Lady Chatterley's Lover has been notorious since it was written. Banned for 30 years it was published unexpurgated, by Penguin Books in 1960 and immediately became the first novel charged under the newly written Obscene Publications Act. The famous story of life, love and society in 1920s England, re-worked as an hilarious comic book by 'Britain's zaniest cartoonist' Hunt Emerson. About the Author Hunt Emerson is Britain's best loved underground cartoonist. Author of Calculus Cat, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lady Chatterley's Lover, The Festival Ritual, Aliens Ate My Trousers, Citymouth and others. He resides in the UK.

As its point of departure, Funny Cuts takes, as its point of departure, Pop art's revolutionary referencing of comics and concludes with the most current trends in contemporary art, reflecting in many diverse ways its dialogue with the commercial and trivial picture worlds of comics and cartoons. Pop art artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were ground-breaking in their provocative confrontation with high and low art using motifs and references from popular comics. In the 1970s, American comics dealt with taboo subjects like sexuality and violence--here, for the first time, the subversive potential and the psychological content of comic worlds were used creatively in in fine art. Within the context of the punk movement, Raymond Pettibon and Mike Kelley were inspired by comics through wall-length drawings that made use of the narrative element of comics on the border between visual art and literature. And internationally today, artists question political and social realities and their own identity through the mythological potential of comics and animations. Presented here are numerous images from roughly 100 artists that visually demonstrate the various ways in which comics have become a form of high art.

Raymond Pettibon is one of the most distinctive and highly regarded American artists of his generation. In the thousands of drawings he has produced over the last two decades, Pettibon stakes out a thematic territory that combines the bright, shiny world of American mass culture with its darkly complex undertows. Pettibon's imagery largely derives from the world of cartoons and popular culture: surfers, trains, baseball players, and cartoon characters. His prolific skill lies in his ability to make powerful and poetic associations between word and image. An avid reader, he isolates a phrase or word and inserts it into his drawing, not as a commentary but as an active graphic element, often written in capitals like a caption to the image. His works range in tone from the polemical to the confessional and introspective and explore the extremes of the human condition from the abject to the sublime. Pettibon's work was originally produced for the attention of his friends-fellow artists and musicians in the punk scene in Los Angeles in the 1970s and early 1980s. At that time he combined painting, songwriting, performing, and video making for bands like Sonic Youth, Minutemen, and Black Flag. Today his works are included in the permanent collections of public galleries throughout the world, and have been shown in many solo exhibitions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.