Critical perspectives on mainstream, groundlevel, and alternative comics in The Comics Journal, 1977 to 1996 Doug Singsen* Art Department, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Milwaukee, USA (Received 20 June 2016; accepted 23 September 2016) The Comics Journal, the premiere venue for comics criticism in the United States since its inception in 1977, built its reputation on its harsh criticism of mainstream comics and its championing of alternative comics, but the Journal did not arrive fully at this position for two decades. During this time its critical perspective was complex and contradictory, with the Journal continuing to hold out hope for the eventual improve- ment of superhero comics. However, the Journal focused most of its critical energies on what were known at the time as groundlevel comics, small, independently pub- lished comics that utilised the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror and super- heroes. The Journal largely ignored alternative comics until the late 1980s, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Journal fully embraced them as the driving force for the evolution and improvement of American comics. Keywords: The Comics Journal; mainstream; groundlevel; alternative; criticism In the past few decades, the historiography of criticism has become an important part of humanities scholarship, providing insight into the rhetorical context underlying artistic produc- tion, yet this topic has so far received little if any attention in the burgeoning field of comics studies. The logical place to begin the study of American comics criticism is with The Comics Journal, indubitably the pre-eminent venue for comics criticism in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century and still one of the major critical venues in the early twenty-first century. This article charts the major developments in the Journal’ s critical attitude towards mainstream, groundlevel and alternative comics in the magazine’ s first two decades, during which time these terms were key concepts in the magazine’ s critical discourse. These devel- opments are tracked using both qualitative and quantitative analysis, which function as complements to one another. This analysis is intended to establish these key features of the Journal’ s critical history and to lay the groundwork for future studies of this topic. The Comics Journal is frequently described as the leading critical champion of alter- native comics and a fierce critic of mainstream comics. Paul Lopes heralded it as ‘[t]he main fanzine for alternative comics fans’ and ‘a boisterous advocate of the alternative comics movement’ that ‘positioned itself as the “art” magazine of comic books with “literary” interviews, criticism, and reviews’ (Lopes 2009, 105). The magazine’ s identification with alternative comics is further strengthened by the fact that its parent company, Fantagraphics, has been the leading publisher of alternative comics in the United States since the mid- 1980s. However, the Journal’ s history is considerably more complicated and interesting than this assessment would indicate. The writer who has come closest to acknowledging the full complexity of the Journal’ s history is Matthew Pustz, who noted that: *Email:singsen@uwp.edu Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2017 Vol. 8, No. 2, 156–172, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1247372 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group