Before the rise of underground comics in the late 1960s, there was no place for eccentric talent in the comics industry. Rather than creating super heroes like Superman and Spider-Man, comic strips like Peanuts and Krazy Kat, or graphic novels like Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Ghost World, the artists represented in Art Out of Time created their own "ingenious" versions of the super hero, western, romance, humor, and horror genres that dominated the comics of their day.<BR>Their visions found a home, but were mostly obscured by the more accessible mainstream work of others. These artists have a distinct, fully formed visual sensibility, and their comics stray from the usual thematic and visual ideas of what we now consider the medium to be. All of them were under-recognized in their lifetimes, and all of them remain outside the usual narratives of comic book history.<BR>Art Out of Time reprints complete comic book and comic strip stories, most of which are being reprinted here for the first time since their initial publication. In five thematic sections, this anthology is a "counter history" of comics, containing nearly thirty often-unknown visionary American cartoonists from 1900 to 1969. These artists foreshadowed and influenced the innovations within the comics medium of today. Together for the first time, these oddballs and obsessives truly constitute an underground that wasn't.