Mary Fleener, An Underground Comix Pioneer

Mary is an alternative underground comix artist, writer, and musician from Los Angeles. She quit art school citing differences and became a rock singer as well as an artist. She started self - publishing her own mini comix in the 1980s, with her first official work “Hoodoo”(1988), a comic about Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. 

She also created semi-autobiographical comix called “Slutburger Stories”(1996), a series that was first published by Rip Off Press and later by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Her style is often described as derived from cubism and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, however she was most influenced by Egyptian Hieroglyphs. She showcases fractured and distorted faces, reflecting the drugged up and duplicitous people that she writes about. Her cartoons caricature the social distortion of the 70s and 80s, an authentic guide to an indescribably peculiar era. These cartoons are also charming, reflecting her open-minded personality. 

These colorful characters play in rock bands, surf, go to college, and participate in the free drugs and love mentality of the era. Her stories are narrated in first-person dialogue, providing us a window into how she views the world at the time.