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Founded by Robert Crumb, Zap is one of the most well-known underground comix, yet comics studies scholarship has not focused as much on underground serials like Zap as it has on single-author works or superhero serials. In this chapter, Daniel Worden accounts for how Zap responded to and represented the political and social struggles of its moments, from the 1960s to 1970s counterculture to the increasing legitimacy of the comics medium in the 2000s, as well as how the series seems to matter to the history of comics, periodicals, and politics today (especially since Zap was recently reprinted in its entirety by Fantagraphics Books). A synthesis of forces have made a series like Zap newly relevant as a complicated but nonetheless “usable past,” and those forces include the interest in exploring diversity in comics history now that comics have become a legitimate object in academia and the art museum; a return to gender and racial identity as a nexus of political struggle owing to the visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement and an upsurge of misogynistic nativism in American politics; and, a continued interest in alternative comics that has been fueled by the availability of amateur digital comics publishing to a new generation of aspiring comic artists. In short Zap matters just as much as a reprinted archive as it did at the time of its initial publication. And ultimately, the series makes evident how the amateur, expressive aesthetic of many underground comix both represent political struggles as personal and structural, and serve as devices for community formation.

From his work on underground comix like Zap and Weirdo from the 1960s through to the 2000s, to his cultural prominence, Robert Crumb is one of the most renowned comics artists in the medium’s history. And, through his involvement in music, animation, and documentary film projects, Crumb is a widely recognized persona, an artist who has defined the vocation of the cartoonist. This introduction contextualizes Crumb within late twentieth-century comics and arts cultures.

Using critical tools drawn from visual rhetoric, gender studies, and comics studies, chapter contributor Ian Blechschmidt examines how Robert Crumb’s comics during the underground comix boom constructed a normative ideal of masculine agency through their images, narratives, and gags. The chapter argues that the comics’ appeals to “authenticity” were shaped by broadly shared anxieties about disappearing opportunities for performing “manly,” individual agency. Unlike much previous scholarship on Crumb’s work, this chapter seeks to take a more critical approach to the way that Crumb’s work imagines the performance and stakes of authenticity by underscoring how that imagining is rooted in deep, very old, and in many ways very current understandings of what it means to perform masculinity in the United States. Though it does not attempt to “debunk” claims to Crumb’s subversiveness, this paper takes seriously Stuart Hall’s reminder that no text is wholly, inherently, or permanently subversive. And while Crumb’s underground comix may have spoken back against some aspects of mainstream American masculinity, one ought not forget the ways in which they thoroughly reinscribed others.

During a short period in the 1960s, the comic book industry underwent a creative phase the effects of which still linger in the early twenty-first century. The industry’s new commercial and cultural dynamic coalesced around Marvel Comics and DC Comics, the two leading publishers at the time, and the superhero genre. In addition, a new conception of comic books, epitomized by the first generation of creators that had grown up with them, emerged. The newcomers overhauled the codes and contents of the medium, the most radical among them producing the first “underground” comics, also known as comix. This chapter examines the comic book industry’s age of innovation, which spanned the years 1963 to 1969. It looks at the rebirth of the superhero genre, led by Batman, and the rise of comix as a direct emanation of the independent press that appeared in the wake of the counterculture—that is, the ideological, social, and cultural rebellion of many baby boomers. It also discusses the industry’s evolution that gave pride of place to comics artists.

Despite a reputation for unsentimental, sardonic, sex-based satire, Robert Crumb has consistently voiced distress over the state of the natural world over the course of his career, and especially the role of modern consumerism in its destruction. As he told an interviewer in 2015, “all that stuff, the whole ecological crisis and all that. That worries me.” Part of an under-studied environmentalist strain in US underground comix, reflected in the work of, among others, Ron Cobb and Ron Turner’s series Slow Death Funnies (1970), Crumb’s “ecological angst” appears throughout his oeuvre, in both explicit and figurative forms. In this chapter, José Alaniz explores how Robert Crumb can be viewed as an ironic elegist for nature’s collapse in the Anthropocene.

In this chapter, Paul Sheehan argues that Crumb’s unrestrained “working-through” of bizarre, grotesque, often obscene sexual imagery and situations—supposedly a way of articulating his darkest fantasies and desires—is not the touchstone or bedrock of his political awareness. Appearances to the contrary, the disturbing sexual politics implicit in the work is a symptom, rather than a cause, which conceals a more deep-seated concern. Crumb’s most extreme and confronting images and subject matter are attempts to reconcile his anarchist suspicion and skepticism of all forms of authority, and his despairing recognition that any challenge to these forms is doomed to fail—to be crushed, co-opted, watered down or deviously ‘absorbed’. In this reading Crumb is, then, a kind of disenchanted political utopian. His work is fired by the tension between a radical anti-authoritarianism that accords with the counter-cultural desire to find a space outside or beyond the reach of state power; and a resigned awareness that such a space cannot be established in the corrupt and corrupting world of capitalist modernity.

The comic book industry underwent dramatic changes in the 1970s, when the large publishers failed to arrest declining sales despite saturating the market with hundreds of new titles. It was also during this decade that the underground movement experienced phenomenal growth until 1973 and subsequently adjusted to the influx of artists who were in pursuit of creative independence yet external to the countercultural agenda. The industry’s restructuring took place at the same time that distribution networks underwent a major overhaul. The neighborhood and retail outlets that had been the main suppliers of comic books for the past thirty years witnessed the emergence of a new distribution system by the mid-1970s that could cope with the economic demands of the first comic book specialty stores. This chapter examines trends in the comic book industry from 1969 to 1979, first by describing its instability during the 1970s and how comics became relevant again. It discusses the introduction of a number of variations in the superhero genre by publishers such as DC Comics and Marvel Comics, the release of comic book adaptations of movies and television series, the decline of underground comics, and the emergence of cartoonists who desired freedom of expression that was refused to them by the mainstream publishers.

This introduction presents a brief biography of Joe Sacco and survey of his work as a comics artist. It also evaluates Sacco’s contribution to alternative comics, the New Journalism, comics journalism, and war literature. It concludes with a summary of the essays contained in the book.

Readership is a reflection of the legitimation of comic books not only in terms of consumption preferences relative to mass cultural media forms, but also in terms of the general public’s perception of comic books. Legitimation is closely coupled with the “visibility” of a media, if visibility is defined by the occurrence of allusions to it in larger media discourses. Paradoxically, comic books enjoyed the greatest visibility during the period 1945–1955, when they were the targets of all kinds of censorship. This chapter focuses on the readers of comic books by tackling the question of knowing who read comics. It looks at comics readers during the Great Depression, the Golden Age of comic books, the impact of television on comic book reading, the emergence of underground comics along with an adolescent-adult readership, and the composition of comic book readership in the 1980s.

In this chapter, Julian Lawrence adopts an “a/r/tographical methodology” to research and create an 8-10 page comics essay that investigates the ways R. Crumb challenges scholars in an age of political correctness. This visual essay combines autobiographical, theoretical, and methodological reflections on Crumb’s influence on a young artist, Crumb’s engagement with gender and sexuality, and the multifaceted ways to approach Crumb’s comics.

This book has shown that the cultural history of comic books in America is not limited to the history of publishers. Instead, cultural products correspond to a public that uses them in a variety of ways. Since the 1950s, the comic book industry has witnessed a transformation of its readers. The appearance of “graphic novels” finally allowed for the emergence of works that are sold in bookstores, where “real” books are. In addition to helping eradicate much of the stigma that comic books have endured as products primarily destined for boys enduring an extended adolescence, graphic novels enabled comics to shift toward the field of “adult culture” and inscribed the medium into a commercial life that was unrelated to the monthly periodicity of comic books. Comic books saw the rise of the superhero genre that was embedded in American popular culture since the end of the 1930s. The cultural legitimation of American comics proved beneficial to the heirs of underground comics.