| Premiering in 1968, Zap was unlike any comic book sensibility that had been seen before. Labeled "Fair Warning: For Adult Intellectuals Only", it featured the publishing debut of Crumb's much-bootlegged Keep on Truckin' imagery, an early appearance of unreliable holy man Mr. Natural and his neurotic disciple Flakey Foont, and the first of innumerable self-caricatures (in which Crumb calls himself "a raving lunatic", and "one of the world's last great medieval thinkers"). Perhaps most notable in the debut issue was the story "Whiteman," which detailed the inner torment seething within the lusty, fearful heart of an outwardly upright American. While a few small-circulation self-published satirical comic books had been printed prior to this, Zap became the model for the "comix" movement that snowballed after its release.--Comixjoint.com |
