The Complete Zap Comix

There scarcely was an underground comics world before Robert Crumb’s classic solo first issue of Zap in 1968. By Zap #2, he had begun assembling a Seven Samurai of the best, the fiercest, and the most stylistically diversified cartoonists to come out of the countercultural kiln. All of them were extremists of one sort or another, from biker-gang member Rodriguez to Christian surfer Griffin, but somehow they produced a decades-long collaboration: a mind-blowing anthology of abstract hallucination, throat-slashing social satire, and shocking sexual excess, that made possible the ongoing wave of alternative cartoonists like Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Charles Burns. The Complete Zap Comix collects every issue of Zap — every cover and every story, and even the Zam mini comic jam among the Zap artists — in a multi-volume, slipcased hardcover set. It will also include the 17th unpublished issue with work by Crumb, Moscoco, Wilson, Rodriguez, Shelton, Mavrides, and Williams. Plus, an introduction by founder R. Crumb and an oral history of Zap by Patrick Rosenkranz, and other exclusive bonus features and items TBA. Zap is the most historically and aesthetically important comics series ever published.

$500.00

Publisher: Fantagraphics

Artists: R. Crumb

Publication Date: 2014

Binding: 5-volume hardcover boxed set

Dimensions: 9 3/4 x 13 1/4 x 7 in (24.8 x 33.7 x 17.8 cm)

Pages: 920

ISBN: 9781606997871

Retail: $500 US & Canada | £325 | €435

Status: Available

R. Crumb

Born in Philadelphia in 1943, R. Crumb has used the popular medium of the comic book to address the absurdity of social conventions, political disillusionment, irony, racial and gender stereotypes, sexual fantasies, and fetishes. Inspired by Thomas Nast, Honoré Daumier, T.S. Sullivant, and James Gillray, amongst others, his drawings offer a satirical critique of modern consumer culture and seem to possess an outsider’s perspective—a self-conscious stance, which Crumb often relates to his personal life.

All R. Crumb books