Directed by Susan Stern
Showing at Slamdance 2021

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Pioneering comix artist Manuel "Spain" Rodriguez would have received a documentary before now, but he isn't a lunatic. Spain's work skated the line of good taste, but his personal life and relationships weren't warped by a pervy fatalism the way Robert Crumb's were. He drew as much bizarre sex as anybody else in the underground but it never landed him in court like Mike Diana's psychosexual provocations did. Bad Attitude, the new Spain documentary from the late artist's wife Susan Stern, is a breakdown of a happily contradictory artist who never worried about ironing the wrinkles out.

The popular conception of any artist is of a lone figure painting, writing, sculpting personal work. Comics artists get the same wrap, only they're nerdier and less likely to get a big payday once they've finished a piece–the going rate of the average staple-bound comic is a little lower than the sticker price on whatever's hanging in your local art gallery. Bad Attitude immediately breaks the isolated artist stereotype, introducing its subject as a member of the New York-based biker gang the Road Vultures.

Spain, living on $15 a week in the filthy NYC of the 60s, draws porny alt-newspaper covers and creates Trashman, an action hero who rains justice down on a cannibalistic upper class like some leftist version of the QAnon fantasy. We get talking head interviews with most living legends of the comix first-wavers and every one of them, from Trina Robbins to Art Spiegelman to Robert Williams, sounds vaguely terrified of their friend Spain. Kim Deitch and Robert Crumb were trying to express themselves in weird, subversive ways and Spain was doing the same while also picking up dozens of women and radicalizing bikers with left politics and better drugs. "Every time I turned around," an artist says, "seemed like Spain had the clap." That Spain himself is quietly well-adjusted, teaching art classes to local kids is never treated as aberrant. He had just lived a lot of lives.

Eventually, Spain moved from New York to underground comix hotbed San Francisco on a whim and became an integral part of Zap, the revered anthology that insisted it was publishing "comix" and not "comics." In retrospect, the "We spell our version with an 'x!'" stance is a little pointless. It's also way less embarrassing than some of the stuff that was actually in Zap. For every forward-thinking mutation of what comics could be, there was a racist, sexist caricature waiting to scandalize you. The artists, all stunning draughtsmen, explored their unrestrained id in an effort to shock people. As Trina Robbins, one of the few women to get big in the dude-heavy 60s scene, notes, that meant the guys all drew a lot of rape and violence.

This is where the documentary starts to distinguish itself as something more profound than a fun Wikipedia history. Stern, who lived with Spain for the last 30 years of his life, asks in voiceover "Did I make this film to defend Spain or to defend myself?" Spain was drawing near-naked, ass-kicking women and his beautifully detailed style can help obscure that when you read "Big Bitch," you're taking a trip through a juvenile fantasy. For her part, Stern says her feminism is sex-positive and that she loved the way Spain drew her. She does an admirable job respecting the person she loved for decades without pretending he was everything to everybody. Women show up and say Spain respected them and championed their work, but that he didn't get women's lib. Stern recalls reading an article praising Spain's feminism and immediately says her partner wasn't a feminist.

Still, as he grew older and fell in love with Stern and raised their daughter (herself a great artist), "he became happy to not be the protagonist of his own life." In this way, Spain is contradictory–he didn't consider himself a feminist, but was as strong an ally as many of the women interviewed can recall having in their lives. As a political tendency, it's a little complicated, but not that much so. He was a good guy who didn't shake some of the macho culture he was raised in.

The movie hints at dissenting opinions, but nobody onscreen expresses any, which feels like a missed opportunity. The closest we get is a look of Spain's story "Dessert," an autobiographical comic about walking around a park with some of his tough friends and beating the shit out of a gay man. "He's telling on himself," somebody says. This seems like a generous reading because it implies some reflection. I haven't actually read "Dessert," but based on what's shown in Bad Attitude, I don't think Spain was doing any self-analysis. He's saying "Here's an intense thing I did" and moving on, which is what so many of his peers were also doing. This is where I get pedantic over the difference between "telling" and "telling on."

Stern chooses to glide through plenty of things here, a pacing decision I ended up enjoying. One day, somebody will write a great book about sexism, racism and homophobia in the comix underground, but Bad Attitude isn't that and isn't trying to be that. Like Spain, it gets loud in spots and vague in others. Spain had a long, slow six years with cancer and even the people closest to him didn't realize how serious it was. The documentary follows suit. If you weren't already aware of Spain, you could get through most of this film without realizing he had died nine years prior to its release.

Stern doesn't even really deal directly with that death. Spain's daughter talks about her last moments with her dad as we watch an animation loop, and by the time the loop stops, Spain just isn't there anymore. It's emotional but not dour. We don't get a funeral, we get more information about the first man to paint a mural in San Francisco's Mission district, who revolutionized comics and turned bikers on to anti-capitalist thought. The last words we hear are from Spain, praising comics as a medium: "You can scream until you're blue in the face or you can find some kind of tool to express your opinion. I've seen many cool scenes. I have hope the cool scenes will keep on coming. I have faith in the revolution." So many people get old and think the kids coming up behind them are all phonies, but the good ones are hopeful. The good ones believe. Spain finishes and an Afro-futurist woman takes to the sky on a hovercraft. Charles Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song" swells. It is, like Spain, Bad Attitude and Susan Stern, inspiring.