[1] After moving from New York City to San Francisco in 1970, Spain's Subvert Comics series (1970–1976)[2] featured "three full length Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International stories".

The Trashman stories are set in a dystopian near-future America, which after having been ravaged by nuclear weapon attacks, has become a fascist police state, with "vast urban conglomerations.

As Barnes flees capture by the police, a mysterious stranger in a hooded robe calling himself "Citizen X" appears and leads him down a hidden passageway to a secret underground installation.

There, Barnes is told he was chosen by the mysterious and elusive "Sixth International", an underground anarcho-Marxist organization, to be trained as a master of the "para-sciences" and to use these powers to fight the oppression of the fascist governments of the world.

He is depicted as a strong, rugged, black-clad militant figure, with dark hair and beard and eyes always in shadow, who wields conventional military weapons such as machine guns, pistols, daggers and explosives in addition to his superpowers.

"Harry Barnes, known to the world as Trashman, trained by the elusive Sixth International as a master of the para-sciences, is able to change his molecular structure or decipher a crack in the sidewalk".

Trashman's post-apocalyptic setting and Marxist-anarchist overtones expressed Spain's own social and political beliefs, as well as the sensibilities of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the underground counterculture of the era.