When Zap #1 premiered, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin were among the most prominent graphic artists of the San Francisco rock-and roll ballroom scene. A year earlier, Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Griffin, and Moscoso launched a graphic style that undermined prevailing modernist notions of formal rightness by introducing vibrating color, illegible lettering, and vintage graphics to posters that were complex assemblies of type and image, designed to be read while high. Always the experimenter, Moscoso, who had been interested in serial imagery when he was a painter studying at Yale in the early 1960s, was beginning to play with skewed sequential photographs for use as a Christmas card for an old high school friend, the animator and film title designer Pablo Ferro. Also in an experimental mode, Griffin had done a poster send-up on the San Francisco Chronicle’s comics section. After seeing this poster, which was “like Disney on LSD,” Moscoso recalls, “it turned me in the direction of cartoons as opposed to photos.”
At first, Moscoso was hesitant to devote himself to comic strips. He was already spending the better part of a week designing two and sometimes three rock posters, which were printed on good paper and therefore more tangible than the underground tabloids printed on cheap newsprint and destined for landfill. “Why should I do something that’s going to be thrown away?” he asks rhetorically. Instead Moscoso and Griffin together created a series of posters for Pinnacle Productions in LA, promoting Janis Joplin and Big Brother, B. B. King, and PG&E.
“At the bottom [of the strip] were three comic panels, which Rick drew,” Moscoso says about the inspiration that gave them the idea to do a comic magazine combining their talents through alternating panels. “I did a template for each of us on eight-by-five-inch cards,” he says about the format. “We were using a Rapidograph at the time, and, since we each had the same template, we’d start drawing anything that came into our mind in a box and alternately put one next to the other in a nonlinear fashion so that the development would be purely visual.”
Originally, the comic was just going to include Moscoso and Griffin’s collaborative artwork. “We were already doing our respective drawings when we saw Zap #1 [after] Crumb had started selling it on Haight Street,” Moscoso recalls. “Crumb asked us to join because he admired Griffin’s cartoon poster. In fact, Crumb did a comic strip in Zap #1, which was a direct bounce off that poster. So he asked Rick, and Rick said, ‘Moscoso and I are already working on this stuff.’ So he invited both of us to join in.” Crumb also asked S. Clay Wilson, who offered up a ribald comic-strip drug fantasy titled “Checkered Demon.” With this, Moscoso and Griffin decided to shelve their collaboration, and each did their own strips.
Given the quartet’s respective popularity on the two coasts (Moscoso and Griffin on the West, and Crumb and Wilson on the East), Zap #2 was an immediate success. However, despite their hippie (“mine is yours”) roots, Moscoso wanted to ensure equitable distribution of profits and copyright. “After having been burned so much in the poster business,” he says about his intellectual property travails, wherein he was denied the rights to many of his images, “I set up a publishing deal with Print Mint, which was a distributor of my and Rick’s posters already. When Zap #2 came out, here’s Moscoso and Griffin and these two new guys, Crumb and Wilson, in the same stores where Rick and I were selling very well.” The poster and head shops that had sprung up in hippie strongholds of big cities and college towns allowed independent distributors a network that bypassed the Marvels, DCs, and all the other Comics Code Authority publishers. By the time Zap #3 and #4 were published, sales were as high as 50,000 copies each for the first printing. (Subsequent printings increased that number into the six-figure range.) Originally, half of the profits after expenses were earmarked for the distributor, and half for the artists. In the meantime, however, the Print Mint changed ownership; after some unfair dealings on their part, Moscoso renegotiated with Last Gasp (the distributor of Zap today).
The first two issues of Zap were fairly innocuous compared to Zap #3, the special 69 issue (“because it was 1969,” explains Moscoso). Rocking the boat with its risqué content that lived up to its “Adults Only” advisory, #3 was spiritually akin to Tijuana bibles (the cheaply produced, sexually explicit eight-page comics imported to the United States from Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s). This issue was sandwiched between two separate front covers designed by Wilson and Griffin, respectively; it could be read front to back and back to front. The hinge was in the middle, a Moscoso-designed turnaround center spread that featured drawings of Daisy and Donald Duck engaged in comic-book hanky-panky.
At the same time that Zap #3 was in the works, Crumb revealed a set of photocopied pages that he had originally prepared for what was to be the first Zap. Unfortunately, he had given the artwork to a publisher who disappeared with the originals before publication. “Fortunately, Crumb had xeroxed the pages, including the covers,” recalls Moscoso. He continues: “In those days, the xeroxes picked up the line, but not the solid black. So Crumb had to fill in all the solids.” Moscoso and Griffin agreed that, since Crumb had this entire comic book together, he should publish it just as it was, without the other contributors, and they would call it Zap #0. The only thing he changed from the original was the cover. “We didn’t very often ask each other for advice,” says Moscoso about the time that Crumb asked for him for his thoughts about a drawing showing a man floating in a fetal position with an electric wall cord plugged into his derriere. “I looked at it and I said, ‘It don’t look right, Robert. The guy is in a fetal position with electricity surrounding him, so to have the cord go into his ass doesn’t make as much sense as if it went into his umbilical cord.’ And he actually took my advice.”
Not to diminish Crumb’s major contributions to Zap or underground comix in general, Moscoso credits S. Clay Wilson with inspiring the contributors to feistily bust taboos. “First Wilson comes out with the ‘Checkered Demon,’ then ‘Captain Piss Gums and his Perverted Pirates,’ in which he is drawing my worst fantasies! Frankly, we didn’t really understand what we were doing until Wilson started publishing in Zap. I mean, he’s not a homosexual, yet he’s drawing all these homosexual things. He’s not a murderer, yet he was murdering all these people. All the things that he wasn’t, he was putting down in his strips. So that showed us that we were, without being aware of it, censoring ourselves.”
Once the self-imposed constraints were lifted, the Zap artists, who now included Spain Rodriguez and Robert Williams, began to explore their own addled fantasies. “Each one of us started looking at our own work asking, ‘How far out can we go along the model that Wilson had set up?’ The only thing was it had to be our individual stories. I, for one, was not going to do ‘Captain Piss Gums.’ Instead, I had Donald and Daisy eating each other in the ’69 issue because I was getting back at Walt Disney! I mean, I love Walt Disney. But here Mickey and Minnie have nephews, but nobody fucked. So this was my chance.”
In this sense, Zap quickly became an arena to test the Supreme Court’s “community standards” doctrine, which allowed each community to define pornography in relation to the local consensus. As on the edge as it was, Zap #3 was unscathed. Zap #4, on the other hand, stretched those standards beyond the limit and was, therefore, enjoined by the San Francisco police. The seeds of discontent were born in features including the explicitly titled “A Ball in the Bung Hole,” by Wilson, “Wonder Wart-Hog Breaks Up the Muthalode Smut Ring” by Shelton, and “Sparky Sperm” by Crumb, which was placed between front and back covers of a dancing penis. But the strip that forced the police’s hand was Crumb’s “Joe Blow,” featuring Dad, Mom, Junior, and Sis in a satire of the incestuous all-American family. Or, as Moscoso explains: “You can cut off a guy’s penis and devour it (as in ‘Heads-Up’ by Wilson), you can even chop people up into little pieces, but you can’t have sex with your children.” The Zap artists thought they “could knock down every taboo that there was.” Instead, the police busted City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and, in New York, Zap #
4 was prohibited from being sold over the counter.
Nevertheless, after paying a fine, City Lights proprietor and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti continued to sell the contraband and subsequent issues without incident. Predictably, the attention caused Zap’s reputation and sales to rise. As for the artists, “I never did an incest story,” says Moscoso, “and Crumb never did an incest story again, as far as I know … not for Zap. However, we did not self-censor… . It was just after a while we got it out of our systems.”
Although subsequent issues were spared legal harassment, they were no less explicit than the offending issue. By the 1970s the raunch factor in underground comics was commonplace, and, with the liberal court’s First Amendment rulings, it was fruitless to expend legal energy in cracking down on them. Moreover, Zap seemed to serve a purpose in venting the urges of a generation that needed to push boundaries. In fact, Zap is today a textbook study of how fringe ideas are no longer mysterious or threatening when they are unleashed. In Zap #7, for example, Spain introduced “Sangrella,” which serves as a paean to sadomasochistic lesbian eroticism with a sci-fi twist, addressing the extremes of such weird fetishism. In retrospect it is little more than a ribald jab at the sexlessness of superheroes. In Zap #8 Robert Williams’s “Innocence Squandered” is less prurient than it is a satiric commentary on how pornography is adjudicated in the courts. Actually, by Zap #11, although sexual references proliferate, the strips became more experimental in terms of form and content. In this issue Crumb’s “Patton,” about the great blues performer Charley Patton, is a masterpiece of comic strip as documentary. In the same issue Spain’s “Lily Litvak: The Rose of Stalingrad” transforms a little-known historical fact into a comic strip that is kindred to the heroic comic books of the World War II era. And in Zap #13 even Gilbert Shelton turned his attention from fantasy to real life in “Graveyard Ghosts,” a brief tour of Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
Thirty years, fifteen issues, and (according to distribution figures) millions of copies later, Zap has not changed all that much. The same contributors, minus Griffin (who died in 1995), are still pumping out an issue every two years. During a period in American history when political ultraconservatives are blaming the 1960s for all social ills, it is interesting to note that even in maintaining its consistency, Zap is not the wellspring of radical raunch that it once was. American tolerance for the abhorrent was long ago stretched beyond Zap’s boundaries. “The fact that we’re even still selling these things actually is remarkable,” Moscoso admits. “These things should have gone by the wayside a long time ago, by all logical standards. But there are people who still read this crap! Not bad for a piece of trash. Really.”
Culture Tabloids
Tabloids developed their malodorous reputation because of the gutter journalism practiced by their earliest proponents in Britain and the United States. It wasn’t until after 1900 that the term tabloid, which originally connoted a newspaper half the size of a standard broadsheet (about the size of today’s New York Times), became synonymous with the lurid and scandalous. In 1919 two cousins, Joseph Medill Patterson and Robert Rutherford McCormick, began publishing the New York Daily News. Its reduced, tabloid size was immediately successful, being easier to hold and read on New York’s sardine packed subways. The Daily News was assured even greater circulation by its unbridled preoccupation with sex and violence, conveyed by screaming headlines and full front-page halftones. It became the largest selling tabloid in America and spawned many competitors. One of these was Bernarr Macfadden’s Daily Graphic, which entered into an unprecedented circulation war, giving its readers the most reprehensible displays of gutter publishing ever practiced. Despite, or because of this, tabloid mania flourished in the 1920s until loud outcries from the protectors of the public’s morals tempered, somewhat, the rumor, sex, and gore.
Recently, there has been a more benign reason for publishing a tabloid: economy. Printers could offer publishers twice the product for half the price. For this reason a tabloid explosion began in the mid-1960s, coinciding with the free-speech movement and subsequent rise of youth culture. Low-budget underground or counterculture papers appeared around the country and abroad. Anarchic drug, sex, and political weeklies, like the San Francisco Oracle, the Los Angeles Free Press, and the East Village Other, were in the vanguard of this movement. They were cheaply produced, inexpensively sold (average twenty-five cents), and widely read. They were records and totems of their times.
The tabloids’ design was governed by a marked lack of money and technology, and administered by naïfs, who, armed with press-type, benday and patterned Letraset screens, ruling tapes, Addressograph phototype, freebie photographs, and raunchy comix, produced raw but expressive nongraphic design. Despite the differences in approach, the instinctive underground layout practiced then and the mannered culture tabloid design of today are remarkably similar.
Underground papers began declining in the late 1960s. A new genre of alternative “sex-culture” papers (many published by the underground papers themselves to make money) stole a fickle audience that preferred nudity to profundity. The underground tabloids finally died in the mid-1970s with the end of Vietnam War, the resignation of Richard Nixon, and as the “me” decade was taking hold. At the same time, a national paper shortage resulted in the decrease of the standard tabloid size and an increase in production costs. Moreover, many of those involved in underground publishing either were irrevocably burned out, or simply grew up and became interested in more conventional lives and livelihoods.
Those designers who used the underground press as a kind of graduate school—including Roger Black of Rolling Stone and Ronn Campisi of Fusion—wed the street-smart design and exuberance the learned with conventional design practices while working for more establishment journals. Hence, during the mid-1970s a second wave of counterculture tabloids emerged, such as the Real Paper, Boston Phoenix, and Chicago Reader, among others, which were neither raw nor anarchic, but rather found solace in convention. Indeed, the only editorial difference from regional consumer magazines like New York, was that the tabloids appealed to a slightly younger, but nevertheless upwardly mobile readership. In terms of their design and editorial bent, these publications were upbeat, yet somewhat staid blends of New York’s Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, and Rolling Stone. Their purpose was to educate, inform, and otherwise provide readers with reviews and calendar features.
Slightly before the second wave crested, the granddaddy of new tabloids, Andy Warhol’s Interview, appeared. In the early 1970s a few avant-garde artists gave vent to their ego needs by publishing artsy, gossip filled magazines. That Warhol’s was the only one to survive was a tribute to a basically sound idea: interviews with movie stars, glitterati, and eccentric personalities otherwise ignored by the establishment press, and a forum for fashion-conscious writers. The first issues were quarterfold formats, with lackluster design and no exceptional visual personality. But Interview quickly developed a constituency and, during the late 1970s, a distinctive look when Richard Bernstein was commissioned to do regular full-color cover portraits. Interview developed into an odd but enjoyable amalgam of W, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar, spiced with a dash of People. Its gossipy tone appealed to culture vultures, those maturated groupies who thrived on avant-gardism. Interview became a safe haven for the Jekylls and Hydes of society called Yuppies, who were squeaky clean by day and down and dirty at night. Interview’s interior is minimally designed, like a hip New York Review of Books, to allow for maximum photographic impact, and so as not to compete with its advertising. Nevertheless, it has influenced the appearance of many subsequent culture tabs.
By the late 1970s, boomers born in the late 1950s and early 1960s were clamoring for their own cultural voices. On the West Coast, punk was the predominant attitude and style. Its proponents in Los Angeles spawned a neo-underground tabloid called Slash, a raucous blend of type, image, and neo-underground comix (cartoonist Gary Panter was the leading practitione
r), and perfected what has been called the “ransom note” style of cut-and-paste design (somewhat related to futurist experiments in the teens). In San Francisco, a bizarre publishing diversion, Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, ingeniously wed the 1970s sexual preoccupation with fashion-conscious nihilism cut, of course, with tongue-in-cheek, ribald wit. Wet’s art director practiced an ad hoc, gridless approach to layout (at least for the first year, after which Wet changed design and editorial format and dropped bathing from its title). Wet signaled a post-underground obsession with esoterica.
On the East Coast, Fetish, a similarly arcane culture tab, was published and designed by David Sterling and Jane Kosstrin. But Fetish was a linchpin of sorts. Its content was not sex or drug oriented, but was a somewhat rarefied exploration of “the man/object matrix in contemporary culture” (translation: articles on art, architecture, and design against an avant-garde backdrop). Although its design was once described as a marriage of underground and Condé Nast fashion-magazine sensibilities, it made a purposeful departure from ad hoc gridless design, to a controlled, yet playful, anarchy (or “new wave” design). Also on the East Coast, new wave/punk music and its offshoots gave rise to tabloids like the New York Rocker and the East Village Eye (apparently a reference to the East Village Other’s eye logo). Both had a random and skewed approach to layout that resembled their underground forerunners, but without the naïve integrity.
Design Literacy Page 11