This exhibition catalogue focuses on the early days of Zap, when artists including Robert Crumb begat their visionary deconstruction of the comic book with remarkable innovations in storytelling and drawing. Zap was the cartoon extension of all the other social experiments and art forms feeding off each other at the time, including rock concerts, light shows, psychedelic posters and acid tests. The hippie readers may have come to the magazine for validation of their anti-war, anti-pollution, back-to-nature values, but Zap dared to critique and satirize the messy cultural and social work-in-progress as well – from the underground's canned and militant us versus them to the more troubling and existential are we them? – the satirical finger was now simultaneously pointed outward and inward, making the audience and authors legitimate targets.