Zap Comix No. 0-5 (3 points)

 I found reading Zap Comix to be pretty enjoyable. Each contained story is kind of all over the place, with not many relating to each other- though there are recurring characters in each issue like Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont. They are all tied together by Crumb’s crude humor and satire on the foolishness of humans. This is shown in comics like Whiteman and Ducks Yas Yas. In Whiteman, we follow as the title suggests a white man. His deepest desires are “SEX” and to “KILL.” He tries to suppress these urges by enforcing his sense of identity prescribed by society as an American, a citizen, a hard charger, and a man with the know-how. It is revealed his deepest darkest fear is black people, and he fears for what the world has come to. This all being overtly satirical. Ducks Yas Yas follows the satirical story of a hippy drifter that I imagine you would find common throughout the time this was written. Some of the stories are also just sort of bizarre, like Freak Out Funnies where a guy falls into a sewer and Angelfood Mcspade is abducted by aliens. Angelfood has sex with the aliens and is dropped off in the guys apartment, and they end up together. I found it just sort of random.

Another aspect of the comics I liked were the bizarre and surreal interludes without any text like on page 66. It shows the transformation of a kiwi bird into the Disney like duck character into alligators then finally into a reconstructed Donald Duck like head. These portions also tended to have a lot of pop cultural references like Disney and planters peanut man, and sexual imagery; which I found interesting. These surreal wordless portions are scattered throughout the anthology, and I found them to be really well designed. For some reason, some of them reminded me of the work of Moebius in a weird way.

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