Underground Comix: The History of Fantagor

I’m gonna level with you, dark travellers – before I dug into the gritty history of Fantagor, I thought I knew underground comix. I’d read my share of Zap and Weirdo, so I figured I had the scene pretty well mapped. But Richard Corben’s blood-soaked baby ‘Fantagor’? That’s a whole different beast entirely. This wasn’t your typical hippie head comic – this was Kansas farm boy meets EC Comics nightmare fuel, wrapped in technical innovation that would make most artists weep into their inkwells.

The Birth of a Midwest Nightmare

In 1970, while San Francisco’s underground scene was churning out anti-establishment screeds and psychedelic fever dreams, Richard Corben was holed up in Kansas City with a day job at an animation studio and a head full of horror. The guy was pushing thirty, no longer some twenty-something rebel, and he was about to blow his carefully saved cash on 1,500 copies of a self-published comic that nobody was asking for.

That first issue of Fantagor wasn’t born from counterculture revolution – it came from pure, obsessive love for the kind of stories that got EC Comics dragged before Congress in the ’50s. Corben wrote in his editorial that he was creating “the realm of fantasy, horror, science fiction and adventure.” No manifesto. No politics. Just a promise to tell the kind of twisted tales that mainstream comics wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

The gamble nearly bankrupted him. The printer wanted money (imagine that), forcing Corben to hawk posters just to get the damn thing printed. But what emerged from that financial crucible was 28 pages of pure, unadulterated genre storytelling that would reshape horror comics forever.

Artistically Gory

Here’s what separated Fantagor from the pack – Corben wasn’t content to just shock readers with explicit content. The man was a trained artist who’d spent years at the Kansas City Art Institute and nearly a decade doing commercial animation. While other underground artists were deliberately crude, embracing a punk aesthetic, Corben was creating fully-realized worlds with weight and texture that felt uncomfortably real.

Critics loved to rag on his character designs – men that looked like “sacks filled with potatoes” and women with “ridiculously huge” proportions. But those same critics couldn’t deny the revolutionary quality of his shading and texture work. This wasn’t flat cartoon art; Corben was creating three-dimensional nightmares that crawled off the page.

The real game-changer came with issue #3 in 1972. Full color. In underground comix. Let that sink in. While most of the scene was content with black and white (cheaper to print, easier to distribute), Corben and Last Gasp went all-in with color printing. And they used it like a weapon – especially red. Lots and lots of red.

The Innovation Nobody Talks About

Here’s where things get technical, but stay with me because this is crucial. Corben couldn’t afford mechanical color separations – the standard method for color comics. So what does this madman do? He invents his own technique, building up colors on four acetate overlays. The result had what critics called “uncanny, almost photographic immediacy.”

By all accounts, original Fantagor pages display staggering craftsmanship. Each overlay had to be perfectly registered, every color choice calculated to create depth and atmosphere. This wasn’t just coloring – it was painting with printing technology. The only comparable work in American comics at the time was Harvey Kurtzman’s “Little Annie Fanny” in Playboy, and that had Hugh Hefner’s money behind it.

The Stories That Defined Underground Horror

Let me walk you through some of the nightmare fuel that made Fantagor legendary.

“Twilight of the Dogs”: Post-Apocalyptic Body Horror

The first story in issue #1 set the tone perfectly. Aliens have enslaved humanity, reducing people to crawling on all fours like dogs. Corben’s artwork here is deliberately grimy, using zip-a-tone shading to create an oppressive atmosphere that makes your skin crawl. The nudity and violence weren’t gratuitous – they were essential to the story’s exploration of dehumanization. This wasn’t shock for shock’s sake; it was existential horror wearing a sci-fi mask.

“Razar the Unhero”: Conan’s Idiot Cousin

If “Twilight of the Dogs” was the horror, Razar was the twisted comedy. Co-created with Starr Armitage (though Corben admitted to completely rewriting it), Razar was everything Conan wasn’t – cowardly, opportunistic, and hilariously incompetent. In his debut, he tries to kidnap someone and ends up captured by a voluptuous bandit queen planning to sacrifice him.

When Corben redesigned the character for issue #5 in 1983, he cranked the grotesque dial to eleven. The musculature became a parody of itself, the facial expressions more exaggerated. It was sword-and-sorcery by way of Mad Magazine, if Mad had an R-rating.

“Kittens for Christian”: The One That Haunts Me

Jan Strnad’s script for this one still gives me nightmares. Post-apocalyptic world, radiation-mutated animals growing to monstrous size, and a scarred survivor named Christian trying to protect kittens from cannibalistic humans. The twist? Those cute kittens are evolving into apex predators.

The opening sequence – a man attacked by mutant cats – became infamous in underground circles. Corben’s use of sickly greens and blood reds through his acetate technique created colors that looked diseased. This story influenced everything from Mad Max to modern post-apocalyptic horror, and once you’ve read it, you can’t unsee its DNA in later works.

The Collaborators Who Shaped the Vision

Fantagor wasn’t a one-man show, despite Corben’s dominance. The collaboration roster reads like a who’s who of underground talent.

Jan Strnad emerged as Corben’s most important creative partner, understanding how to write for Corben’s visual style. Their partnership would extend far beyond Fantagor, but it was here they learned to mesh psychological unease with visceral imagery.

Herb Arnold provided a crucial counterpoint to Corben’s style. Where Corben’s figures oozed primal physicality, Arnold’s linework on “The Devil in the Well” evoked Edward Gorey’s delicate grotesquerie. This wasn’t just variety for variety’s sake – it established Fantagor as a showcase for different flavors of horror.

The inclusion of Vaughn Bode (yeah, the Cheech Wizard guy) for a back cover painting in issue #3 was a coup. It signaled Fantagor’s acceptance into the underground elite while bridging the gap between horror and psychedelic fantasy.

The Business of Independent Nightmares

The publishing history of Fantagor is a masterclass in underground economics. That initial self-published run in 1970 nearly killed the project before it started. Gary Arlington’s intervention – connecting Corben with Last Gasp – saved Fantagor from obscurity. The Last Gasp reprint of issue #1 in comic book format (as opposed to Corben’s original magazine size) sold significantly better, proving that format and distribution mattered as much as content.

When Corben revived Fantagor as his own imprint in 1986, he and his wife Dona took on all the headaches of independent publishing. The Fantagor Press years (1986-1994) produced ambitious work but also demonstrated the brutal economics of non-mainstream comics. Despite strong sales in Europe and Japan, they had to abandon color printing mid-series on “Son of Mutant World.”

The need to take commercial jobs to keep the lights on constantly interrupted comic production. “Richard Corben’s Art Book 1 and 2” nearly bankrupted them despite being their most expensive projects. This tension between artistic vision and economic survival runs through Fantagor’s entire history like a bloody thread.

The European Connection Nobody Expected

Here’s something that blew my mind during research – Fantagor had a bigger impact in Europe than in the States. German publishers reprinted stories in Schwermetall, French critics analyzed the Bandit Queen as feminist commentary, and Italian horror filmmakers studied Corben’s visual techniques. The European appetite for adult-oriented comics meant Fantagor found its most appreciative audience an ocean away from Kansas City.

The DNA of Modern Horror Comics

I can draw a straight line from Fantagor to half the horror comics on shelves today. Corben’s painted art style, first developed in those acetate experiments, became the industry standard for prestige horror books. His blend of realistic figure work with fantastic subject matter? That’s the template for everything from Hellboy to Saga.

More importantly, Fantagor proved horror comics could be art. Not just exploitation, not just shock value, but genuine artistic expression using genre as a vehicle. When I read modern horror comics that treat their subject matter with deadly seriousness while never forgetting to entertain, I see Fantagor’s influence.

The visual conventions Corben established – using color to create mood, combining humor with genuine terror, treating monster design as sculpture – these became the building blocks of sophisticated horror comics. Every time an artist paints a horror comic instead of drawing it, they’re following trails Corben blazed with those acetate overlays.

Coda: May Fantagor Never be Forgotten

In an era where horror comics are big business and painted artwork is commonplace, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary Fantagor was. This wasn’t just another underground comic riding the counterculture wave – it was a technical and artistic leap forward disguised as genre entertainment.

Corben and his collaborators treated their readers like adults who could appreciate both technical mastery and complex storytelling. They proved that underground comix could be more than political statements or shock tactics – they could be vehicles for genuine artistic innovation.

When I hold an issue Fantagor in my hands, I’m not just looking at a tattered old comic (my copies have seen some serious action). I’m seeing a manifesto written in blood and acetate, declaring that horror deserves the same artistic respect as any other genre.

That’s the real legacy of Fantagor – not just the stories it told or the techniques it pioneered, but the permission it gave future creators to take horror seriously. Every sophisticated horror comic that followed, from Swamp Thing to The Walking Dead, owes a debt to that Kansas City farm boy who risked everything to publish his nightmares.

And that, fellow horror hounds, is how an underground comic from the American heartland changed everything.