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Sunday, March 20, 2005
Zap Comix #15
It's about time I got around to one of these big reviews I like doing.
It rarely happens, but the Zap crew has yet again gotten together to turn out some cartoons that can be safely described as “underground.” Zap is one of the most important titles in all of comics, it being the first real hit of the underground comix movement and inspiring countless cartoonists to create art for art’s sake. With the fifteenth issue of the book (over the course of five decades) we find Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Victor Moscoso and others still turning in great work.
This is a flip book that can be read from wither back to front so I’ll just start with the side that has the legal indicia on the inside cover. The cover and following pages by Paul Mavrides displays an artist whose work finds the psychedelic in rigid complexity. The title on the cover is created through a grid of three-dimensional boxes and inside we find wildly different depictions of the human skull. Mavrides gives us there first comic of the book “Jesus Fucking Christ!” where the mind-bending artwork for which Zap is known for is on full display as beautifully drawn yet abstract blobs and what looks like tree roots swear at each other in with various obscenities. It’s one of those perfect strips for Zap, as the book has been known for it’s LSD-inspired content as well as its indulgence of the profane. This comic mixes both of those in a pretty interesting way.
The most well known artist in the book and the comic’s creators comes next with “Walkin’ The Streets.” Here Crumb starts off with his anti-social worldview (he hates humanity yet lusts madly after the female side of it) and then grows into an exploration of his immensely dysfunctional family, where his outsider disposition was encouraged through osmosis. He and his brother Charles live in there heads as they speak philosophy to each other, much to their father’s chagrin. The former marine is driven to anger by seeing his sons be such wimps. Charles and Robert don’t stop with their activities (or lack of them). It seems like the only escape they have from a family where the diet-pill addicted mother will occasionally scratch up Dad’s face and the racist grandmother won’t stop even for Charles’ black friend. Charles’ suicide in 1992 is brought up in the strip through a moment where Crumb dreams his brother in the after life. It might be one of the sweetest things Crumb has ever put on paper, but he quickly deflates any sentiment (could you imagine any in a Crumb comic in the first place?) by adding at the end “don’t worry, I haven’t turned into a true believer. Not yet, anyway.” At the end Crumb tells us that his days of ponderous self-pity and the street walking it breeds has ended for him after being a part of most of his life. It’s up to the reader to decide how much confidence they’re going to put into that when Crumb’s whole personality seems defined by his neuroses, but it’s nice to think he has gotten somewhere more comfortable in his life.
Further on in the book we get pieces by S. Clay Wilson and Victor Moscoso, two cartoonists who have been with the book since issue number one. I’ve always felt that Wilson was the weakest link in the early issues of Zap but by now his art style has evolved to catch up with the mirthful bad taste his work revels in. The light line along with pages packed to the rafters with anarchy overwhelms the readers’ senses so that the very fact that Wilson came up with the pages is enough to offend most people. That’s probably why they’re some of the most joyful highlights of the book. Moscoso work continues to be unique and a fine example of the power of cartooning. Strips like “Blobman The Magician” and the centerpiece “Dante and the River of Lethe” (which completes the flip book part of the comic as it can be read from both ways) is what people expect from the man by now: simple figures of shapes living and playing a world that is part acid trip and part classic newspaper strip. They break away from the stereotype that people have of underground comix by being very breezy and fun. Moscoso fits right in, though, because his work is just as committed to self-expression, the artists’ liberation, as every other strip in the book is. It’s on “Dante’s Inferno” that we see Moscoso doing something different with his techniques. Moscoso uses collages reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Python work, although the nonsensical situations and strong rhythms still remain.
The main attraction in the book is the two-page jam strip “Circle o’ Jerks.” Crumb, Rodriguez, Mavrides, Moscoso, Wilson, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Willaims combine their talents for a fast paced and barley coherent story that makes up for it what it lacks in narrative with sheer energy and anger. The most political strip in the book, it’s good to see cartoonists that once railed against Nixon now have no trouble setting their sights on our far more toxic president and the world he has created. Abu Ghraib is depicted as well as robot soldier willing to send anyone whose name sounds like Noam Chomsky to “Gitmo.” The anger on display is exhilarating. What could have been an equivalent to those boring old “all-star jams” instead ends up being the comic book equivalent of The MC5’s “The American Ruse.”
After Moscoso’s center piece strip that flips itself over the other half of the book’s contents are found. Gilberton Shelton has his Wonder Warthog character on the cover so it’s no surprise that’s what the readers get him for the first strip on this side of the book (after a fine inside cover by Rodriguez depicting an NYC late 70’s street side). Shelton’s strip, “The Warthog that Came In from the Cold,” continues the spirit of Kurtzman and Wood’s “Superduperman.” Philbert Desanex finds he can no longer change into his superhero alter ego. He takes his problems to a psychologist but it’s only after Philbert’s humiliation in public, complete with even more angry political satire, do we find how WW gets back in the picture. The strip, with its theme of rejuvenation through anger, feels right in a book with a long history of outrageousness but one that is rarely seen. Just like WW, Shelton and the rest of the Zap crew “come back from the dead” to indulge in whatever they please.
Rodriguez turns in a fine autobiographical strip about his days with a Buffalo motorcycle gang. He can create a sense of character and setting in a clean and unpretentious way. Rodriguez is a great yarn-spinner and this comic feels just as good as if the man was telling it to you over drinks, complete with the funny ending where it feels as if Rodriguez was chuckling to himself when he was drawing it.
Zap #15 is a comic that might feel out of time for some. There is, after all, no underground movement anymore. It’s a testament that the cartoonists involve don’t need to be living in a particular decade or environment to create fine underground work. It was always about the assemblage of creativity and the current issue of Zap proves that as good as any other issue.
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