Underground comix cartoonist Jay Lynch, perhaps best known for Bijou Funnies and his contributions to the Garbage Pail Kids trading card series, died March 5, reports the New York Times..

"Underground comix were the most important art movement of the 20th century," he wrote, using the "comics" spelling preferred by underground cartoonists, in the introduction to "Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics Into Comix" (2009), by Denis Kitchen and James Danky.

"Copies of many of the early books sell to collectors for many thousands of dollars," he continued. "It's all quite ironic: Rebellious cartoonists mocking consumer culture were inadvertently producing collectible artifacts for the same consumer culture 40 years down the road."