the poisoned zone. The last panel sees the pair munching away at an all-night diner as Tot quotes from detective writer Dashiell Hammet.

One of the charms of this volume is that it also contains a number of individual illustrations such as the satirical meditation that graces its back cover, which depicts a squad of Asiatic Sluggoes (in fanciful Japanese army uniforms) emerging from a submarine floating in a bathtub. In this Fantasia on a Theme by Ernie Bushmiller the Sluggoes dream of a kimono-clad geisha Nancy.

The comic strips that appear in the volumes Underworld and Sidetrack City and Other Tales date from the 1990s and lack some of "Tot"'s overt expressionistic edge but display a more sophisticated graphic sense. As suggested earlier, Kaz's cartoonist progenitors are the old newspaper strip artists. (One of his earliest strips is set in a graveyard full of tombstones bearing the names of those he admires.) Some time ago, R. Crumb admiringly described the earthy appeal of a strip like E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater. "There's a seedy quality to it. You can smell the stale bread and cabbage when you read that." Kaz's world has some of the same grungy feel; it's filled with "dirty sinks, loose floorboards cigar butts, a half a bottle of beer..." as Kaz described it in a recent Journal interview. In one episode of Underworld, a cartoon rat, regarding his leaky, peeling, altogether decrepit surroundings, mutters "I hate you Kaz." Kaz has also spoken of the link that he sees between the rude, low-rent humor of Happy Hooligan-syle strips and the "punk aesthetic": "The Yellow Kid had a punk feel to it.... Snuffy Smith was like a hillbilly punk. He was lazy, you know, shooting people, drinking moonshine."

Both Underworld and Sidetrack City are populated by a cockeyed cast of characters who seem like mutated, hybrid cousins, Popeye, Bluto, Snuffy, Daffy and the rest, Kaz makes use of the fact that the visual reconstruction of reality going on in modernist art is paralleled in places by some of the stylizations inherent in 20th century commercial popular art, especially comics. There is an exciting collision of elements in Kaz's work: his imagery is fractured, exploded, and reassembled from bits and pieces of old comics, inanimate objects, and what not. For example, the cover of the earlier Buzzbomb depicts a highly-stylized figure, whose body is a visual cacophony of tubes and discs with outsized cartoonish arms bursting into a welter of cubistic shards, all rendered in high comic book style. Kaz is not much of a draughtsman in the naturalistic mode, but he is possessed of a great feel for composition and he uses comics' visual language and devices more like a painter would--not just as narrative devices but as design elements. Figures and objects are flattened, exaggerated, and pushed into wild geometric configurations: abstract shapes sprout up to form forests of weird hieroglyphic trees or to float, radiant, in the sky. In these strips, Kaz's imagination and visual inventiveness are at full throttle. His characters stroll through the fantastic architecture of Sidetrack City where surreal buildings are shaped like pigs or topped by giant faces, body parts, or inscrutable symbols and where weird beings lurk in every corner--skull-faced birds with 8-ball bodies and bones for legs, winged worms, smiling skeletal serpents. Much of the appeal of Kaz's work relies on its rich atmosphere. His pictures capture some of the magic and mystery that resides in the crude imagery of old black-and-white cartoons and comics. The very crudity and unreal slapstick irrationality of these simple cartoon figures exerts a strange hold on the imagination and imparts to them some primitive (yet hard to define) power. The atmospheric quality of this world is enhanced by its suggestion of an earlier, half-remembered time filled with steaming, puffing, iron-riveted contraptions with pot-bellied boilers and held together by a crazy patchwork of crooked pipes and tubework. Kaz places this old-fashioned imagery into a new, adult context, reconfiguring it to create a surrealist cartoon world in which he can tell his own darkly humorous tales.

The Underworld volume is a collection of the weekly four-panel gag strip of the same name. It is basically a parody of the daily newspaper strip, with an emphasis on the outrageously juvenile humor one finds in strips like Nancy or Bazooka Joe, except that here the punchlines often revolve around heroin, suicide, murder, cannibalism and the like. The humor of the strip derives from this incongruity: funny-looking cartoon characters hunt for a fix or bite the heads off leprechauns, seedy smoking cats literally cough their lungs onto the sidewalk, and vending trucks cruise the streets selling severed heads. For that reason Underworld has been described as "Peanuts for psychopaths," but that (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek description overlooks the totally absurd nature of Kaz's cartoon surrealist galaxy." Underworld is so stylized and unreal it doesn't come off as being quite so vicious as some of the strips done by a number of alternative cartoonists whose cartoon worlds align more closely with the real world and who seem to create vile, stupid characters primarily for the pleasure of subjecting them to brutal (if well-deserved) abuse.

Kaz uses absurdity in the same manner as the surrealists: for its shock value and because there is a liberating quality to joking about society's most sacred taboos in a non-constructive way. In one Underworld episode Drafty Duck laments the fact that he, as a cartoon character, is unable to kill himself, to which is his cartoon pig friend replies, "Heroin is nice." This might be seen as cynical and perhaps irresponsible commentary, but what meaning do such concepts as suicide and drug addiction have in such a universe? As Pinky Pig declares after Drafty blows his own brains out (literally), "Don't be alarmed. We are fictional characters in a sick, imaginary world." This strip is Kaz's mad rumpus room in which characters are not bound by physical or moral laws and one need take nothing seriously, whether it be death, drugs, or mutilation, and indulging in this freedom can be fun, even if, as Aunt Betty says after sampling some human meat at the butcher shop, "Why, this is totally tasteless."

Sometimes Kaz's humor goes uncomfortably beyond mere dumbness, especially when the joke involves how children perceive and interact with the cruel humor of TV cartoons and life in general. In one strip, a brother and sister are watching real cartoons when brother says, "Ha ha, I sure wish were real." At that moment a cartoon mouse reaches from the TV and knocks him senseless with a big mallet, to which sis responds, "Damn...I wish I'd been taping that."

Kaz can also be a clever writer, and when he's not being hopelessly vulgar has the gift of turning a colorful phrase. Some of his strips illustrate little ditties that have a veiled meaning: "A rat once left the city/Through a fungic catacomb/He accomplished it with the benefit/Of never leaving home." (The final panel shows a contented rat lounging in his dingy room next to a bowl of mushrooms.) Sometimes the meaning of the verse is more obscure. Other strips consist entirely of strings of jazzy, incongruous word combinations; in another, De-mise-O the clown recites a litany of comic punch lines from bad jokes.

All this being acknowledged, the question still arises as to whether Underworld is something of a dead end, and of whether Kaz is in danger of turning into just a punk version of Ernie Bushmiller for the alternative newspaper crowd. There is not much room for development within the rigid four-panel gag format, and witty though it may be at times, a certain formulaic repetition soon begins to set in. Also, the crudity of Kaz's drawing is not always matched by a corresponding sophistication of design or composition and in those cases the results can be disappointing.

Reading these strips week after week also raise legitimate concerns over their content, and it is easy to be repelled by Kaz's unremitting nihilism, whether humorous or not Although Kaz often dips his oars into deeper water, most of the time he wallows unashamedly in dumbness. He is one of those cartoonists who deifies the lame humor of strips like Nancy. Kaz professes to see "sensitivity" in brazen, dumbness, but that sensitivity is not always very apparent. Even when he does deal with his characters' deeper aspirations or their speculations on the nature of life, Kaz is quick to cynically deflate them with a deprecating wisecrack in panel four. Perhaps it is unfair to ask a humorist whether being funny is enough. But it is legitimate to ask if his unrelenting cynicism is leading anywhere (in an artistic or narrative sense), or if turning out Underworld keeps him from working on somewhat more ambitious projects such as the longer pieces that make up much of Sidetrack City.

One undoubted advantage to working in the full-page format of the comic book, with its larger panels and potential for creative layout, is the ability to open up visually. The longer length also more easily allows for narrative development that extends beyond mere comedy or irony. One of the central themes of Sidetrack City is the search for enlightenment, even if it is served up in typically sardonic manner.

One of Kaz's most interesting pieces is "The Tragedy of Satan," which takes the form of a Kaz-ian folk tale and even includes tidbits from Lithuanian mythology for flavor. Upset at his one-dimensionally evil nature, the devil goes looking for love and meets his match in Virus Slunk, a femme fatale from the seamier side of Sidetrack City who, we are told, is "infested with every malignant idea ever invented." The devil tries to woo Slunk by offering her riches but she rejects both the devil and God. When she's killed the devil thinks that he has her, but alas, she ends up in Purgatory; it seems that bad as she was, she never fully accepted him. Dubious theology, perhaps, but a nice little fable and Kaz's depiction of the weird landscape of Hell--with its truckloads of bones, bizarre geological and architectural formations, and even more bizarre denizens--is extremely inventive.

The title piece Sidetrack City is also an odyssey of enlightenment. Its hero, Bizmark, tries to find the source of the "city twisters" that periodically rip through town. At the same time he must deal with a "floating pig head named Charlie" who goads him into homicidal actions. The story's most interesting passages occur when Bismark takes a ride on the "Devil's Trolley." He's seen the tracks all of his life but never the actual trolley because he's "never been this irrational before." With skeletons as passengers and the devil at the throttle, it looks like a folk art decoration straight out of a Mexican "Day of the Dead" celebration. The journey is described in verse, and as it proceeds and "reality grows in discord" Kaz's imagination runs riot. Each panel is a dark fantasy landscape erupting with a profusion of vivid, hallucinogenic imagery. Indeed some of Kaz's most beautiful, mysterious and powerful work comes when he is illustrating his own poems or ditties or in the fantastic, full-page drawings that dot the pages of both Sidetrack City and Buzzbomb, and in these passages attains a real level of visual poetry.

Of course many of the pieces in Sidetrack City are as nihilistic as those of Underworld, even if the artwork is more expansive. There is also an unusual one-page strip relating how the young Kaz, still in high school, made a clay figurine of punk rocker Richard Hell, which he then presented to him backstage at CBGB club. It is an interesting strip, but it also illustrates the limitations of Kaz's style when he tries to work with more realistic subject matter. It raises the intriguing question or how an artist who uses such a highly stylized, almost abstract type of drawing can evolve and develop his narratives in the future. It should be interesting to see what direction Kaz takes in meeting this challenge.