ART & DESIGN

Raunchy and Revered

Zap Comix, Now in a Coffee Table Boxed Set By DANA JENNINGS OCT. 31, 2014

SLIDE SHOW|10 PHOTOS Zap Comix, Plugging Readers In for More Than 45 Years

The cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez still recalls vividly the first time he saw Zap Comix as a boy. It was issue No. 2, and it oozed with druggy phantasmagorias, sex, over-the-top violence, sex, demons and, yes, sex. It was funny, too, 52 pages of, as the cover promised, “Gags, jokes, kozmic trooths” — all for 50 cents.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to go to hell for reading this,’ ” said Mr. Hernandez, who created the much-praised independent comic Love and Rockets with his brothers in the 1980s. “The Zap artists, they’re like these crazy children. The naughtiest kids in the world. But I enjoyed Zap in a weird, lurid way.”

And while it never really went away — the most recent issue came out in 2004 — Zap, born in late 1967 in the fever dreams of R. Crumb, is emphatically back in a big way. Fantagraphics Books of Seattle in November is publishing “The Complete Zap,” a strikingly designed $500 hardcover boxed set of more than 1,100 pages. Not bad for a black-and-white comic book series whose first issue cost a quarter in 1968.

While the early issues stand as rowdy documents of the 1960s counterculture, Zap was also more. In reinventing the comic book, it set off legal battles and conversations over censorship, brought attention to cartoonists as artists, and set an example for generations of alternative comics creators like Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Joe Matt and the Hernandez Brothers.

The five volumes in “The Complete Zap” include Issues 0 to 16 — the final issue, No. 16, is being published for the first time — a portfolio of Zap covers, and an oral history as told by Zap’s artists. But as the underground comix historian Patrick Rosenkranz writes in his introduction to the history: “Be warned. These books contain an incendiary collection of radical propositions and unsettling notions. Do not confuse them for a quaint relic from the long-gone Age of Aquarius.”

Countercultural comics had appeared in alternative newspapers, but the arrival of Zap No. 1 in early 1968 — with its “Kozmic Kapers” and “Freak Out Funnies” strips — was the moment comic books got psychedelicized and became comix, aimed at an adult, if stoned, audience.

Within four issues, Zap grew to a collective of seven artists and became the unofficial flagship of the comix movement, inspiring the publication of hundreds of undergrounds. But none approached the quality of Zap and its all-star lineup. As Mr. Crumb says in the oral history, they were “the baddest gang of cartoonists ever to wield their crow quills together.”

Asked why he wanted to publish “The Complete Zap,” Gary Groth, Fantagraphics’ founder and publisher, said: “I consider Zap one of the most important comics ever published. It’s a landmark in comic art. The work is brilliant, and it stands for the underground movement. It stands for the times.

“Zap changed the conception of what comics are capable of.”

Outside R. Crumb’s lonely San Francisco room in 1967, the Vietnam War continued to roil the nation as the Summer of Love gave way to late fall. Inside, Mr. Crumb, burning up with drug-fueled visions, was transforming cultural notions of comics and art.

There’s a sweet Crumb drawing in Volume 5 of the boxed set that shows him with his pregnant first wife, Dana, selling copies of Zap No. 1 from a baby carriage on the Haight. Mr. Crumb looks ill at ease, Dana put-upon, and the San Francisco hippies nonplused by this 25-cent comic book. “We had no distributor,” Mr. Crumb said in a phone interview from his home in the south of France. “We were one step up from running it off on a mimeograph machine. I had to explain to the head shop guys that it was a psychedelic comic book.”

With the simple goal of just wanting to make a modest living doing comics, Mr. Crumb wrote and drew the first two issues of Zap, Nos. 0 and 1, in late 1967 — 48 pages in all. “It was way LSD-inspired,” Mr. Crumb said, “and looking at it brings back that LSD feeling.”

S An Exclusive Preview of Zap No. 16, the Comic’s Final Issue Credit R. Crumb/Zap Comix

Those black-and-white epiphanies included characters like Mr. Natural, Whiteman, Shuman the Human — and Mr. Crumb’s endlessly pirated “Keep on truckin’ ” images. “A lot of ink has gone under the bridge since back then,” he said. “But I’m grateful that this stuff still has a timely appeal. Sometimes, it looks like a different person did it. I’m not that person anymore. I was crazy. I was depressed. But the depression made me productive.”

And Mr. Crumb soon found out that his comics were speaking to kindred souls, like the popular rock-poster artists Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso, and the Nebraska wild man S. Clay Wilson, who enlisted for Zap No. 2. “I was amazed they were interested,” Mr. Crumb said. “I worked in total isolation until then.” And by issue No. 4 the Zap lineup — the Seven Samurai of the undergrounds — was complete as Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez and Robert Williams joined up.

Their influences ranged from Hieronymus Bosch and the Surrealists, to funny animal comics and vintage Fleischer Brothers cartoons, to 1950s EC horror and crime comics and Harvey Kurtzman, who created Mad for EC. “As a kid, I loved Mad magazine, because it regurgitated 1950s America in an incredibly brilliant way,” Mr. Crumb says in the oral history.

And just as Mad mapped out a screwball path for Zap artists, Zap did the same for later cartoonists. “Zap paved several roads to what comics can be,” said Mr. Hernandez, whose latest graphic novels are “Bumperhead” and “Loverboys.” “And indie comics are indebted to that.”

Pondering Zap’s legacy during a phone interview, Paul Mavrides, who joined the crew after Griffin died in a motorcycle crash in 1991, laughed and said, “All the blown minds left in its wake.”

Zap is the House That R. Crumb Built. But S. Clay Wilson is its howling muse.

Mr. Wilson threw down his filthy gauntlet to his fellow Zapsters right away in No. 2 with a one-page exercise in excess called “Head First.” Starring his Pervert Pirates, it revels and rollicks in sex, radical dismemberment and cannibalism. “He showed us we had been censoring ourselves,” Mr. Moscoso said in a phone interview. “He blew the doors off the church. Wilson is one of the major artists of our generation.”

Little wonder the taboo-breaking novelist William S. Burroughs once said, “I have always found Wilson’s art hilarious, relevant and timely.”

Mr. Wilson’s unhinged drawings, which Robert Williams called “vulgarly lyrical,” are a cross between Bosch and Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” by way of the most gruesome EC comics. But Mr. Wilson, who stopped drawing after a severe brain injury in 2008, embraced his pornographic riffs. “Sex sells,” he says in the history, “and I like drawing dirty pictures.”

But not everyone admired how raw and feral Zap was. As its popularity grew — its first 16 issues are said to have sold more than three million copies over the decades — Zap attracted unwanted attention. It was part of a nationwide crackdown on the sale of undergrounds. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco were even busted in 1969 for selling Zap. “We got in a lot of trouble,” Mr. Williams said in a phone interview. “We were in the middle of a seditious act.”

Then there was the trouble with women.

As Mr. Crumb, Mr. Wilson, Mr. Williams and their buddies unleashed their raging ids, relishing dark abysses of sex, drugs and violence, some of their female peers accused them of casual sexism and worse. Mr. Crumb nods toward their collective guilt, a bit tongue-in-cheek, in the history. “As Trina [Robbins] says, I ruined comix by encouraging all the younger boy artists to be bad and do comics about their own horrible sex fantasies.”

The Seven Samurai of Zap: from left, Rick Griffin, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams, R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson and Victor Moscoso. Credit Suzanne Williams What Ms. Robbins, a cartoonist contemporary of Team Zap, said, as quoted in Mr. Rosenkranz’s indispensable history of the undergrounds, “Rebel Visions,” is:

“I objected from the very beginning to all the sexism, to the incredible misogyny.” She went on, “We’re talking about representation of rape and mutilation, and murder that involved women, as something funny.”

But Mr. Groth said: “You have to look at it historically. They were liberating themselves from all restraints. They were defiant, breaking taboos.”

Some female cartoonists, like the MacArthur Foundation fellow Alison Bechdel (“Fun Home”) and Lynda Barry (“One Hundred Demons”), who first read Zap as a seventh grader, cite the comic and Mr. Crumb as crucial influences. Ms. Barry devotes three pages in her book “What It Is” to discovering Zap, noting that she once copied the whole of Zap No. 0.

And, in a surprise, Mr. Crumb smuggled his current wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb — who half-jokingly calls herself the Yoko Ono of the undergrounds — into Zap No. 16. They share the work on the “Aline & Bob” full-page strips, the first time a female cartoonist has appeared in the comic.

An air of elegy hangs over Zap’s 84-page final issue, No. 16. The cover is Mr. Crumb’s, 46 years after his two solo blasts heard round the counterculture. It includes last stories by Mr. Wilson and Mr. Rodriguez, who died in 2012, and Mr. Moscoso’s muted back cover says, “Adiós.” It’s like attending one last high school reunion.

But these venerable iconoclasts say they’re fine with closing up shop on Zap. “After all, we’re dying,” Mr. Moscoso said. “This isn’t Walt Disney Enterprises, where it’s going to go on after we die.”

In the end, let’s give the last word to Mr. Crumb. Asked what he’s most proud of about Zap, which he lovingly called “crude, homemade and artistic,” he didn’t even pause for a half-moment:

“It’s authentic.”