Reading, Looking, Feeling

Abstract

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.