ZAP SPLITS! | PAGE 1, 2

This man -- his name is Gary Arlington -- had reason to be this furtive. Across town, at the very same time, proprietor and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti had already been busted for selling that very first issue of Zap at his bookstore, City Lights.

(City Lights, it should be said, always did have a way of hoarding all the good busts. From "Howl" to Zap, at City Lights you could almost see each new wave in the Cultural Revolution begin to cascade each time the cops arrived with the padlocks.)

The first three issues of Zap contained Robert Crumb's work exclusively. What were they about? At the time it wasn't easy to say. Drugs, certainly. In time the stories began to make sense as the hilarious sex fantasies of a really messed-up young guy who, through these books, would begin the long and difficult process of empowering fellow nerds long before Bill Gates ever came around.

By the fourth issue, Crumb's Zap comic book had become something of an industry unto itself. In No. 3 (which was the fourth one -- the first three issues were numbered 1, 2 and 0, in that order), Crumb took the opportunity to open his book to the work of a few contemporaries who seemed to be working out of the same vein of shock and outrage. Victor Moscoso, S. Clay Wilson and the late Rick Griffin joined the masthead. Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Williams joined soon after that.

And thus the Big Lineup was set. For the next 25 years Zap became the boss underground of all boss undergrounds. Other great mags would come and go -- Arcade, Raw, Weirdo, to name but a few -- but Zap would remain the place you simply had to go when the stench of fascism grew too close and you really wanted to hear the Big Dogs howl. Or just when you wanted to check out the latest depraved doings of the Checkered Demon.

In retrospect one wonders why the comic strip was reborn as such an important and powerful art form during those decades. Clearly one reason was the sheer cheapness of the form. If you were willing to put in the killer hours required to actually write and draw one of these books smartly, you could usually find an old web press somewhere in the neighborhood to run out a couple thousand copies of these books for a few hundred bucks.

The other big factor was that the undergrounds would remain uncensored. Truly uncensored.

Take two or three hundred graphically skilled, entirely dysfunctional children directly from the great underbelly of the American middle class, feed these children a diet of drugs scientists haven't even gotten around to finding a name for yet and then ask them to create the look of their actual fears and trepidations about their place in a world ruled by monster Cold War politicians, and what you got were the undergrounds.

Ninety-five percent of this work would never, of course, rise above the level of psychotic child art cravings. But the 5 percent that did is clearly something. That 5 percent belongs to the best traditions of visionary and eccentric American art. And we understand much better today that the line separating the art of Crumb, or Moscoso, or Williams, from the "legitimate" artists of the period is very narrow indeed. Sometimes nonexistent.

"Comics," Art Spiegelman has said, "is about creating pictures that actually talk." Pictures that actually talk. Can you feel the fundamental excitement there? In film it takes us all the way back to the work of Georges Méliès.

The independent comics movement is still a great place to grow up, if you aspire to being a magician.

And so it remained for all these years; even as, in the margins of course, everything else utterly and completely changed. In particular: Crumb was lifted from the ranks of his fellow cartoonists by the Fickle Bitch Goddess of American Success and singled out for fame and attention and pile after pile of green dollar bills to an extent unmatched by any other comic artist of his generation.

And that distancing lies behind the sad, semiviolent tale unfolded, in unreliable, "Rashomon"-like fashion, in the latest issue of Zap.

Zap No. 14 begins like many earlier issues. There is the minimal, enigmatic, poetic Moscoso; the sexy, romantic and historically informed Spain; and the congenitally outrageous, over-the-top Wilson. (This reader in particular finds the new Wilson character Beautiful Bubba such a true garbage heap of a character that his stench can almost be smelled rising, like the smell of warmed-over Brazilian dogshit, straight off the page.) Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will, draw characters like this better than S. Clay Wilson.

No, all is just about normal for Zap, until the reader encounters the three two-page stories that appear at the back of the book.

The stories, which are reprinted below, speak for themselves. It should be made clear that it was AFTER the incident in question that Crumb decided to fulfill any lingering debt he owed Zap by creating his story "I've Had It." When his colleagues read that story, they decided to respond in kind.

Is this the end of the road for Zap? Who knows? Jerry Garcia died, but the Dead still live on, albeit with a new name. What is known is that the cartoonists who write and draw Zap need to write and draw new stories as much as ducks need water, or birds need air, or, for that matter, capitalism seems to sooner or later make a mess out of most working relationships.

Perhaps, in modern America, Crumb is right: 29 years is a long time for one gang of outlaws to run together. But how wonderful that this particular run of this particular blessed gang of outlaws, is forever enshrined in the 14 issues of Zap, the greatest underground comic book of all time.
SALON | Sept. 3, 1998

Bob Callahan is the co-founder, with Art Spiegelman, of the illustrated crime novel series Neon Lit and the editor of the "New Comics Anthology." He is the creator, with artists Spain Rodriguez, Paul Mavrides and Justin Green, of the comic noir trilogy "Dark Hotel," which will (finally! and really!) premiere in Salon on Sept. 25.

To purchase a copy of Zap Comix, postage and handling included, send $6 to Last Gasp, 777 Florida St., San Francisco CA 94110. You must include a statement that you are at least 18 years of age. Most orders are shipped within two weeks. Send an additional dollar to receive a 300-page catalog of 10,000 books and comics.

The 30th Anniversary issue of Zap Comix, No. 14, will be on display in an art exhibition at Lawrence Hultberg Fine Art, 544 Hayes St., San Francisco, Jan. 6-30, 1999, with an opening reception on Jan. 14 at 5:30 p.m.