“As an artist you have only one of two choices. Either burn it or put a stamp on it.”

Archive of zines and related correspondence to and from Anne D. Bernstein, founder and editor of humor zine RHUBARB. Bernstein, an animation writer and illustrator, later became a contributing editor for Nickelodeon and is perhaps best known for her work on MTV’s “Daria.”

Bernstein’s correspondents include Mike Gunderloy of Factsheet Five; Jennifer Finney Boylan, then of the American Bystander; critic Marvin Kitman; historian Paul Buhle; underground cartoonist Joyce Farmer; poet Stephen Ronan, National Lampoon writer Joey Green, and others. The bulk of the letters, which range from postcard-size to several pages in length, are devoted to addressing the question Bernstein asked of her readership: what is radical humor?

Paul Buhle, noted historian of radicalism and labor movements, had previously written a manifesto of the “Humor International” and followed it up with 1982’s Radical Humor Festival, an ambitious enterprise that drew Art Spiegelman and Jules Pfeiffer, but was not repeated.  An early letter to Bernstein takes some some umbrage at her “self-indulgent misuse of the name” — meaning Rhubarb’s “Radical Humor Union Network” subtitle — “and of me.” Buhle was disappointed that the second issue failed to “collect the news of said movement” and was presumably a more lighthearted and irresponsible production than he had expected. (Radical humor is apparently nothing to joke about.)

Bernstein insisted that any definition of her zine’s focus would be collectively established with her readership, and enthusiastically solicited and printed selections from their responses.  Later correspondence from Buhle, of which there is a great deal, takes a more familiar and conversational tone, full of trivia, suggestions and friendly disagreements, and Rhubarb kept its original tagline until issue 5, which carried the banner “Rhubarb: ‘The newsletter that has yet to define itself.’”

One of the more fascinating and revealing portions centers around the feud between Bob Black and Caitlin Manning of Processed World magazine. As is customary with Berkeley anarchists, the hostility began with a bad review, escalated to circulation of scurrilous leaflets, and reached a nadir of public harassment and threatening telephone calls. Manning’s telling of these and other quarrels is detailed in the full-zine-length “PUBLIC WARNING Against BOB BLACK,” together with various xeroxed supporting evidence. Black’s alleged exposure of pseudonymous zinesters’ legal identities is a major point of discussion, and the argument over the malicious intent and potential chilling effects of such exposure previews in miniature the furor over doxxing in the coming internet age.

Several of the letter-writers and zine creators represented here, like Bernstein herself, would rise to some prominence as writers and artists in later years; some, like Buhle, were already established academics; and some were devoted and obsessive cranks with no filter and no sense of proportion. (Some were all three.) But at the time of composition, their passionate energies were entirely directed towards communicating with, feuding with, and performing for each other: peers and comrades in a space that drew no lines or hierarchies separating fans, readers, critics, and creators. A revealing, entertaining, and representative collection of zine culture in the 1980s.

$2,750