Swollen breasts, gaping cunts, and cocks shooting off semen inside swelling liberated wombs may be the height of vulgarity to some, but it’s Nancy Burton’s stippling that makes that fine word – vulgar – spring into my mind first at the sight of her art. That crude, disorganized, precise pressing down of ink onto paper in little dots, spread across the page to cast shadows, texture, across her images like a trail of stubble, like dust and cobwebs, like acne, like pubic hair. It’s laborious work to cover a page with those little clumsy pockmarks. Have you ever sat down to do this yourself?
Hurricane Nancy is a new retrospective of Burton’s visionary art from FU Press edited by Alex Dueben. The book introduces us to two eras of Burton’s artwork – her comix from 1965-1971, and her return to illustration from 2010 to present. Dueben’s illuminating interview with Burton reveals the cause of this great lacunae – Burton quit making art in despair at an extreme low point of her life, only to return to her craft during treatment for breast cancer. It’s a wonderful career-spanning interview, delightfully candid and often harrowing.
The first era of Nancy Burton’s art is as compulsive and dense as her stippling, a language of its own. She is a true artist of the '60s underground, obsessively creative in that boundless way that tends to be mistaken for a lack of skill. Her subjects are psychedelic and sexual, yonic trips taken by easygoing, naked women drifting from city streets into fungal paradises of the mind and nature, crashing cartoon ocean waves and beaming sunrises. An elusive icon of the wimmen’s underground with just a few credits to her name, this hurricane blew across the pages of alternative papers and tore through the middle of Trina Robbins’ feminist comix classic It Ain’t Me Babe Comix, where Burton’s art proudly occupied, as she says in her interview with Dueben, “the centerfold.” Amid crisp reproductions of her published works, scans of unfinished and private pieces peer out, yellowed and torn, speckled with whiteout and pulp, the full extent of her ferocious creativity erupting out of these new inclusions.
Burton’s career in comix, and this collection, begins with the underground strip Gentles Tripout, a heady variation on an adventure serial that feels like the work of an artist making an educated guess at what underground cartooning could be. Her line is sparser than it would later get, almost Peellaertesque, but already deeply experimental, the tarot-inspired fantastic voyage resembling a narrative rapidly turning incoherent as Burton’s focus goes to crafting pleasing patterns and elusive turns of phrase. It’s not a meaningless work, nor an unintentional or thwarted work, but a story best felt as the energy of its own creation. In her second strip, Busy Boxes, Burton truly finds her groove, thanks to its Sunday page-style scale and the introduction of her cartoon muse “The Chub”, a busty, clumsy girl with flowing mermaid hair whose clothes casually slip from her body as she gleefully stumbles across the page, her eyes rolling back happily while grasping hands climb out from nowhere to enter her vagina.
Henceforth, Burton becomes the artist known to readers as Hurricane Nancy, her cartoons' delirious tableaus of women’s bodies, cosmic abstractions, silhouettes of cocks, animals, monsters and infinite delights. These are unmistakably drug comix, to deny their hallucinogenic quality would be outright disrespectful. But they are also body comix, overwhelmingly shuddering with the impact of female orgasm. Pregnancy and childbirth eventually enter this intensely corporeal work, bellies just as full as breasts. In what I consider Burton’s finest illustration from this period, which also graces the cover of this book, hands reach out of a giant woman’s massive vagina which also sports an impressive penis that one of the hands furiously gets to work pleasing. A voluptuous medusa with snakes for hair, hands for eyebrows and bullseyes for areolae, the nude, fat woman snacks on a gorgeous leg while another woman eats her gaping ass. Two more women stand at her heavy thighs as if rolling back a vaudeville curtain, and an alien wizzes by on a UFO and watches the whole scene through binoculars. She looks crazed. She looks blissful. The whole image defies description, whirls of patterns and obscenities thrilling the eye. With heads full of acid, cunts full of dicks and hands, assholes full of women’s tongues, and wombs growing children, the Nancy Burton woman is teeming with life.
The second era of Burton’s art is more careful, polished work, her line much thicker, the stippling no longer erratic but neatly arranged. Fewer nudes grace these pages, or at least, fewer cocks and cunts. Burton’s return to art, in her words, came at a time when “my attention un-fixated from my body.” Nonetheless, the body and its sensual joys of movement remains a focal point – buxom babes dance with teddy bears, bearded androgynes stand before fires and cradle the world. Religious imagery also abound: Buddhas, totems, crosses and mandalas frame semi-sequential compositions with an interpretative looseness that nonetheless carries an earnest sense of spirituality and respect, alongside circus imagery of trapeze acts, clowns, acrobats and dancing animals. Liberation, embodiment, and life itself crackles through these pictures. In their creation, Burton finds her reason to live. These are the mature works of the pleasure-hungry Hurricane Nancy, meditating on the need for art and the meaning of joy.
Hurricane Nancy is a true testament to cartooning, a look back on a body of work that dizzies the reader with its sheer creative ecstasy. I have not felt so dazzled by the obscene potential of comics art to be personal, hilarious and impossible since I first encountered the demented works of Rory Hayes. Alex Dueben deserves every accolade possible for championing a pioneer of feminist comics who could easily have been reduced to a footnote on the outskirts of the underground canon. No other comic I’ve read this year has made me want to draw comics as badly as Hurricane Nancy. These are beautiful vulgar comics, cartoons for adults ferociously mannered, filled at every corner with messy, perfect stippling.
