Intuitive, Impractical Passions

Dan Nadel on the work of legendary underground cartoonist, artist, and sculptor Michael McMillan.

By Dan NadelJuly 21, 2025

• Art & Architecture

• Comics

“MY LIFE,” Michael McMillan says, “is like geographical strata. Climbing is the base stratum. It generates my energy and defines my attitude to everything. The next stratum is craft—sculpture and printmaking. And the final stratum is drawing comics and painting.” A more Californian opening statement would be difficult to find. Michael is a westerner, born in Pasadena in 1933. He is rarely to be found east of the Mississippi, and is forever asserting the primacy of life outside, and moving up and over terrain. Art is another activity, one as intuitive as a ramble across boulders and down into a pebbly cove. It is not, he emphasizes, a job. “Mountain wandering” (as Michael calls it) and climbing, like art, necessitate problem-solving (how to get to that next point) and in return offer a reward of perspectives (look at that down there) otherwise strictly for the birds. Those views—above, around, and sideways—inspire the work in Terminal Exposure, which gathers Michael McMillan’s work as a cartoonist, a sculptor, and a writer together for the very first time.

And what a lot of work! Guided by patient and steady mind and hand, here are paintings, three-panel autofiction comics, conceptual photography, underground comics, sculpture, comics reconciling art and reality, a strip for Climbing magazine, excerpts from Michael’s climbing journals, single-panel cartoons, koan-like two-panel comics, three-panel comics about bodies moving through space, woodblock prints at the intersection of fantasy and memory, and Sunday page–style strips. Most of them have never been published because, as Michael has told me more than once in the last 20 years, he was not interested in putting his work out there. He likes the idea of making something and not gaining from it. Put Michael’s way, he likes making “useless objects.” This is an attitude specific not just to Northern California art but to a particular kind of artist quietly searching for peace on the worktable in front of him.

Michael tells us much of what we get to know about him in the stillness of his untitled autobiographical comic strip. Fittingly for a climber, one of Michael’s earliest memories is a ride with his father up in an airplane, feeling the wind and noticing the curiously small buildings down below. His approach to making comics and sculptures is one way to achieve that view. In his final autofiction strip, he writes that his stand-in “persisted in maintaining a link to objective reality.” Michael is a fantasist grounded in the real, possessed of a clean line and crisp spatial ability, so he can begin with a truth, like a runway, and take off from there, soaring into unexpected space. Everything in his thematic and visual field is experienced at angles only possible when hanging or flying or zooming or moving.

This path was gifted to Michael by his father, who was an office worker for the Santa Fe Railroad. When Michael was a boy, he and his mother, an art teacher, moved over 200 miles northeast to Fresno, California. Fresno is in the Central Valley, where the Okies came fleeing the Dust Bowl to start over in the hundreds of miles of agriculture that stretched across the region. As a boy of the 1930s and ’40s, Michael was transfixed by comics and film. In the newspapers, it was Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Buck Rogers, and Terry and the Pirates. On the newsstand it was Superman, Batman, and Detective Comics. James Whale’s Frankenstein films “traumatized” young Michael, though those visions were leavened by endless B-movie double features experienced alone in dark, air-conditioned theaters. Far from any city and left mostly on his own, Michael stowed away in a screened-in porch on the second floor of his home, developing projects rooted in the culture he was absorbing. He constructed model airplanes and railroads, built a wearable gorilla suit head with a movable jaw, and made a head of Frankenstein, domesticating the monster and soothing his fears in the process.

Outside of Michael’s workshop, orchards and creeks led into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where he discovered his love of climbing. It was as impractical a passion as art was for a working-class kid, but climbing with new tools and techniques, out there in the great wide open, was a way to practice nonconformity while keeping the body fit and the mind sharp. Michael, always drawing, published cartoons in his high school newspaper and took up producing abstract canvases. For an education, though, he was more practical, earning a degree in industrial design at the University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1955. Just out of school, not yet a professional, Michael was drafted into the army, serving from 1955 to 1957 in North Carolina as a photography lab technician.

After his time in the service, he moved to San Francisco, where by the end of the 1950s countless other dreaming men and women took up residence in spindly, run-down Victorians, enticed by the cheap rent and proximity to glorious scenery. Michael plied his trade as a draftsman for the Otis Elevator Company, various electronics firms, and all manner of packaging concerns. Somewhere along the way—like many others of that era—Michael got fed up with the square life. He thought teaching might be a better choice than being chained to a drafting table. In 1967, he enrolled at San Francisco State University on the GI Bill to pursue a teaching degree. After seeing his portfolio, the wise SFSU administrators suggested he study art, specifically sculpture under Stephen De Staebler. De Staebler had (like his mentor Peter Voulkos) helped shift ceramics out of craft and into the realm of art by insisting on foregrounding its earthy lumps and using it not for function but as a way to explore the human figure, indicating weight and motion through attention to form and detail.

In the art that Michael was tracking in magazines and galleries, a certain mode of well-crafted, high-spirited, surrealist-inflected painting and sculpture was popping up around the country. In the Bay Area, William T. Wiley and Bruce Nauman, antic artists obsessed with wordplay and the idea of communicating through multiple mediums, decided that a simple green linoleum-covered footstool bought at a junk store in Mill Valley would be called the Slant Step. They made the footstool the subject of multiple artworks and a 1966 exhibition in San Francisco, with several artists reinterpreting it. To this day, the Slant Step remains an inspiration for art that revels in its uncanny uselessness. Like these artists, Michael had a healthy interest in Dada, in which he found a strategy, or at least an example, for pushing his work to the edge of absurdity. He began making useless objects, like fins he attached to his calves. These were gestures that meant more to the artist than to anyone else, gestures at an art for oneself.

As the Slant Step slouched into view, hundreds of miles east, in Chicago, six artists began putting on exhibitions as the Hairy Who, one of which occurred in 1968 at the San Francisco Art Institute. Visiting this exhibition inspired Michael to broaden his graphic approach to encompass humor and linear grotesqueries. The Hairy Who artists Jim Nutt and Karl Wirsum distilled the commercial imagery of the century into lines and colors that displayed ecstatic bodies, punning wordplay, and 1940s references and were made with exquisite attention to detail. Faced with a teeming but bland urban expanse, and with no trees or slopes to soothe them, the Hairy Who labored to sear their bright colors into eyeballs, defiant to be seen. Both crews, and Michael too, shared a love for the acrobat, sculptor, printmaker, and veteran H. C. Westermann, who traversed the country showing art-goers terrible truths about war and America in a vernacular sculpture language polished to seemingly impossible levels of craft perfection. In Westermann, Michael found an example of a fellow athlete who moved fluidly between disciplines with humor and dignity.

Add to that mix Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix, which Michael discovered at City Lights, where a climbing buddy worked. In 1968, Crumb’s comic book, released with an upstart publisher named Don Donahue, was viewed as much a part of the up-for-grabs non–New York art world as any of the above. Crumb took the old medium of the comic book and turned it to exclusively personal, radical use. This was a conceptual and material breakthrough that allowed comics to take in any kind of content.

Crumb’s breakthrough brought a flood of underground comic books. From 1970 to 1973, floppy publications—in envy-inducing print runs of 10,000 or more—poured into head shops and bookstores across the country, to be bought alongside roach clips and incense. During that time, the medium became capacious enough to hold nearly every kind of idea, no matter how serious or absurd. Most underground cartoonists were coming from EC Comics and MAD, and they were either antagonistic or indifferent to gallery art. It was usually popular, not “high,” culture that fed the underground dream. But Michael, a decade older than most of them, was grounded in contemporary art and Depression-era entertainment. His drawings from that period have the spiky grotesque lines of Jim Nutt but plots torn from James Whale films. It says a lot about both the popularity of underground comics and the looseness of the times that in 1971 Michael could simply walk over to Don Donahue’s place in the Mission District with the artwork for his first and only comic book, Terminal Comics, and walk out with a publishing agreement.

In a sea of comics that looked like 1950s takeoffs, Crumb knockoffs, or psychedelic sludge, Michael’s crisp work and aesthetic sophistication stood out, and other cartoonists with ambitions for the medium to grow in scope, sophistication, and intensity took notice, among them Bill Griffith, Diane Noomin, Jay Kinney, Justin Green, Rory Hayes, and Art Spiegelman, all of whom asked him to contribute to anthologies in the ensuing years. For a young artist like Gary Panter in Texas, seeing Terminal Comics was a signal that the visual culture he was absorbing in magazines, museums, and head shops needn’t be parsed into bins labeled “art” and “comics” but rather that art could be comics and comics could be art.

But then the underground comics world took a serious hit by the end of 1973. Inflation, spiking fuel costs, and new obscenity rules drove retailers away from the nascent scene. Publishers shut down, artists got older and needed steadier income, and the culture veered rightward, kicking out against the liberal stew of the sixties. Happily, Michael wasn’t looking to make a living from comics, and he bounced to commercial work, designing and producing several short animated films, including Be My Gas, and TV spots. He also worked on the poster artist and cartoonist Victor Moscoso’s TV spots for KMEL radio.

In the late 1980s, two of Michael’s Otto strips appeared in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Weirdo anthology, but otherwise Michael worked as he always did—for himself. If no one was going to ask, he wasn’t going to suggest it. So Michael continued making comics that tested the style and form of the medium. In works collected in Terminal Exposure, he adapts the curvilinear bodies of the Fleischer brothers’ cartoons in the late 1970s strips, the curlicues of Memphis-era postmodernism for Otto, and then the thick strokes and trunk-like forms of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie for the contemplative strips of daily life.

All along, he’d made sculptures and paintings, and soon he started making prints on his home printing press. He is, in his studio, the still-dreaming child clutching The Phantom and The Shadow. Those are memories as real as climbing Mount Shasta in a snowstorm. His sculptures appear with the same solidity as his 1980s comic strips—sturdy things that often have a foot or a wedge forward, that could inhabit one of his pages or take a step down the alley, rooted in some of the same sources as Westermann’s work—the allure of a block of wood, the finish of a fine tool, a smoothly carved toy. Accompanying the allusive sculptures, linoleum cuts, and paintings are precision images of memories and dreams. Michael-the-narrator seems ever present in these images, telling a story, whispering a communication. Like the sculptures, their clarity does not yield obvious interpretations. Rather, as with the best surrealism, the clarity of their disjunctions—why is The Shadow in the living room; who is in bed smoking that cigarette?—makes them even more beguiling.

Happily, our artist isn’t above letting us in on the trick. As much as he might do it all for himself, the self wants to chat about the enchantment of making art, perhaps to share that delirious moment of invention. If there is a secret to Michael’s world, it’s in a few lines from “Otto Comic Strip 17, The Enigmas of the Identity”: “Now this you might call art. I don’t call it anything! In that way I don’t have to become an artist like everyone else. / Once you call yourself something … there you go! Into the dumper! You start getting mail from the society of serious whose-its! / If you are really serious you’ve gotta sneak up on yourself. Then presto!”

¤

This essay is an excerpt from Dan Nadel’s introduction to Michael McMillan’s Terminal Exposure: Comics, Sculpture, and Risky Behavior, out July 22 from New York Review Comics.