Michael McMillan, Terminal Exposure: Comics, Sculpture, and Risky Behavior. New York: New York Review Comics, 2025. 231pp, $39.95.
Review by Paul Buhle
ONTEMPORARY CRITICS’ RECOGNITON of “Outsider Art” can be said to have come early to its precursor, Underground Comix of the late 1960s and 1970s. “Recognition,” that is, in the best way: publication—albeit with a real if fleeting audience—far from any recognized, official art scene. Thus artist/nonartist Michael McMillan. A leftover from those days and now past 90, he fairly inhabits this book of his past drawings and sculptures, with a standout introduction by Crumb biographer Dan Nadel and supportive blurbs from the likes of Gary Panter and Bill Griffith.
Nadel takes less than four pages to give us the heart of the McMillan saga, among the more unusual in the always-unusual “comix” world. Son of a railroad office worker and an art teacher, the young artist grew up mostly in Fresno, home of an agricultural empire with the Sierra Nevada nearby. An insular kid drawn to fantasy popular culture, building model airplanes and railroads, also a high school newspaper cartoonist interested in abstract art, he attended the USC School of Architecture just before he found himself drafted into the peacetime Army.
Trying to avoid “predictable boredom.”
Moving to San Francisco after his two-year hitch, McMillan landed, in the late 1950s, in US version of Bohemia. Over the next decade, he worked at various jobs, took art and sculpture classes at San Francisco State and felt himself inspired or confirmed in his inclinations by a 1969 exhibit of the Hairy Who. Would-be successors to Surrealism but conspicuously without the label, the group of Chicago artists lasted only 1966-69, with a couple of group showings in Chicago and one (the one that McMillan saw) in San Francisco. Drawing heavily upon vernacular street visuals, sharing the psychedelic colors, anti-racism and anti-war politics of the contemporary scene, they offered ambiguous but transgressive symbols of a radically shifting public culture. Most of all, arguably, they challenged the contemporary New York art scene. Thereby, they moved close to the sensibilities of the emerging Underground Comics, but from another direction.
McMillan actively sought out comix publisher Don Donahue, living nearby in the city’s Mission District, and arranged publication of a one-shot comic of his own, the instantly obscure Terminal Comix. Recognized and greatly admired among these artists a half generation younger than himself, he remained nevertheless an outsider.
Oddly, the public history of the artist almost ends here, in the 1970s. A handful of comix (after 1980, restyled “alternative comics”) anthologies, including Robert Crumb’s Weirdo magazine, took him up, usually for one-shot contributions. He earned a quiet reputation among the artist-editors as someone drawing upon multiple vernacular visual sources, breaking down the barriers between experimental art and comic styles. He made no effort at further outreach, giving himself over to the quiet life of his own sculptures, paintings and prints on his home press. He did it all because he enjoyed the work for its own sake, living cheap and taking little commercial jobs along the way. According to the more notable artists, this self-chosen insularity demonstrated his artistic purity: he had nothing to gain and no interest in gaining it.
The easiest part of Terminal Exposure to describe is naturally the autobiographical five comic pages. Boyhood fascinations with machines, boyish fantasies of heros and adventures followed by fantasies about girls at his school, and above all, riffs on hiking seem to flow forward, however weirdly drawn and narrated. One might say that all of this constituted, already, a way of being alone, learning to be alone, and satisfying himself with that choice.
More pure fantasy dominates the book otherwise. The strips that appeared in the comics anthologies and others very much like them would be the most narrative, a few pages at a time. His characters change, sometimes satirical superheroes or random oddballs. The setting is forever abstract, more than unreal and often humorous but never in the predictable fashion of funnypaper gag strips.
Reflecting his own life or rather his view of his life, these dream-like sagas often take place amid wide horizons, even amid some mild eroticism and occasional nudity. Returning to the fantasy films and pulp literature of his young years, his characters appear in jungles or the high seas. More than occasionally—this is often theorized as the real source of Wonder Woman’s popularity—a miraculous female overwhelms the ostensibly innocent but definitely gratified male, ignorant in the mysteries of biological appeal and incapable of seduction.
Most remarkably, McMillan is also capable of straight-forward memory art, like his experience in climbing mountains of the West, in the half century from 1951 onward. Of his four drawn and otherwise unpublished volumes of illustrated stories, we get two pages of exertion and also escape—from an entangling relationship. This is an artist who, we learn repeatedly and in different circumstances, made the choice to escape relationships in order to be on his own.
The assorted sculptures in the book mean less to this reviewer. They certainly resemble the products of surrealist experimentation with mixed materials and playful human/non-human depictions. McMillan, even more than the collective Hairy Who, makes no editorial, political or any other statement about his his art. It Is.
Trying to reach those “primeval forces.”
The best or easiest to see McMillan’s work is as an extension of comic art forms appropriate to the age of comic/art experimentation, an age that began in the 1960s and has, in multiple ways, continued as fixed forms break down at all levels. By contrast to, say, Pop Art’s stylizing familiar and notably banal comic strip protagonists and remaking them into studio art, McMillan goes the other direction. They escape Pop Art by posing the issues differently.
Or is this somehow familiar, after all? The last several years have seen a burst of renewed Surrealist activity in its own name, exhibits in dozens of locations celebrating the centenary of Surrealism’s 1924 birth but also a global art-show interest and an accompanying scholarly surge. Who would have guessed that the younger generation of radicalized graduate students and an evidently wider milieu would re-establish actual surrealist groups in familiar (Prague) and unfamiliar (Helsinki or Sao Paulo) locations, create the Journal of Surrealist Studies or its sponsoring International Society of Surrealist Studies? Why, in a world damaged almost beyond repair, would the long-gone dreams of the 1920s Parisians now find watchers, listeners and zealous disciples?
Your reviewer, publisher of two journals (1967-91) with several special issues organized by the Chicago Surrealists (and mainly Franklin Rosemont) has a special stake in these questions, without any firm conclusions. McMillan, unpublished and unknown, might easily have been a “discovery” of surrealist researchers rather than the underground comix circles. Instead, he may offer a kind of bridge between several worlds, not by dint of any political commitment or any commitment, except to his own imagination and skills.
Whatever the analysis, Terminal Exposure’s content, that is to say also the artist’s work as a whole, can now be said to have been exposed to public examination. Also the artist himself? Probably not, because without intending to do, Michael McMillan remains a mystery within his work. Or he has done so by intent, the very reason he stopped drawing for publication just as soon as editors stopped asking?
