I have another memory of Kurtzman. A few years before he died, I was with him at a restaurant when he was having a brief meeting with an art director from an ad agency. Kurtzman had accepted an advertising job to earn some much-needed cash. I watched this iconoclastic humorist acquiesce as the art director altered everything Kurtzman had done, removing all the humor and leaving only the style. Maybe it’s a good thing the authors were unaware of this anecdote; their book is probably better off without it.

Underground cartoonists of the ’60s and ’70s knelt before two deities: Harvey Kurtzman and Paul Krassner. Kurtzman you know about. Krassner was the editor and publisher of The Realist, considered the first underground-­press periodical, a product of the Beat and anti-McCarthy movements. While The Realist was rather conventionally designed compared with the psychedelic underground newspapers that began springing up during the mid- to late ’60s, it was more ribald and raucous than anything in print — scandalous, borderline libelous and even pornographic. It was the next evolutionary step in counterculture satire after Mad. And it is cited by Jay Lynch, an underground cartoonist known for the strip “Nard ’n Pat,” in the introduction to James Danky and Denis Kitchen’s Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into Comix (Abrams ComicArts/Chazen Museum of Art, $29.95). As Lynch says, The Realist bitingly attacked “the sham and hypocrisy of society at large” and was one of a few magazines that contributed to the rise of the underground comix sensibility.

This collection of essays, reproductions of original art, and mechanicals of comics pages and covers is a nice complement to the Kurtzman book. Primarily the catalog for a traveling exhibition, it includes images that will be familiar to anyone who grew up with the under­grounds and captivating to those who did not — a good substitute if you can’t see the exhibition.

I was happy to be reintroduced to Dope Comix; Spain Rodriguez’s Trashman, one of my favorite antiheroes of the day; and Gilbert Shelton’s “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” (the Abbott and Costello of the dope generation) and “Billy Graham Reaches the Dope Mystics.” But the book is worth the price if only for the superb reproduction of Rick Griffin’s “Fighting Eyeballs.” Griffin, who rendered the original Rolling Stone magazine logo in the ’60s, was Hieronymus Bosch on mushrooms, as evidenced by his astonishingly precise surreal assemblage of eyes fighting eyes in a sci-fi dystopia.

Griffin died in a motorcycle accident. Yet many of the other artists, currently in their 60s and 70s, are still quite active. This is not (as the title suggests) the definitive collection of all their classics, but it is a satisfying representation of some of their greatest hits.

The visual language of rebellion has a few commonalities that are adapted to individual cultures and countries. The images in Zeina Maasri’s Off the Wall: Political Posters of the Lebanese Civil War (I. B. Tauris/Palgrave Macmillan, paper, $29.95) are stylistically similar to some of the underground comics created in the ’60s. But the messages in Lebanon from the ’70s to the early ’90s were decidedly more serious than those in the United States. Underground comics were concerned with sex and drugs, among other favored themes; the Lebanese activists were concerned with survival and victory. American undergrounders faced nightsticks and Mace when they demonstrated against government policy; the Lebanese factions used lethal weapons.