Jay Lynch, an artist, writer and satirist who was a central figure in the underground comics revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, died on March 5 at his home in Candor, N.Y. He was 72.

His cousin Valerie Snowden said the cause was lung cancer.

Mr. Lynch, who had a wry, deadpan sense of humor, held strong views about the importance of underground comics, which differentiated themselves from the mainstream through raunchy and grotesque depictions of sex, drugs and violence.

“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.