Artist Biography & Facts

Jay Lynch

"Jay Lynch, Underground Comics Creator, Dies at 72,"
 Obituary by Richard Sandomir, March 12, 2017, Art & Design section, The New York Times.

Jay Lynch, an artist, writer and satirist who was a central figure in the underground comics revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, died on March 5 at his home in Candor, N.Y. He was 72.

His cousin Valerie Snowden said the cause was lung cancer.

Mr. Lynch, who had a wry, deadpan sense of humor, held strong views about the importance of underground comics, which differentiated themselves from the mainstream through raunchy and grotesque depictions of sex, drugs and violence.

“Underground comix were the most important art movement of the 20th century,” he wrote, using the “comics” spelling preferred by underground cartoonists, in the introduction to Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into Comix (2009), by Denis Kitchen and James Danky.

“Copies of many of the early books sell to collectors for many thousands of dollars,” he continued. “It’s all quite ironic: Rebellious cartoonists mocking consumer culture were inadvertently producing collectible artifacts for the same consumer culture 40 years down the road.”

Mr. Lynch played several roles in the underground comics world. Using a retro style with a tight crosshatching technique, he created comics like “Nard n’ Pat,” about a conservative man who bickers with a hip cat.

“It was sweetly rooted in the past,” the cartoonist Art Spiegelman said in an interview.

“Two characters who oddly refracted the themes of old comic strips, but now they surrealistically dealt with sex, drugs and cheap thrills.”

Mr. Lynch founded Bijou Funnies with his fellow cartoonist Skip Williamson to publish his work and that of other artists, and acted as a publicist for the loosely defined industry.

“He put people together,” said Patrick Rosenkranz, who is writing a biography of Mr. Lynch. “He publicized what was going on. In the back of Bijou, he had small free ads for other underground comics. He was a crossroads figure.”

But his most significant role might have been as an archivist of underground comics history. He kept nearly everything from his teenage years on: letters, original art, comics, fan magazines, merchandise and publicity campaigns. He donated it all to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University.

“We have letters between 14-year-old Art Spiegelman and 17-year-old Jay talking about their favorite EC Comics and Mad magazines — and about reading the first issue of Spider-Man,” said Caitlin McGurk, the museum’s associate curator.

Mr. Spiegelman recalled that about a year ago he asked Mr. Lynch to let him see some of their old letters.

“So he sent me a bulging three-inch-thick binder with a Xerox of every letter he received from 1961 to 1963,” he said. “He kept all this history so well organized, but if you had taken a camera pan of the rest of his daily life, it would have been the opposite.”

Mr. Lynch’s early life was a bit unconventional. Jay Patrick Lynch was born in Orange, N.J., on Jan. 7, 1945, and grew up in Belmar. His father, William, and his mother, the former Alice Mangan, divorced when he was young, and he was raised in his grandmother’s house, surrounded by aunts, uncles, his cousin Ms. Snowden and his grandfather.

At age 11, he moved with his family to Miami, where he focused on his artwork, painting murals for neighbors’ homes and stage sets for school productions. He later moved to Chicago, where he attended the Art Institute.

The education that pointed him to his future in underground comics was provided by Mad magazine, whose editorial mastermind was Harvey Kurtzman, and The Realist, a satirical political journal founded by Paul Krassner in 1958.

“After reading my first issue of The Realist, I was in a daze which almost bordered on frenzied religious ecstasy,” Mr. Lynch was quoted as saying in Mr. Rosenkranz’s book Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution (2008). “Here was a magazine that pointed out, through satire, the hypocrisies in the society that nobody else dared even speak of, let alone print discussions of.”

His path to underground comics took him through fanzines, college humor magazines and alternative newspapers. He contributed to Wild, Cracked, Whack and Sick magazines.

He and Mr. Williamson began a humor and comics magazine, Chicago Mirror, which they turned into Bijou Funnies, after the transformational publication of Robert Crumb’s Zap No. 1 in 1968, which featured the big-footed, long-bearded, guru-like Mr. Natural.

Mr. Lynch’s comics never reached as broad an audience as some of his more famous brethren’s. Mr. Rosenkranz suggested that this might have been because he did not use sex as much in his work as others and was not part of the so-called “slash and drip” school of underground cartoonists.

“He was more interested in intellectual ideas,” he said.

Some of Mr. Lynch’s work reached the mainstream — through Playboy in the 1980s, but more regularly through Topps, the trading card company, which provided an income for artists like Mr. Spiegelman and Mr. Lynch. “They were our Medicis,” Mr. Spiegelman said.

Over a few decades, Mr. Lynch illustrated Bazooka Joe comics; Garbage Pail Kids, which began as a satire of Cabbage Patch Kids; and Wacky Packages, which parodied consumer culture. He recalled that he was told which food conglomerates not to mock, but with a list of products that he could parody, “I would go to the supermarket and buy those products.”

Ira Friedman, a Topps vice president, said in an interview, “Jay was at the epicenter of Wacky Packages.”

He also branched into children’s books, including a collaboration with Frank Cammuso on Otto’s Orange Day (2013) and Otto’s Backwards Day”(2013).

Mr. Lynch was divorced twice and had no children.

When he resurrected “Nard n’ Pat” for the cover of Mineshaft magazine in 2015, he seemed to split his life into his two creations. He drew Nard busily typing and telling Pat: “And thus, kitty-kat, while you draw cartoons to cleverly illustrate mankind’s folly, I textually chronicle my astute observations on life’s passing parade. Alas! What fools these mortals be!”

Filling in a comics panel at a drawing table, Pat says: “You said it, Boss! Fun, fun, fun, ’til Daddy takes the T-square away.”

Jay Lynch was born in Orange, New Jersey on July 7, 1945.  At age 17 Lynch (aka Jayzey Lynch) moved to Chicago.  His comic strip Phoebe and the Pigeon People ran in the Chicago Reader through the 1970s and 1980s. 

During the 1990s he began writing for Mad magazine.

Edan Hughes, author of the book "Artists in California, 1786-1940"


Nearly 20,000 biographies can be found in Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes and is available for sale ($150). For a full book description and order information please click here.