Watching the movie "Crumb" - made in the 1990s about Robert Crumb. When I was a kid our family friend had bought us the album Cheap Thrills.
This was I think my first encounter with Robert Crumb (he did the artwork).
I think I was about 13 when my dad got this book, A History of Underground Comics. I think it had something to do with his being an English professor. Maybe the author was in the department. Of course I can find the cover of it in ten seconds on the internet.
I was also checking out the National Lampoon, which I think I had encountered when I was about 10. They had the Radio Hour program on radio.
I don't think I had any idea that some people might have thought this was totally inappropriate for a kid my age. I loved all this stuff. It was so much more real than the stuff in school.
My friends were fascinated. There were all kinds of taboos broken in that book, (the History) - gay sex, the pope masturbating, things that were not readily available to suburban 13 year olds in 1974 or so. I don't think I even looked
at the stuff _about_ the comics, just the excerpts of the comics themselves. I guess if I had money and freedom I could have bought the actual comics, but I didn't even imagine that.
Nowadays I subscribe to a Robert Crumb group on Facebook. It feeds me a lot of Crumb stuff. Recently there was something he did in like 2022, about his current life in France.
There's also Harvey Pekar and American Splendor.
I discovered it in a bookstore I was working in in 1986. I think the Crumb style really caught my eye. Pekar is another of the heroes in my pantheon.