The adult part of that statement -which also served as a warning -announced the graphic content between the covers these were not the Sunday funnies. ![]() He made comics “For Adult Intellectuals Only,” as the cover of Zap #1 declared in 1968. “ Zap started it all.”Ĭrumb might have disagreed about that first part: “Comics are different, and when cartoonists try to elevate the form, so to speak, it’s in danger of becoming pretentious.” Yet he did elevate the form: though he did not transform it into literature, in the way that, say, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, Alison Bechdel, and Ware have, he set it on a parallel trajectory. ![]() “Without Zap there would be no such thing as alternative/literary/artistic/self-expressive comics and graphic novels,” Chris Ware has said. One wants more of it -if not from the artists themselves, then from those they worked with (and those they didn’t) and from some of the myriad cartoonists they have influenced since issue #1 appeared. It’s valuable as a framework and in understanding certain strips in the comix, but the stitched-together conversation feels thin in places, and certain readily available details are inexplicably missing (for example, the name of Crumb’s publisher who absconded with the files for the first issue). The oral history covers the essential points in the narrative of Zap’s history -how the magazine got started and how all the players came together, how they influenced and worked with one another, their conflicts and arguments, censorship, the magazine’s legacy, and so on -yet it sometimes seems lacking. The fifth volume is a retrospective one: it includes an oral history compiled by Patrick Rosenkranz, author biographies, a brief time line, archival photographs, gatefolds of the five wraparound covers, and other ephemera. Granted, one doesn’t require a lavish, $500 version to do this -a humbler, more portable edition would do the trick-but reproduction values count for a lot here: the sixteen issues, as well as a seventeenth that was previously unpublished, are reproduced over four volumes on a thick paper stock and at slightly larger than full size, and have been scanned from negatives. ![]() This mammoth edition offers the ideal opportunity to examine the way the periodical evolved, not only in terms of the interaction among its artists but also in terms of subject and form. In thumbing the pages of Fantagraphics’s five-volume set (six, if you consider the clamshell case housing limited-edition prints of the seventeen covers), I began to feel as though I hadn’t known Zap very well at all. Peanut cover for issue #4, I had never thought about the comics that went into an issue of Zap in concert with one another, much less with the entire series. I realized that although I’d read, say, Crumb’s “My Troubles with Women” and Rodriguez’s “Evening at the Country Club” and had long loved Moscoso’s wraparound Mr. But this is a merely a thumbnail of Zap’s significance, one I had long taken for granted. ![]() Zap also illustrates an alternative history of the visual art of the period, a story that runs counter both to the predominance of abstract modern art and to mainstream comics’ subservience to the Comics Code Authority, which formed in 1954. Zap Comix didn’t kick off the underground press scene of the sixties, but it serves as a model of what was at stake in the shift from the button-down, nuclear-family '50s to the radicalism and drug culture of the '60s and '70s.
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