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 Zapor
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 Zapartists, 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,Zapquickly 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 #3was 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 Zapartists
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 #4was 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
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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