![]() By banding together to produce Zap, they allowed access to the extremely diverse potentialities of the comics medium in a single comic book. These artists were responsible for a large chunk of the best of 1960s and ’70s comics. Clay Wilson, the brilliant artist of the grotesque a young hot-rodder and future Juxtapoz magazine founder Robert Williams the epic revolutionary cartoonist Spain Rodriguez the hilarious, underrated satirist Gilbert Shelton and the younger, anarchic cartoonist Paul Mavrides. Crumb published the great psychedelic designers Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso S. Īfter Crumb published two solo issues of Zap, he started releasing work by other prominent creators in the underground scene-not only cartoonists, but illustrators and poster artists. Without Crumb there might be no Art Spiegelman and no Maus, no Lynda Barry and The Good Times Are Killing Me, no Gilbert Hernandez and Love and Rockets. Underground comics fed the need, and the impact of his moves changed the medium forever. He found an audience hungry for picture stories that related to their own experiences. When these stores bit, Crumb inadvertently opened up a distribution door for hundreds of artists.Ĭrumb was the first to conceive of the comic book not as a genre but as a medium for anything. His psych-pop sensibility was appealing to the late-’60s crowd, specifically to those frequenting the head shops and hippie boutiques that were sprouting up and looking for something to sell next to the bongs and beads. Its success was founded on Crumb’s accomplished draftsmanship and surreal wit, as well as his shrewd commercial instincts. Underground comic books existed before 1968, but none had the potency or popularity of Zap Comix. Crumb, meanwhile, took the familiar mid-century comic book and messed with it, stripping it of its patriotic superheroes and huggable, funny animals and filling the pages instead with psychedelic and psychologically charged imagery. ![]() Duchamp used a familiar object-a bicycle wheel-and imbued it with new meaning by changing its context, placing the wheel in his studio as a work of art. ![]() He might deny it, but when Robert Crumb published Zap Comix number 1, in 1968, he invented a new form of art as surely as Marcel Duchamp did in 1913 when he made the first “ready-made” sculpture. ![]()
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