Culturally, physically, scatologically — it’s hard to overstate “The Complete Zap Comix.”
Let’s start with the thing itself: If I threw it at your head, and landed a solid strike, I might end you. It weighs 20 pounds, stands more than a foot tall and comes in a large black felted box with poignantly hard edges. It is composed of five hardcover volumes and a portfolio of cover art, 1,100 pages in total. Fantagraphics, the Seattle comics publisher that spent years assembling it — “every artist in every issue owned their work, so every artist in every issue had to agree on everything,” said Fantagraphics co-founder Gary Groth — is printing only 2,700 editions. And the entire, backbreaking brick, a totem to tangible media, the 21st century hipster’s equivalent to the once ubiquitous Encyclopaedia Britannica, goes for a very iPad-ish $500.
That is quite the markup from the $40 or so it would have set you back had you bought all 16 issues of “Zap” from the start, when it debuted to a confused group of hippies on the streets of San Francisco in 1968.
But you didn’t buy it.
And you weren’t there.
Besides, $500 is arguably a small price to pay for a cornerstone that has been so much a part of our cultural ether, and remained so relevant, whether you realize it or not. “Zap,” which began as the unleashed id of cartoonist R. Crumb and became a cheerfully reckless jam session among friends, reinvented the possibilities of comic books and planted the idea of cartoonist as serious artist, laying the groundwork for decades of graphic novels, subversive performers, ironic illustrations, even convention-upending ad campaigns. Without the influence of “Zap” — and its own antecedent, “Mad” — it’s hard to imagine the emergence of more than a few cartoonists, from Art “Maus” Spiegelman to Alison “Fun Home” Bechdel. It’s even harder to picture decades of Chicago cartoonists — Daniel Clowes, Ivan Brunetti, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry.
Or a culture that puts a premium on an aggressive mix of high, low, distasteful and distrustful, within the same work: see “The Simpsons,” “The Colbert Report,” “Saturday Night Live,” “The Book of Mormon,” “Girls.”
The pages of “Zap” were dense, visually and philosophically, with sex, riots, violence, racial satire, political satire, melancholy lyricism, cartoonish pranks, self-portrait, protest and surrealism. Barry once said, having discovered an issue of “Zap” as a child, she was so scared of it she buried the comic in her backyard. “Even the guys who drew it were scared, convinced they would go to jail for it,” said comic historian Patrick Rosenkranz, who wrote the introduction to the set. “Right after Crumb did this story about Frosty the Snowman bombing the Rockefeller mansion, he was audited. And I really doubt that was a coincidence!”
Ware, who lives in Oak Park, said he remembers sneaking copies of “Zap” into his high school art class and copying its pages into notebooks, though initially out of a fascination with it as “relic of the ‘counterculture’ and as a perfunctory accompaniment” to smoking pot. And yet, as he has grown older, and though his interest in other “underground” cartoonists has waned, his fondness for Crumb’s work in particular has never diminished: “There are few artists alive who see as well as he does — perhaps none. For me, his was the first work I read that really uncovered many of the lies and frauds of America. He’s an undisputed genius.”
ROBERT CRUMB, WHO IS 71, lives in southern France with wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, herself a comics pioneer. He doesn’t have email, an Internet connection or a computer. He rarely makes public appearances and seldom gives interviews. He spoke by phone recently. This is an edited version of a longer conversation.
Q: Why did you start “Zap”?
Crumb: You mean, aside from the fact that since I was a small child, I aspired to draw comic books (laughs)? I drew comics all through my childhood and into my late teens, but I started to realize this was an unrealistic aspiration, that drawing comic books professionally, for a living, wasn’t realistic. Comics in the late 1950s, once the Comics Code had eliminated the unconventional, had become straight-laced, conventional. I couldn’t do that — I couldn’t draw conventionally. I couldn’t. I was too crazed, too alienated. I was, you know, out there. Also, basically, I didn’t want to draw conventional comics. I had no interest in being that kind of cartoonist. I gave up on the idea of doing it for a living. I drew greetings cards for American Greetings in Cleveland, then went to San Francisco. And then, as the hippy movement was starting in the mid-’60s, I was still drawing comics for my own pleasure, in notebooks and stuff. And I also started taking LSD in 1965. I was in my early 20s and LSD became this psychedelic influence on my cartooning. Plus, underground newspapers were coming up then, and those guys, they would print anything you gave them!
Q: You submitted work.
Crumb: I submitted a few psychedelic comics to hippy papers. Editors liked them, readers liked them. In the back of my mind, I still had a dream of doing a comic book, but I could not figure out how you could go about putting out a psychedelic comic book. How would it work visually? Who would print it? Who would distribute it? There were no channels for that then. So I was doing more and more work for underground newspapers, and this one guy at a paper in Philadelphia suggested I do a whole comic book and he would publish it. I was like, “Now you’re talking.” He would take care of the business stuff. I drew “Zap” issue No. 1 in the fall of ’67. Then he disappeared with my art. He went off to India and didn’t tell me. He went on a spiritual trip and put the art somewhere. It was all original artwork. I tried calling and I wrote to the address for him.
Q: Why not just drive to Philly?
Crumb: I had no resources whatsoever in 1967. I also lived in San Francisco, and though I had hitchhiked across the United States a few times, I didn’t drive — and I don’t drive! But I had the foresight to make Xerox copies of “Zap,” and what I had became “Zap” No.0. After that came out, I started right away on the second one, which became “Zap” No.1. When that came out in early 1968, I sold them around the Haight-Ashbury (neighborhood) in San Francisco, and it started getting widely seen among the hippy youth culture people.
Q: In the boxed set, in the oral history of “Zap,” here’s a great drawing you did of that time. You’re with your pregnant wife on a street corner, surrounded by hippies, selling the first issue out of —
Crumb: A baby carriage. That’s true.
Q: But the irony — considering how much “Zap” is often thought of as a product of that time, this seminal countercultural touchstone — is that none of the hippies in your drawing seems seem to get it.
Crumb: And they didn’t get it. Not right away. It didn’t look like the counterculture then. It looked like a comic book. So they would say “A comic book?” Hippies were not interested in comic books! There had been a few attempts at hippy comics before “Zap.” This guy from Texas, Jack Jackson, did a comic called “God Nose.” Frank Stack, also from Texas, had done “The Adventures of Jesus” in the early ’60s. But nothing caught on until “Zap,” and that’s when these rock poster artists, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin, saw it. They had been trying to draw psychedelic comics. Then S. Clay Wilson saw it — someone had brought a copy to Lawrence, Kansas, where he was, drawing his own personal comics. I decided to include those guys. We did “Zap” No.2 with all four. Then other artists came out of the woodwork. Spain Rodriguez, who ended up with us, was in New York drawing this dark adventure comic, “Trashman.” Very left wing. He was a card carrying Communist! (Laughing.) He actually was. I remember when he showed me his card.
BY THE FOURTH ISSUE, most of the seven artists who would draw every page of “Zap” for the next four decades were in place, and to say they didn’t quite grasp the meaning of negative space is an understatement: The stories — some of which introduced Crumb’s most iconic ’60s creations (Mr. Natural, “Keep On Truckin'”) — drew on hieroglyphics, children’s comics, rock posters, drug-fueled hallucination, advertising, woodcarvings. Robert Williams, for instance, had been working as the art director for the famed custom-car designer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and once rendered a “Zap” story in an inked approximation of chrome.
“We were utopian pirates,” Williams, now 71, said in a phone interview. “We knew we were showing things that were socially reprehensible, but had all come up through the same art situation. Basically, art schools were dominated by abstract expressionism then and oozed the attitude that craftsmanship was passe. Pile on minimalism, conceptualism and pop art — which was really appropriation — and you had a lot of talented people on the margin. So those guys became this brotherhood. And I think we all had revenge in our heads.”
Q: YOU HADN’T PLANNED ON HAVING A COLLECTIVE.
Crumb: Originally, I worked in complete isolation. I didn’t have to deal with people liking (my work) at all until there was recognition. I was on my own. I knew artists, writers — I wasn’t socially isolated — but nobody drawing comics. Then people came to me. That’s how I met other “Zap” guys, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton.
Q: Was there ever talk of accepting advertising?
Crumb: (Laughs). No! We absolutely refused anything like that, but there were people who wanted to use us in advertising. There were people who saw they could cash in. People in the music business, the movies. The animated “Fritz the Cat” movie got made because these filmmakers, they had recognized that (by 1972, when the film adapted from Crumb’s character came out), a cartoon for youth culture could make money.
Q: And when did you start hearing that “Zap” was racist and misogynistic?
Crumb: Immediately. It didn’t take long. There were proto-feminists in the culture and a lot of people, of course, very sensitive about race. But really, there were people who didn’t see (“Zap”) for what it did, which was satire racism. Some took it at face value. Then there are people who just don’t get satire, right? I like what John Waters said about the left wing being “humor-impaired.” The sexist thing, though, I accept. I do believe the work showed violence toward women and could be painful for women, that it was something that women could not digest or accept — I get that. I had to vent my anger toward women back then and I did.
Q: Where did that anger come from?
Crumb: Oh, who knows? It’s very complicated. I would need decades of Freudian analysis to figure that out. I went to a Catholic school in Philadelphia and I was beaten by the nuns. But the few times I make public appearances, I get questioned about this (perceived misogyny). Someone always asks about violence toward women in “Zap.” But I will own up to it: Yeah, when I was younger, I did have anger toward women.
AS YOU FLIP THROUGH “ZAP” TODAY, a couple of things quickly become apparent: “Zap” presciently foresaw our contemporary culture, in which offense is at the tip of everyone’s tongue, even as the culture itself bathes in offense. And “Zap” pushed so fearlessly into every conceivable provocation — cannibalism, masturbation, et al. — it would probably only be published now as it is in “The Complete Zap Comix,” as a kind of historical document.
“I can’t imagine anyone being bold enough to publish some of this in 2014,” said Hillary Chute, an associate professor of English and visual arts at the University of Chicago, and one of the smartest experts on comics. “As someone who considers herself a hard-core feminist, it has taken me aback, but it had never bothered me. There’s an excess in ‘Zap’ that’s clearly satiric. But you do pause. Maybe because it doesn’t seem like an artifact. It’s still disturbing, a really harsh critique of race, commodification, America — it’s undimmed.”
It’s also done.
Over the decades, even as its artists remained a kind of enigmatic, aging rock group of cartoonists, its members disagreed on whether to focus on narratives or gags; there was opposition to letting more artists into their club; and publication (the most recent issue, No.15, is now a decade old) became more and more sporadic. “The Complete Zap Comix,” therefore, is meant as a kind of unofficial headstone, a casual farewell from a comic nobody really knew was still alive. It includes an 80-page, never-before-published issue No.16 (weighted toward collaborations between Crumb and Aline). The back page has a simple message: “Adios.”
Q: AS “ZAP” GOT BIGGER AND MORE INFLUENTIAL, WAS SOMETHING LOST?
Crumb: It maintained its integrity, but yes: What was lost was the hippy culture itself. “Zap” had come out of that confidence that existed in the ’60s, that thing about changing the world, how once the old farts died off, the world will be flowers and love again. (Laughs.) But a hard edge, a revolutionary attitude crept in — “The old farts, they’re not going away, we may have to buy guns and fight.” When that entered the equation, the environment for “Zap” fragmented into feminists, spiritual people, revolutionaries, gay-rights people, people who just decided to go after money. But we were left with the feeling that cultural revolution had happened.
Q: One of the most striking things about this boxed set is how much of it, even the earliest issues, doesn’t really feel at all like a nostalgia trip, or even necessarily from that time.
Crumb: I only look back through my work now very occasionally. When I do, when I look at the old “Zap,” I realize I am not the same person who drew it. Sexual repression had been very present throughout childhood — all that straitjacket (expletive) in the ’50s weighed on you. But I don’t recognize that person now. My sex drive is not as strong as it was. And sex, just looking at “Zap” today, was one of the major motivations of my youth, clearly. It was the motivation for everything! What jumps out at me now is how sexual it is. But I’m 71 now. And dwindled!
Q: Do you recognize the influence of your work in the wider culture? Do you see it?
Crumb: When someone like Lynda Barry or Chris Ware or Dan Clowes says something, sure. I’m deeply touched. I respect those guys. In the 1940s, a lot of comics were done for servicemen (his own father had been an illustrator for the Marine Corps), but as culture, it was a very low form of popular entertainment. If you had pretensions to being cultured, you looked down on comics. So, to answer your question, the biggest change I have seen is comics going from being mainstream entertainment for children to something an adult can pick up. Specifically “Zap” said that this low form of culture could be a form of personal expression, and I think that, for the past 50 years, is our biggest legacy, that sense of comics as a form of personal expression. And maybe if comics are still seen that way, if comics have stayed honest, it’s because you don’t get rich doing them. The rewards are small. Because of that, (expletive) gets weeded out. You can’t put across a good comic without thought. There is not enough reward for the sweat, and I think maybe, now that “Zap” is finished, that’s what we said: If you don’t love what you’re doing, you’re definitely not doing this.
Twitter @borrelli
