Mike Kuchar: Veteran Of The Underground Movements

As a young boy in the 1950’s, I read and looked at Science Fiction and Horror comic books and went to movie theaters, which in those days played two movies; the “A” picture (big budget), and the “B” picture (small budget).
I enjoyed the painted posters advertising the movies outside of the theaters, depicting the sensational events in vivid color that will go on inside the theater.

I seldom went to museums where I would have to stand in rooms where the pictures on the walls had no “rocket ships” painted on them, or prehistoric reptiles stepping on cities while being blasted by atomic ray guns. Instead, I preferred to sit in dark movie theaters illuminated by spooks on the big screen, or sit by the open window with a comic book that had on its cover a ying saucer invasion. These were visual stimulants for me, they made me want to draw and make movies.

High Adventure! ©Mike Kuchar

The reason was simple, comic books are “storyboards” and Hollywood movies are “storyboarded”!
… Then, when I turned twelve years old, my mother bought me an 8mm movie camera and I began making my own movies using friends as actors. I still do this today at the age of seventy-five.
Moving forward to the 1960’s when I was in my twenties, painters, sculptors, and poets decided to try using a 16mm movie camera to express their visual and audio ideas, and so; the “underground” film movement happened. Movies were now being made in private bedrooms and on filthy streets and alleys with real people who don’t act. These low budget movies were free from corporate and conventional restraints.
The movie camera was now the “tool” for an artist’s vision, it was something to experiment with! My own work with film was included in this movement happening in New York City.
In 1970, I moved to California to be with my brother, George, who was teaching filmmaking classes at the San Francisco Art Institute. There, on the West Coast, another movement had started: “underground comics”.

Mythology ©Mike Kuchar

It too was an alternative outlet for an artist’s “self expression”.
I got to design and illustrate a trail blazing comic book titled Gay Heartthrobs, which had me put down the movie camera and pick up a pen and brush to illustrate homoerotic stories. I gave those drawings an attitude that was missing in other, sex-oriented publications, that being a “universal friendliness”, an “escapism” which was important. In my work, I attempted to depict an innocence with primal urges.
It is an odd coincidence that these “underground” movements in the arts happened and I was swept up into that cultural current, first on the East Coast with film, and later on the West Coast with drawings.
I knew Andy Warhol, R. Crumb, and Allen Ginsberg. Today, when I am not inspired by a handsome face or body, or picturesque place, I put down my camera and pick up a brush to paint naked gods on flowery landscapes, populated by lizards and pirate ships.