Exposed.

This article examines two recent volumes, *In Visible Archives* (2023) and *Raw, Weirdo, and Beyond* (2022), which innovate comics studies by adopting alternative scholarly approaches that align with the multimodal and hybrid nature of comics as literary and artistic artifacts. *In Visible Archives* focuses on feminist and queer comics of the 1980s and 1990s, emphasizing archival research that centers peripheral communities and material cultures surrounding comics production. *Raw, Weirdo, and Beyond* builds an archive of an exhibition on alternative comics, highlighting the labor and materiality involved in underground publishing and expanding the thematic and formal possibilities of comics. Both volumes challenge traditional academic conventions, contribute to the archival turn in comics studies, and underscore the importance of community, embodiment, and historiography in understanding alternative comics within their cultural and political contexts.