By the late 1970's most of the comic titles that we today consider the bronze age classics were publishing on a monthly basis, loaded down with advertisements and circulating in the millions. For most of the 60's and all of the 70's there was a growing underground comics scene that made its bread and butter selling raunchy counter-culture books to hip adults. They quickly became characterized by an almost religious devotion to depicting sex, violence, drug use and anti-establishment sentiment. By the time the Love Generation grew out of even these blue themes, the market for comics about things other than super heroes expanded to favor a much less overtly political edge. From the passe ashes of the underground scene, alternative comics were born.

The people who pioneered alternative comics were participants in the last days of the underground movement. Names like Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes and Robert Crumb were often attached to the hard-edged punk art of the comics underground, but they were also much more artistically minded than their indulgence-obsessed peers.

By 1980, Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly laid the groundwork for the high road of alternative comics for the next decade and a half, producing the international anthology RAW. For eleven years and as many issues, RAW featured what we become the most notable creators of fine art comics in the world. Artists from every continent on Earth except for Antarctica found their work in print with Spiegelman and Mouly's ambitious home-based publishing outfit. Spiegelman even garnered himself a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, first featured in full in RAW after some early prints in another publication a decade prior.

RAW was very self-conscious of the public perception of comic books. It did everything it could to separate itself from the kid-centered, so-called "low art" of comics by referring to itself as a "graphix magazine". In contrast, Robert Crumb's Weirdo anthology took the opposite tack. It sought to make itself as juvenile and offensive as possible, echoing the punk aesthetic that would be a major part of 20th century American folk art until late in the 1990's. Weirdo was an inversion of the elite artists who aspired to the global scale of RAW. Its contributors became just as exclusive and revered as the artistes on the opposite end of the spectrum, including the likes of Harvey Pekar and Terry Zwigoff.

By the mid 80's, alternative comics were a full-on industry. Incredibly popular franchises like The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got their start as self-published projects by alternative artists and big-name labels like Dark Horse grew out of the movement as well.

The legacy of alternative comics has arguably been more influential in the past two decades than the mainstream super hero books that defined American comics since the 1930's. Considerably successful titles like Neil Gaiman's Sandman series and Jhonen Vasquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac all come from the alternative tradition, while major super hero labels like Marvel have employed hip writing icons like Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith to give old franchises a new, edgier spin. Without the artistic ambitions of the post-underground alternative anthologies, comics may not even be a relevant medium today.