Planet of Sound 2: More Essays From the Rock and Roll Globe Era (2021-2023)

Planet of Sound 2 is the second collection of rants, raves, and reviews penned by award-winning rock critic and music historian Rev. Keith A. Gordon. Originally published by the Rock and Roll Globe and Book and Film Globe websites, the Reverend covers a wide range of rock and blues music with these 33 essays.

From well-known artists like John Lee Hooker, Lou Reed, Muddy Waters, The Kinks, Edgar Winter, and the Georgia Satellites to lesser-known talents like Joe Grushecky, The Jazz Butcher, Randy California, and Willy DeVille, the Reverend explores the history of these artists and places their legacies into proper context. Planet of Sound 2 also includes several book reviews that delve into the history of the underground comix of the 1970s.

The “Reverend of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Rev. Keith A. Gordon has been writing about classic rock and blues music for 50 years. A former contributor to the All Music Guide, and the former ‘Blues Expert’ for About.com, Gordon has written for over 100 publications worldwide, including Creem, Blurt magazine, Goldmine, Blues Music magazine, High Times, The Blues (U.K.), and Live! Music Review. The Reverend has also written or edited 26 previous music-related books, including The Jimi Hendrix Reader, The Other Side of Nashville, and and Anarchy In The Music City!

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Book Review: R. Crumb’s The Complete Record Cover Collection (2011)

Cartoonist Robert Crumb came to prominence during the 1960s, contributing significantly to the birth and evolution of underground “comix” with his highly-stylized and uniquely-exaggerated artwork. One of the founders of Zap Comix, Crumb created the nearly-ubiquitous “Keep On Truckin’“ comic, which would become a 1970s pop culture icon, as well as such memorable counter-culture characters as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and the Devil Girl.

Crumb is also among the most controversial illustrators of his era, often slammed by critics for the purported misogynist nature of many of his sexually-charged, fantasy-fueled strips. Charges of racism have also been leveled against Crumb, who is guilty at a minimum of racial insensitivity for his stereotyped portrayals of African-American men and women. None of these criticisms dilute a powerful and prolific body of work, however, Crumb’s mainstream comics such as American Splendor – in collaboration with writer Harvey Pekar – or The Book of Genesis, the artist’s interpretation of Bible stories, rising to the level of genius.    

R. Crumb’s The Complete Record Cover Collection

Seldom mentioned in any discussion of Crumb’s artistic milieu is his love of music and his work in preserving the history of the blues, jazz, and country music. An enthusiastic collector with an impressive library of 78rpm recordings in the aforementioned genres, Crumb is also a semi-professional musician. R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders – a revolving roster of like-minded amateur instrumentalists that has included fellow cartoonist Robert Armstrong and filmmaker Terry Zwigoff – have released three albums of old-timey blues, jazz, bluegrass, and swing music from the 1920s and ‘30s. Crumb played mandolin with the East River String Band on several recordings, and has also put together a number of compilation albums featuring songs culled from his personal collection of 78s.  

Crumb is also well-known, albeit underrated, as an illustrator of record album covers. Working in a medium where, perhaps, illustrator William Stout is his only rival, Crumb has brought a unique aesthetic to his album cover artwork that is both steeped in tradition and informed by the underground cartoon work he created in the 1960s. The best of Crumb’s album cover and other music-oriented artwork has been gathered in a collectors’ edition titled The Complete Album Cover Collection. A beautifully-illustrated, sparsely-annotated, roughly 10” square hardback (around the size of a 78rpm record), Crumb’s work is certainly to be of interest to any fan of old-school blues and jazz music.

Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills

Perhaps Crumb’s best-known album cover is Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills, the 1968 album that introduced the world to singer Janis Joplin. Featuring a series of panels that depict the album’s song titles, the cover draws its inspiration from the psychedelic ‘60s San Francisco rock scene that the band came up in, and is actually one of Crumb’s least-entertaining covers. More inspired is the artist’s cover for the 1976 compilation Harmonica Blues, an album of blues, jazz, and country harmonica performances from the 1920s and ‘30s that, while sparse at first glance, perfectly frames a solitary figure walking down a long country road, presumably in the south, playing away on his harmonica, his back turned to the viewer. Created for Crumb’s friend Nick Perls, who owned Yazoo Records, it is a work of enduring elegance.

Through the years, Crumb would draw almost a dozen-and-a-half album covers for Yazoo releases, many of them included in The Complete Album Cover Collection and nearly all of them similarly inspired works. Among my personal favorites is the cover for the Blind Boy Fuller collection Truckin’ My Blues Away, the Casey Bill Weldon and Kokomo Arnold collection Bottleneck Guitar Trendsetters of the 1930s, and the label’s History of Jazz compilation. Crumb also did some brilliant work for other labels, including archival specialists Arhoolie Records and Barrelhouse Records, the latter label’s Maxwell Street Alley Blues a two-toned marvel.

Crumb’s immersion in music illustration doesn’t begin and end with the aforementioned album covers. The Complete Album Cover Collection also displays a wealth of Crumb artwork, including logos for labels like Ordinary Records, Blue Goose, and Oboy Records as well as the actual album labels themselves, advertisements, artist portraits, and more. His illustrations for Michael Bloomfield’s “Me And Big Joe” article, which originally appeared in High Times magazine, will have me scouring eBay for a copy of the 1980 issue. Not all of Crumb’s works are strictly illustrated, either, covers for the Cheap Suit Serenaders albums integrating antique-looking photos with colorful drawn artwork.       

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

The Complete Album Cover Collection won’t appeal to all blues fans, and some may be offended by Crumb’s bawdier, more suggestive artwork (mostly PG-13 by today’s standards, but also some R-rated material contained herein). There is surprisingly little art duplicated here from Crumb’s Heroes of the Blues trading cards (and accompanying jazz and country sets), or from the hardback cover collection of the cards. For those who appreciate Crumb’s musical obsessions, however, The Complete Album Cover Collection would make a welcome addition to any blues book collection. (W.W. Norton & Company, 96-page hardback, published November 7, 2011)

Also on That Devil Music: R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country book review

Buy the book from Amazon: R. Crumb’s The Complete Record Cover Collection  

Book Review: R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country (2006)

Cartoonist Robert Crumb is one of the most talented and controversial artists to rise out of the underground comix scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. One of the founding artists of Zap Comix and the creator of such counter-culture icons as Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat, Crumb is also the writer and illustrator of The Book of Genesis, a best-selling collection of Bible stories. The subject of the award-winning 1995 documentary Crumb by filmmaker Terry Zwigoff, Crumb is one of America’s best-known and notorious artists.

Crumb is an obsessive record collector, his tastes running towards blues, jazz, and hillbilly music from the 1920s and ‘30s, as well as semi-professional musician with a handful of albums to his credit with his band R. Crumb and the Cheap Suit Serenaders. As shown by the 2011 hardback book, The Complete Album Cover Collection, Crumb is also a talented album cover illustrator and designer, bringing his unique, 1960s-forged aesthetic to bear on covers from the familiar Big Brother & the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills album (featuring a young Janis Joplin) to better than a dozen vintage archival releases from Yazoo Records, his own Cheap Suit Serenaders records, and many others.    

R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country

Crumb’s fascination with old-timey music hit its peak in the creation of his musician trading card sets during the early 1980s. Originally drawn from rare studio and family photographs, the art was created with an eye towards reproduction as 1950s-and-60s-styled bubblegum trading cards to be included with Yazoo Records album releases. As Crumb’s friend and former Cheap Suit Serenader Zwigoff writes in his introduction to the R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country book, Yazoo owner (and fellow record collector) Nick Perls would instead package the cards in individual sets in order to give him something new to sell to supplement his meager income from LP sales.

“Heroes of the Blues,” a 36-card set, was the first to be completed by Crumb in 1980, followed by 1982’s “Early Jazz Greats,” another 36-card set, and 1985’s “Pioneers of Country Music,” a sumptuous 40-card set. The color artwork for all 112 trading cards has been collected in R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country, an entertaining 240-page hardback book that includes all of the text from the original cards, as well as a 21-track CD that offers seven songs from each of the featured musical genres, culled from Perls’ collection and originally released by Yazoo Records.

Heroes of the Blues

While both the country and jazz sets include some incredible Crumb artwork, it’s the “Heroes of the Blues” section of R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country that we’ll mostly concern ourselves with here. A total of 36 vintage bluesmen (and women) are portrayed by Crumb’s brush, some more intricate than others (depending on the original photographic source material, I guess), each accompanied by in-depth biographical information provided by blues historian Stephen Calt, author of the acclaimed Skip James biography, I’d Rather Be The Devil. The original 3”x4” trading card art is nudged up slightly to a size of roughly 5”x7” with no loss in brilliance or detail, and Crumb does an excellent job in capturing the spirit of the musicians portrayed.

“Heroes of the Blues” champions both well-known artists like Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Memphis Minnie, Mississippi John Hurt, and Skip James alongside the lesser-known bluesmen of the era like Furry Lewis, Peetie Wheatstraw, Tommy Johnson, and Rube Lacey. Crumb’s portraits of blues legends like Son House, Charley Patton, and Blind Willie Johnson are particularly striking, and would be welcome as fine art prints in the homes of many old-school blues fans.

The jazz and country sections of R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country are equally inspired and informative. Among the better-known early jazzmen portrayed are Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman, while less-familiar jazz artists such as guitarist Eddie Lang and trumpet player King Oliver – both major influences on blues music – are provided a similar level of respect by the artist. Among the important early country artists included in that section are the influential Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Uncle Dave Macon, and “Dock” Boggs, among others. Biographical text for these cards was provided by music historians David Jasen and Rich Nevins, respectively.   

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Robert Crumb’s painted artwork for the three card sets collected by R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country is nothing short of brilliant, and would appeal to any fan of early American roots music, as well as Crumb fanatics and comic art collectors. The historical and biographical text accompanying each card serves to whet the reader’s appetite for more information on the artists, as Crumb brings a true record collector’s enthusiasm and zeal to each portrait.
The 21-song CD accompanying the book is a bonus, the tracks chosen by Crumb himself and including rare 78rpm recordings from blues artists like Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton, and Frank Strokes as well as country pioneers like “Dock” Boggs and jazz legends King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. Altogether, R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country is a treasure of American music, preserving the past for future generations. (Abrams Comicarts, 240-page hardback w/CD, published November 1, 2006)

Also on That Devil Music: R. Crumb’s The Complete Record Cover Collection book review

Buy the book from Amazon: R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country

Book Review: Zap Comix #16 (2016)

When the Reverend was a wee teen back in the dark ages of the early ‘70s, I was enamored of underground comix. I had been raised on a steady diet of Marvel and DC superheroes (Daredevil, Black Panther, The Avengers, and Batman) during my single-digit years, so it wasn’t such a large leap to dive headfirst into characters like Mr. Natural, the Checkered Demon, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. The day that I discovered Zap Comix is the day that my life took a left turn into a surrealist anti-authoritarianism that I’ve dragged with me well into (late) middle age.

After seeing an advertisement in the back of an issue looking for people to sell comix, I contacted all the major underground publishers and soon became Nashville’s resident “college sales rep” for The Print Mint, Last Gasp, and Rip Off Press. I fed my own growing comix addiction by placing new issues on consignment at Hillsboro Village head shops near Vanderbilt University, using the profits to pay for my own comix. It was a pretty good gig for a year or so as the publishers were cranking out new issues at a prolific rate. About the time that I graduated from high school in 1975, the bottom fell out of the underground comix biz and I drifted into other hustles (like writing…).
 

Zap Comix No. 16

Zap Comix was the granddaddy of all undergrounds, the ground-breaking, earth-shaking first shot across the bow that proved that comix were a legit art form, and funny books were not just for kids anymore. Artist/writer Robert Crumb published Zap #1 in 1968, selling copies out of a baby buggy on the streets of San Francisco. The success of the first issue led to Crumb enlisting a number of talented friends to contribute to the second issue. Thus was the Zap collective created – ringleader Crumb along with artists S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Williams, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin – all of whom would be responsible for creating and carrying Zap Comix into the new millennium.

Through the decades, new issues of Zap Comix would appear more sporadically, often at three-to-five-year intervals between issues, some seven years elapsing between issues fourteen and fifteen. Griffen died in 1991, and artist Paul Mavrides was added to the team when Crumb announced that he no longer wanted to do Zap. The revolutionary publication was honored in December 2014 when a deluxe box set collecting all seventeen issues of Zap Comix was published by Fantagraphics Books. A previously unpublished final issue – Zap Comix No. 16 – was included in the box set as a bonus, and has since been published as a stand-alone graphic novel with fetching Robert Crumb cover art.

Unable to cough up nearly $500 for The Complete Zap Comix Box Set, it was with great anticipation that I ordered up a copy of Zap Comix No. 16. Since I’d owned and/or read virtually the entire run of the publication, I knew that the zine could be spotty and inconsistent – Victor Moscoso’s work generally bored me, and S. Clay Wilson’s shotgun approach to pen ‘n’ ink hits the target as often as it misses – but nothing could have prepared me for the mess that is Zap Comix No. 16. The first issue to include material from all eight Zap artist between two covers, it should have been glorious, but the results often make one wish that some of these guys had retired earlier.

Wonder Warthog & The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

First on the chopping block is Crumb, who readily admits that he’s out of practice on these strips drawn in 2003 and 2004, and it certainly looks it (the book’s cover, drawn in 2014, is a fine return to form, however). Although Crumb’s storytelling skills remain intact, his art here is crude and hesitant, lacking his characteristic energy and on-page charisma. Sneaking his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb into the book as its first female artist is less subversive than it is lazy, a way to flesh out autobiographical stories with her flat, unattractive, one-dimensional artwork shoehorned into the panels. I have nothing again distaff artists, but if Crumb wanted to include a woman’s work in this final Zap in order to combat the book’s often-criticized misogyny, perhaps he could have found somebody other than his wife, who jokes that she’s the “Yoko Ono” of underground comix.  

Worse yet are S. Clay Wilson’s contributions to this final issue of Zap Comix. Wilson’s long-running characters like the Checkered Demon and Captain Pissgums were seldom the epitome of subtlety, drawn in a rude and crude B&W style that matched Wilson’s raw but spellbinding storytelling. But the strips here, dated 2006, 2007, and 2009, showcase a significant deterioration of the man’s skills. Wilson suffered severe brain trauma in a 2008 accident, and he has been plagued with health issues since that have left him unable to draw. His 2009 efforts, though, are just bad; simplistic and uglier than normal. One guesses that they were included in order to generate some royalties for the tragically sidelined artist.    

This is not to say that all of Zap Comix No. 16 is bad, as there are a few gems to be found among the sludge. Spain Rodriguez’s stories feature the sort of dense, detailed art and gritty storytelling that he’s long been known for, and his tales of the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club are always welcome. Disturbingly, though, Rodriguez’s art is cluttered with un-erased pencil lines for some reason, and faces in some panels were left inexplicitly un-inked. The final Wonder Warthog story by the legendary Gilbert Shelton is one of the book’s color sections and it’s a real hoot, as is Crumb’s four-color “The Unbearable Tediousness of Being,” which displays a spark of his talent. Shelton’s Furry Freak Brothers story – “Phineas Becomes A Suicide Bomber” – was inked by the artist for the deluxe box set but this version was inked by Paul Mavrides. Either way, it’s a classic Freak Brothers farce with the ever-serious Phineas, as always, as the fool.  
              

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Overall, I’d have to say that Zap Comix No. 16 is a mediocre collection that might have been so much more. Perhaps his own less-than-stellar work is what caused Crumb to shelf the issue in the first place, and maybe it’s merely the last gasp from a formerly revolutionary group of artists and writers that have long since been eclipsed by the subsequent generations they influenced and inspired to pick up pen and ink.

The trade paperback format is perfect for this sort of collection, and I’d love to see Fantagraphics publish the other fifteen issues of Zap in similar graphic novel form (three or four issues per book) for those of us who can’t cough up half-a-yard for the limited-edition box set. Considering the uninspired mix of material found in Zap Comix No. 16, I can only recommend the book for hardcore comix collectors. The rest of you should instead dig up some of the early issues to find out why Crumb called his Zap brethren “the baddest gang of cartoonists ever to wield their crow quills together.” Grade: C (Fantagraphics Book, published February 22, 2016)

Book Review: Fantagraphics' Zap The Interviews (2015)

Maybe it wasn’t the first underground comic book, but Zap Comix was undeniably the most important and influential title to emerge from the 1960s. Zap’s free-wheeling storytelling and frequently anarchic artwork – which ranged from cartoonish to crude, and from psychedelic to carefully-crafted fine art – shattered the limitations of what a comic book could be. Unabashedly adult in nature, with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll filling its pages, Zap opened the door for comic artists to experiment in the pages of mainstream titles published by DC and Marvel as well as influencing a generation of young creators like Jaime Hernandez (Love & Rockets) and Daniel Clowes (Eightball), among many others.

Zap Comix

The first issue of Zap was published by artist/writer Robert Crumb in 1968, Crumb and his wife selling copies of Zap #1 out of a baby stroller on the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The book kick-started the underground comix business and it wasn’t long until head shops and other counter-culture retailers were stocking titles like Zap Comix, Dopin’ Dan, Young Lust, and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

Given the popularity of Zap #1, Crumb decided to open up the book to other artists, enlisting talents like Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, and Victor Moscoso to bring creative diversity to the book. This visionary group of creators became known as the Zap collective and they shared equally in the subsequent success of the book, which saw new issues published sporadically every few years. Even after the underground comix “boom” fizzled out during the mid-1970s due to too many books and not enough talent to sustain them, Zap just kept on truckin’…

Artist Paul Mavrides, known for his incredible work for the Church of Sub-Genius, was brought on board after Rick Griffin’s tragic death in a motorcycle accident in 1991, and Crumb himself left the title in the 1990s. Spain Rodriguez succumbed to cancer in 2012, and health problems have left S. Clay Wilson unable to draw, so it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see another new issue of Zap Comix. Over the course of 15 mind-blowing issues, however, Zap influenced not only mainstream and alternative comics, but also concert posters, album covers, animation, and even fine art as well as introducing timeless characters like Crumb’s incorrigible Mr. Natural, Wilson’s Checkered Demon, and Shelton’s Wonder Wart-Hog to readers.

Zap: The Interviews

In 2014, Fantagraphics Books published an ultra-deluxe box set that includes beautiful reproductions of all 15 issues of Zap Comix as well as a previously-unpublished 16th issue. While the set includes an extensive oral history of Zap as well as an artist portfolio and other heretofore unseen goodies, its hefty $500 price tag puts it beyond the reach of all but the most well-heeled of comics and art collectors. Hopefully Fantagraphics will see its way clear to reprint the comix themselves in paperback versions for those of us of more modest means.

While The Complete Zap Comix box raised the title to fine art status, the set garnering an impressive amount of publicity upon its release, another Zap-related title was published by Fantagraphics around the same time but to much less fanfare. The ninth volume in the company’s acclaimed “Comics Journal Library,” Zap: The Interviews is a highly-collectible tome in its own right. An oversized (10”x12”) trade paperback running some 264 pages, the profusely-illustrated volume collects previously-published interviews with the eight different Zap artists from the pages of The Comics Journal, as well as a number of unpublished interviews, conversations that range from as long ago as 1972 (the first Gilbert Shelton interview) to as recent as 2012 (including what may have been Spain Rodriguez’s final interview).

There’s a lot of meat in the 264 pages of Zap: The Interviews. One might think that Robert Crumb as, perhaps, the most famous of the Zap artists, would receive a lion’s share of the book, but that’s not the case. The erudite and outspoken S. Clay Wilson and Spain Rodriguez receive nearly as much or more ink than Crumb, and only Gilbert Shelton – at a mere fourteen pages – seems to be shorted here. Plenty of each artist’s work is reproduced in the extra-large volume, providing a visual touchstone for readers unfamiliar with an individual Zap contributor’s work.

Robert Crumb & Spain Rodriguez

Crumb’s lengthy interview, from 1988, is both informative and entertaining, and while I personally would like to have seen a more updated conversation with the artist included here, there’s plenty of other material available for those wanting to discover more about Crumb (and, in fact, Fantagraphics publishes numerous Crumb collections worthy of spending your hard-earned coin upon). Other Zap contributors haven’t achieved nearly the level of fame and notoriety of Mr. Crumb, so it was particularly gratifying to find several interviews with Spain Rodriguez – one of my personal faves – by The Comics Journal’s Gary Groth and underground comix historian Patrick Rosenkranz.

Covering Rodriguez’s childhood in Buffalo NY through his time with the Road Vultures motorcycle gang and his eventual move to the West Coast and Zap Comix, there are 50+ pages here on Spain, providing invaluable insight into his art, his left-leaning working class politics, and the overall unique worldview which colored his gritty, often ultra-futuristic art. The section on S. Clay Wilson is also lengthy, but nowhere near as interesting, as multiple interviews spanning a couple of decades tread a lot of same turf, with Wilson often repeating his stories, sometimes with interesting flourishes, and while these conversations do open a window to Wilson’s blood ‘n’ guts style of artwork, they also become exhausting to read.

Rick Griffin & Victor Moscoso

The initial interview with Rick Griffin is also somewhat mundane, although subsequent conversations offer some fascinating nuggets. Griffin was already a well-known psychedelic concert poster artist and surfer legend when he hooked up with Zap, but he seems somewhat reticent in sharing himself with his interviewers in the same manner as Rodriguez or Wilson. That’s definitely not the case with Victor Moscoso, whose brash manner and confidence were a refreshing change of pace after slogging through the Griffin material. The oldest of the Zap collective, Moscoso’s psychedelic-tinged fine art style stood out on Zap’s pages, and his conversations here provide a lot of information on both the man and his art.

As mentioned above, Gilbert Shelton – the legendary creator of such beloved comix characters as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Wonder Wart-Hog, Oat Willie, and others – definitely receives the worst coverage in Zap: The Interviews. With a mere handful of pages, Shelton isn’t given a lot of room to talk compared to the others, a sin considering his status as probably the second-best known and popular underground comix creator. Ditto for the infamous Robert Williams, whose unique vision and style has made his artwork extremely collectible (and with the prices to prove it!). Williams gets only a dozen pages here and while they touch upon his lengthy history and include a smattering of artwork, the brevity of the section doesn’t do the artist justice. Last but not least, several Paul Mavrides interviews not only provide a lot of back history on the influences found in his art, but also showcase the artist’s indelible sense of humor and intelligence.  

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Those minor cavils about Shelton and Williams aside, Zap: The Interviews is a fascinating, informative, and entertaining collection that serves as an invaluable companion to the collected run of Zap Comix itself. By looking under the hood and gazing deeply into the inner mechanics of the book and its artists, Zap: The Interviews provides important context for each creator’s work.

With individual copies of Zap Comix readily available from eBay and comics shops at not-too-obscene prices; books by Williams, Rodriguez, and Wilson are easy to find with a little digging; and with Robert Crumb’s nearly entire artistic milieu available in multiple paperback volumes, comix fans can patch together an impressive collection of art and stories in no time. Zap: The Interviews is the place to begin, however, the book introducing the larger-than-life talents that created the comix revolution and proving a place in history for their art and efforts. (Fantagraphic Books, published January 4, 2015)

Late-breaking news: it looks like Fantagraphics will be publishing an 80-page paperback version of Zap Comix #16 in graphic novel form in December 2015. Stay tuned, faithful readers! - yer manic editor

Buy the book from Amazon.com: Zap: The Interviews

Got money to spend? Buy The Complete Zap Comix Boxed Set from Amazon.com

The Complete Zap Comix box set is coming!

It’s long been the Holy Grail of underground comix collectors – the publication of a collection of long-ago issues of the infamous Zap Comix in graphic novel form. Arguably one of the best-selling series in underground comix history, with sales rivaling those of many mainstream comic titles, Zap offered readers scatological humor, scathing social and political satire, and artwork unlike anything we’d seen before. From the first gang of counter-culture revolutionaries like Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, and S. Clay Wilson to the second wave of alternative talents like Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Charles Burns, the pages of Zap Comix provided an invaluable forum for artists to hone their craft.

On December 6, 2014 Fantagraphics Books will release The Complete Zap Comix, a beautiful six-volume hardback box set with slipcase, 900+ pages that features all 16 issues of Zap Comix published between 1968 and 2005, as well as a previously-unpublished 17th issue with work by Crumb, Shelton, Rodriguez, and others. Also included in the set is a portfolio of Zap covers by the series’ eight original artists, replicated from high-resolution scans and proofs, and specially printed for the edition on acid-free, 100% cotton fine-art paper with archival pigment inks. The set includes an introduction by Zap Comix founder Robert Crumb and an oral history of Zap (and, thus, underground comix) by writer Patrick Rosenkranz (author of the fine Rebel Visions).  

The first issue of Zap Comix was published in a modest print run of 3,500 copies in 1968 by Apex Novelties, with Robert Crumb writing and drawing the entire comic himself. For Zap Comix #2, Crumb brought in brought in a diverse bunch of talented fellow travelers like Shelton, Rodriguez, Robert Williams, and two well-known SF area psychedelic poster artists, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin. Zap was published sporadically, with years often passing between issues, but the level of talent involved remained impressive throughout the series’ run, and Zap was arguably responsible for changing the comic industry, freeing artists and writers to create the stories they wanted to tell without censorship or boundaries.

Unfortunately, considering the posh presentation provided The Complete Zap Comix by Fantagraphics, the set sports a $400+ price tag that is accessible to only the most well-heeled of rabid fanboys, leaving those of us with more modest bankrolls to drool with desire. Hopefully the publisher will consider splitting the series into individual volumes somewhere down the road like with The Complete Crumb Comics (how about five or six full-color paperbacks with $29.95 cover prices?) so the rest of us can revisit the vital, radical, influential cultural game-changer that was Zap Comix.

Buy the set from Amazon.com: The Complete Zap Comix box set

 

Video of the Week: Last Gasp Books Fall Publishing Kickstarter

Last Gasp Books holds a nostalgic fondness for the Reverend. While a comix-obsessed teenager living in the rural suburbs of Nashville, Tennessee back in the early 1970s, I eagerly bought every underground comic that I could find, and when I couldn't find them easily, I became a "sales rep" for Last Gasp and Rip Off Press, placing comix in local head shops on consignment, and selling enough copies to underwrite my own collection.

Last Gasp has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to publish its fall 2014 slate of books and other cool stuff. I know as well as anybody that publishing is a sucker's game these days (please buy my books!) but the good folks at Last Gasp branched out long ago beyond their initial comix fare to include lush art books, trading cards, and other alt-culture flotsam and jetsam. Check out their very cool video below, and then click on the "Save Strange" graphic at the bottom of the page to see what kind of rewards are available for contributing to their Kickstarter. I've already pledged my donation; you can help put Last Gasp over the top.