UNAUTHORIZED PORTRAITS.<i> By Edward Sorel</i> .<i>...

In 1924, the critic Gilbert Seldes lauded George Herriman’s daily comic strip “Krazy Kat” as “the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America today.” Three decades later, the film critic Robert Warshow, in his essay “Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham,” worried about the violence and stupidity of comic books, which he described as “crude, unimaginative, banal, vulgar, ultimately corrupting.” (Paul was Warshow’s 11-year-old son; Dr. Wertham was a crusading anti-comics psychiatrist.) Comics seem particularly good at producing both Seldes’ celebratory exuberance and Warshow’s furrowed brows.

The very sharp Edward Sorel, who draws both caricatures and strips for a variety of publications, is likely to elicit yelps of pain, rather than artistic accolades or even mere consternation, from many of his subjects. In “Unauthorized Portraits,” a sort of Sorel’s greatest hits, the artist describes his work as “deliberately hurtful.” Indeed it is, and wonderfully so: Here is Henry Kissinger as Narcissus; Bob Dole, entertaining a Grosz-like group of corporate pigs; and a befuddled Ronald Reagan responding to critics of his Big Brother tactics (“What the heck is wrong with acting like an older brother?”). And, again and again, here is Richard Nixon: as Louis XVI, as a religious penitent, as the Pieta. (Indeed, Nixon’s downfall and eventual disappearance from the political scene were not necessarily good things for Sorel. In a 1993 caricature entitled “Difficult Days Ahead,” the cartoonist, faced with President Clinton, ruefully notes, “Let’s face it . . . He’s no Nixon.”).

Jewish history, the Jewish people and Jewish culture are frequent subjects of Sorel’s, all treated with a blasphemous wit. Reprinted here is the 1995 drawing (which, apparently, only Penthouse magazine would run), in which Moses parts the Red Sea for his carping, complaining, thoroughly ungrateful people (“Some miracle! If I don’t get pneumonia, that’ll be a miracle.”). An earlier piece for Penthouse shows a smugly satisfied God congratulating himself on his clientele: “Y’can’t beat Jews and Christians when it comes to loyalty,” he notes.

“Tijuana Bibles” are not scathing or blasphemous, just cheerfully obscene. Clandestinely produced and distributed from the 1930s to the ‘50s, they depict sexual acts that cannot really be described, and use sexual slang that cannot really be printed, in a family newspaper. (As the accompanying text notes, the strips were filled with “the lingo of the crook, the prizefighter. . , the jazz musician, the traveling salesman, the cooch dancer, the starlet.”) If you like pornography, and you like comic strips, you will probably like “Tijuana Bibles,” although, as Art Spiegelman notes in his introduction, “Like the clap, these comics are better in small doses.”

The oddest--and most subversive--aspect of the “Bibles” is the fact that most of their characters are based on popular cultural figures of the period: film stars like Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, cartoon characters like Betty Boop and Donald Duck, icons like heiress Barbara Hutton and Lou Gehrig. The “Bibles” mock the Hays--and every other--code of the times, showing everyone from Nick and Nora (William Powell and Myrna Loy) to Mickey and Minnie getting it on. (As Minnie sweetly exclaims, “I’m going to go boom-boom.”) Most fascinating, and weird, are the political strips: Here is Joe Stalin, with a huge penis; there are Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers in a homosexual encounter. Even Mahatma Gandhi makes an appearance. Zowie!

Nicely, and surprisingly, the erotic pleasures depicted in the “Bibles” are equally shared by both sexes. Unlike so much of today’s porn, the “Bibles” do not eroticize, or even concern themselves with, humiliation, violence or rape (with a few rare exceptions). For the most part, all the men are can-do studs and all the women are eager sluts. In the world of the “Bibles,” men aren’t from Mars nor women from Venus; instead, everyone--from Al Capone to Greta Garbo to Dick Tracy--exists on the same lusty planet.

Lust, although perhaps of a less innocent variety, was a major theme of the underground “comix” that began emerging in the 1960s from the wild imaginations of R. Crumb and others. In “Dangerous Drawings,” Andrea Juno interviews 14 “comix and graphix artists” working today, including Spiegelman (“Maus”), Julie Doucet (“Dirty Plotte”) and Ted Rall, whose politically “hard left” strips are distributed to more than 100 newspapers by Universal Press Syndicate. “I’m proudest of being in the Des Moines Register,” Rall notes.

Juno is an often terrible, verbose interviewer, but some interesting themes do emerge: These artists, especially the women among them, are not overly interested in conventional notions of sexuality or femininity. “Well, I obviously don’t think of myself as ‘gay’--but being a queer, a deviant, a slut, a pervert has always seemed more exciting,” says G.B. Jones, creator of the Tom Girl drawings. The Japanese artist Emiko Shimoda, who, as the text notes, “drew pretty, ultra-feminine girls who stabbed, bled, urinated, insulted and smiled their way to true love”--and who is now a Queens housewife--says she “hates” sex: “It’s disgusting. . . . It feels like stupid work.”

The most valuable interviews here--precisely because they raise aesthetic and formal issues that extend beyond the psychoanalytic--are with Eli Langer and Spiegelman. In 1993, Langer, who is 29, was arrested and charged with obscenity after his first gallery exhibition opened in Toronto. The artist--some of whose drawings depict child sex--notes that, in our visually saturated society, “We read our lives through images . . . an image becomes the behavior.” But, Langer reminds us, “the physical world exists despite representation. . . . In the real world, there are victims and antagonists, but in the world of drawing, I don’t think there are.” Langer’s defenders were as clueless as his antagonists: “The media were nice to me. . . . They’re just stupid,” Langer says. “The media . . . missed the magic, the fun, the humor and the pleasure of the actual visual art.”

Conversely, Spiegelman celebrates the viscerally negative response some of his New Yorker covers (such as one showing a Hasidic man kissing a black woman) have generated. “I was . . . very pleased by it, because it showed that an image can still have power,” Spiegelman muses. Of his artistic development, he recalls: “In the early to mid-70s, I became very interested in how narrative a comic strip had to be. . . . Could one create an undertow that dismantled the narrative while appearing to deliver one? How many obstacles could you put in somebody’s path before the reader just caved in and couldn’t handle it anymore?”

Alternative comics tend to be strongly autobiographical--although, as Diane Noomin (“Twisted Sisters”) sensibly warns, “It’s not enough to vomit your life out onto the page without understanding how to shape a narrative.” Not suprisingly, the question of catharsis emerges repeatedly in “Dangerous Drawings”--and its possibility is repeatedly rejected. Spiegelman insists that art is “just something to do. Thereby you have to postpone this other thing, which might be suicide. . . . I associate ‘catharsis’ with coming or blowing your nose.”

Catharsis and resolution are not primary concerns of Richard Marschall, author of “America’s Great Comic-Strip Artists.” This handsome, lavish, very heavy tome includes the work of 16 cartoonists, from “founding father” R.F. Outcault to “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz, all of whom, it turns out, “are enshrined in the Hall of Fame by the Museum of Cartoon Art in Rye Brook, New York.” The peppy text reads much like advertising copy, replete with phrases such as “astonishing masterpieces” and “the best of the best.” However, Marschall does delineate the whole history of art, from “cave paintings” to “art for art’s sake,” in a mere two paragraphs. With pithy writing like this, who needs comics?