Comics, British comic art maven Paul Gravett reminds us, have been historically related to childhood, as ‘the first stories and artwork we are able to choose for ourselves’. The giant burst of comic art creativity arrived with social protest and psychedelic drugs a half-century ago, almost exclusively for a youth culture in rebellion. In recent times, even after trade publishers and a growing number of university publishers have jumped onto the bandwagon, seeking trade sales and course assignments, there remains something less than respectable about comic art.

If we do not let ourselves be distracted by comic conventions jam-packed with people in superhero costumes, if we do not think too hard about the occasional appearance of comic art in high-toned galleries suggesting an appropriate canon for this presumably new ‘outsider’ discovery,  we may get a fix on the more intriguing developments in this odd but steadily growing genre.

Today, young or youngish artists, many them author-artists, are finding themselves just as the prime re-inventors of the genre in the 1970s age out or pass away. Unlike the original ‘funny pages’ artists of over a century ago who toiled in the hands of big papers or syndicates and who could not own their own creations, today’s artists own the copyrights, live as badly as most artists in the past, and pursue careers or semi-careers, drawing on weekends away from paying work.

That they can use multiple technologies to draw and can draw just as readily for non-print as print media seems to be less important than the familiar realities of the artist in the money-society. What may be more remarkable is their choice of artistic and narrative styles: the doors are wide open and likely to stay wide open.

Nate Powell, the artist of Save It For Later: Promises, Parenthood and the Urgency of Protest, is at the apex of the non-fiction comic artists. He managed this by drawing March, a three-volume epic saga on the heroic civil rights protester, later Congressman John Lewis. March, notably published by a smallish firm with no history of protest comics, has won prize after prize, been assigned to large numbers of college students, and arguably opened up a recognition of comics’ political importance.

Unsurprisingly, Powell is the first comic artist to win a National Book Award. He is also clear on his politics. The final regular page of Save It for Later has a photo of himself  with his daughter in deep Middle American Bloomington, Indiana. His daughter holds up a sign that reads CLOSE THE CAMPS.

Save It For Later is superficially as different from its precursor as a comic could be. March was starkly realistic. This time, a worried dad’s daughter is rendered a comic-art canine along with a wife and a younger, not so often seen littler sister (also doggish). The rest of the actors are drawn human, and so creatively comic-like that close readers will readily see influences of earlier comic artists. We could call the result a fascinating dive into the natural anthropomorphism of childhood innocence and a father’s struggles to explain the world. The critical character here was four years old on the night of Trump’s 2016 election victory that, dad had promised her, could not possibly happen. He observes her with a father’s normal anxiety redoubled and redoubled by his own fears. What kind of society is this?

The chapters parse a father’s uneasiness. To take one key example, early on: the  2016 election is over, a few hundred protesters cry out their anguish in his city’s streets, and more than a few Confederate flags also appear. No imaginative leap is needed in real life Indiana, where the Ku Klux Klan took over the state legislature in the 1920s and has never really vanished. In January 2017, Mom leaves to join the Women’s March at the National Mall, while dad watches while the kids sit before the TV,  permitted for a first time to a watch regular broadcast show. Closer to the present, the weeks and months pass and as Powell notes dolefully, the Trump regime sets itself to dismantle the infrastructure of a somewhat functional society.

The aching need to do something and also to explain that something to a growing child fills many of the pages that follow. Save It For Later may be best read as a series of visual essays, because the artist has no wish to be particularly chronological. Once we find him at a 2011 ComiCon, already too old for the crowd and embarrassed at his own feelings of condescension. Or earlier in his life, in the middle of the Reagan years,  he recalls traveling with his liberal parents through the South, feeling the hate in an Alabama city square with Klansmen on parade.

Mainly, he wrestles with vexing problems: for instance, how to explain to his daughter that everyone should be free to express themselves, but some things, hateful things, are nevertheless ‘bad’, and cannot be accepted. Powell also turns directly to the reader in critical moments, seeking to tell us that even a four year old can readily understand the idea of fairness, and attach it to the sets of values she will carry forward. All the while, the artist is thinking to himself, wondering if he interprets and articulates rightly the things that she needs to know in this scary world, problems not going away in her future.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, another warning about the rise of the Right, is an avowedly queer romp through the illusions of the liberal, prosperous and substantially mythical ‘Portlandia’, aka Portland, Oregon. The debut work of Mannie Murphy, drawn in a faintly yellow wash against the background of lined school paper,  possesses the intensity of personal experience that has made underground comix and their successors, at their best, altogether worthy.

Murphy’s own blue collar family made it to Oregon, like so many others over the generations, as the end of the line, geographically and economically.  She grew up, she tells us, in the poor and largely minority section of Portland, going to a more or less hippie high school based on the Summerhill model of openness, but also inhabited, in an adjoining park, by youthful druggies who have sex and sell sex. Some of these druggies gravitate naturally to ‘Vaseline Alley’, the nightclub district of the city where wealthy men prowl for action.

One main thread of the comic is developed brilliantly around the artist’s own earlier fascinations. River Phoenix, the preternaturally beautiful James Dean-like creature seen in a series of films of from the 1980s until his death of a heroin overdose in 2003 is captured most perfectly, she says, as ‘the queer narcoleptic street hustler Mike in My Own Private Idaho.’ The real-life River Phoenix, having grown up in an extended family cult, was directed in this film by a wealthy independent local filmmaker, Gus Van Zant.

The real subject is of course Portland itself, the Portland unseen in the travel adverts. To say this scene is grim would be a considerable underestimation. But the images of Matt Dillon in Portland, on the screen in Drugstore Cowboy riveted the aimless local kids, she says, better than meth or heroin.

And worse, in a larger sense. Van Zant’s film Mala Noche, which Murphy describes as ‘a queer, artsy, racist take on the lives of two seasonal residents’ from the perspective of a white, narcissistic store clerk in Portland, itself became a small-scale gay classic of hipster racism. Racist psychopaths are unfortunately not so alien to Portland’s gritty history. Murphy takes us on a brief historical tour of nineteenth century Oregon as a ‘white paradise’, rising to statehood out of clashes with Native Americans and creating a state constitution rigidly forbidding citizenship to all nonwhites. Throw into this mix ‘Port-land’, the literal nineteenth-century port town, where poor young men were abundant, and dockside landlord-pimps made fortunes.

The arrival of a giant Kaiser shipbuilding plant in the 1940s drew thousands of workers to mostly poor housing, especially bad for ethnic minorities. A locally famous flood worsened the housing situation of the impoverished. But for the city and for the best paid workers, industry much aided by the military-industrial complex, along with timber production in the state, brought an uneven prosperity. With the emergence of high tech, a modern Portland culture began to take shape, and, eventually, trendy coffee shops arrived by the dozens, inhabited by the bored and restless, but not the impoverished.

Oregon has long been contested between Left and Right, including an often invisible far right. Close to Idaho, home of the most intense white nationalist impulses toward secession from the US proper, it has its own spillover. At the end of the 1980s, when Reaganism summoned further Right activists into the spotlight, Portland served as location of a famous trial of neo-Nazi leader Tom Metzger and his son John, perverse media celebrities thanks to invitations from Oprah and Geraldo (where, with their followers in the studio audience, the Metzgers staged a riot, successfully throwing a chair at the host’s face).

The pair of Metzgers, convicted of ‘vicarious liability’ in the brutal beating death of an Ethiopian-American political activist, made the most of his day in a Portland court. Back then, father and son were the idols of local skinheads. These days, thirty years later, the noxious and violent racism is very much back, thanks to Trumpism and the right-wing blogosphere. Taken altogether, this is the saga of the West unseen in depictions of Portland or Seattle as model cities of the new century and new economy, and this is the saga that the artist wishes to make personal and unforgettable.

The blatant racism and the sheer viciousness of the Portland police, not much changed from decades ago, occupies some of the last, most vivid pages here. Their protection from legal sanction in even in the most egregious cases is historical and seems to be largely unchanged. The art and accompanying text bristles with the outrage of a home-towner who has seen it all and participated in the demonstrations. But she also offers a personal message that brings us back to Save It For Later: ‘kids need adults they can trust.’ I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a testament of our times and cannot be understood otherwise.