Last Gasp
Encyclopedia
Last Gasp is a book and underground comix
publisher and distributor
based in San Francisco, California
.
, Robert Crumb
, Richard Corben
, Ron English, Camille Rose Garcia
, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Spain Rodriguez
, Mark Ryden
, Dori Seda
, Larry Welz
, Robert Williams
, and S. Clay Wilson
. In the early 1980s Last Gasp published some of the first books about the West Coast punk rock
scene.
titles, including Barefoot Gen
, Pure Trance
and Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
. The company publishes art and photography books, graphic novel
s, fiction, and poetry. Last Gasp operates as a publisher, distributor, and wholesaler for books of all types, often with a lowbrow art and counterculture
focus.
Underground comix
Underground comix are small press or self-published comic books which are often socially relevant or satirical in nature. They differ from mainstream comics in depicting content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence...
publisher and distributor
Distributor
A distributor is a device in the ignition system of an internal combustion engine that routes high voltage from the ignition coil to the spark plugs in the correct firing order. The first reliable battery operated ignition was developed by Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. and introduced in the...
based in San Francisco, California
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
.
History
Founded in 1970 by Ron Turner to publish the ecologically-themed comics magazine Slow Death Funnies, followed by the all-female anthology It Ain't Me Babe, Last Gasp soon became a major part of the underground comics/comix movement. Notable artists published by Last Gasp include Tim BiskupTim Biskup
Tim Biskup is an American artist generally considered to be a part of the group that has been dubbed "lowbrow" or pop surrealism...
, Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb —known as Robert Crumb and R. Crumb—is an American artist, illustrator, and musician recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream.Crumb was a founder of the underground comix movement and is regarded...
, Richard Corben
Richard Corben
Richard Corben is an American illustrator and comic book artist best known for his comics featured in Heavy Metal magazine...
, Ron English, Camille Rose Garcia
Camille Rose Garcia
Camille Rose Garcia is a Los Angeles-based lowbrow artist. she produces paintings, prints and sculpture in a gothic, "creepy" cartoon style. She cites as influences Walt Disney and Philip K. Dick. - Biography :...
, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Spain Rodriguez
Spain Rodriguez
Manuel Rodriguez , better known as Spain or Spain Rodriguez, is an American underground cartoonist who created the character Trashman. His experiences on the road with the biker gang, the Road Vultures, provided inspiration for his work, as did his left-wing politics.-Biography:Born in Buffalo, New...
, Mark Ryden
Mark Ryden
-Early life:Ryden is the son of Barbara and Keith Ryden, born in Medford, Oregon but raised in Southern California. He has two sisters and two brothers, one a fellow artist named Keyth Ryden....
, Dori Seda
Dori Seda
Dorthea Antonette "Dori" Seda was an artist best known for her underground comix work of the 1980s. Her comics combined exaggerated fantasy and ribald humor with documentation of her life in the Mission District of San Francisco, California.- Biography :Seda was originally a painter and ceramics...
, Larry Welz
Larry Welz
Larry Welz is an American cartoonist and commercial artist, and the creator of Cherry Poptart . He is a noteworthy early contributor to the underground comics movement based in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s and early 1970s.In 1969 his work was published in Yellow Dog, a tabloid comic...
, Robert Williams
Robert Williams (artist)
Robert Williams is an American painter, cartoonist, and founder of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine.Williams was part of the Zap Collective, along with other underground cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton...
, and S. Clay Wilson
S. Clay Wilson
S. Clay Wilson is an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson is known for aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of "lowlife," often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers. He was an early contributor to Zap Comix,...
. In the early 1980s Last Gasp published some of the first books about the West Coast punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
scene.
Current publishing
Today Last Gasp publishes few comic books, though they have published English-language versions of some mangaManga
Manga is the Japanese word for "comics" and consists of comics and print cartoons . In the West, the term "manga" has been appropriated to refer specifically to comics created in Japan, or by Japanese authors, in the Japanese language and conforming to the style developed in Japan in the late 19th...
titles, including Barefoot Gen
Barefoot Gen
is a Japanese manga series by Keiji Nakazawa. Loosely based on Nakazawa's own experiences as a Hiroshima survivor, the series begins in 1945 in and around Hiroshima, Japan, where the six-year-old boy Gen lives with his family...
, Pure Trance
Pure Trance
is a manga by the Japanese artist Junko Mizuno published in 1998. Her first full-length manga story, it was created for the Pure Trance techno compilation CD series...
and Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
is a one-volume manga written and illustrated by Fumiyo Kōno. The two connected stories were first published in Japan by Futabasha in Weekly Manga Action in 2003 and 2004, then collected in a single tankōbon volume in 2004. The stories about a family of survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima...
. The company publishes art and photography books, graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
s, fiction, and poetry. Last Gasp operates as a publisher, distributor, and wholesaler for books of all types, often with a lowbrow art and counterculture
Counterculture
Counterculture is a sociological term used to describe the values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day, the cultural equivalent of political opposition. Counterculture can also be described as a group whose behavior...
focus.
Comix
This is a partial list of underground comix published by Last Gasp.- The Adventures of Harold HeddRand HolmesRandolph Holton Holmes was a Canadian artist and illustrator probably best known for his work in underground comix....
- Anarchy ComicsAnarchy Comics-Anarchism:Overtly anarchist in its bent, all content included was based on anarchist philosophy and history. The humor of each anthology was satirical in nature, mocking both mainstream culture as well as traditional leftist ideas of revolution.-Punk rock:...
- Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin MaryBinky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin MaryBinky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a 44-page autobiographical comic book from 1972 by American cartoonist Justin Green. It was the first long autobiographical work to appear in underground comics, and was extremely personal, detailing Green's childhood struggle with a disorder which in...
- Brain FantasyRick ShubbRichard Shubb is best known as the inventor of the Shubb Capo, a very popular guitar and banjo accessory. His 1978 patent is cited by Sterner's Capo Museum as being one of the most significant improvements in the development of the capo...
- Cheech WizardCheech WizardCheech Wizard was a cartoon character created by artist Vaughn Bodé and appearing in various works, including the National Lampoon, from 1967 until Bodé's death in 1975...
- Cherry PoptartCherry (comics)Cherry is an adult comic book with a protagonist of the same name, written and drawn by Larry Welz.-History:First published in 1982 the comic series was originally called Cherry Poptart, but the title was changed to Cherry beginning with Issue #3 following litigation or threats of litigation by...
- Harlan Ellison's Chocolate AlphabetFrom A to Z, in the Chocolate AlphabetFrom A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet, a work by Harlan Ellison, is a collection of 26 extremely short stories on abstract and basically unrelated topics, displaying various aspects of Ellison’s well known preoccupations with morality, mythology, the trivia of history, and humor.The last of ten...
- Cocaine Comix
- Dirty LaundryDirty Laundry"Dirty Laundry" is a song by Don Henley from his debut solo album I Can't Stand Still, released in 1982. The song reached number one on the Billboard Top Tracks chart in October 1982. Released as the second single from I Can't Stand Still, it peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 in...
- Dopin' Dan
- Dr. Atomic
- Enigma
- Frescas ZizisMelinda GebbieMelinda Gebbie is an American comics artist and writer, probably best known for Lost Girls, the three-volume graphic novel she produced in collaboration with writer Alan Moore, published by Top Shelf.-Biography:...
- Good GirlsGood Girls (comics)Good Girls is a 1987–1991 six-issue comic book limited series. It was created by Carol Lay and published by Fantagraphics and then Rip Off Press. The series parodies romance comics.-History:...
- Grim Wit
- Horny Biker Slut
- Hup
- Inner City RomanceGuy ColwellGuy Colwell is an American political artist and underground cartoonist. Although not African-American himself, Colwell's comics often portray blacks in strong roles in stories of life on the streets....
- It Ain't Me Babe
- Last Gasp Comix & Stories
- Mickey Rat
- NeurocomicsGeorge DiCaprioGeorge Paul DiCaprio is an American comic book writer, editor, and major west coast underground comic book distributor.DiCaprio was born in 1943 to an Italian American father, George Leon DiCaprio, and a German-born mother, Olga Anne Jacobs. He met Irmelin Indenbirken, a German immigrant, in...
- Slow Death Funnies
- Weirdo
- Wimmen's ComixWimmen's ComixWimmen's Comix, later titled Wimmin's Comix, was an influential all-female underground comics anthology published from 1972 to 1992. Though it covered a wide range of genre and subject matter, Wimmen's Comix focused more than other anthologies of the time on feminist concerns, homosexuality, sex...
- Young Lust
- ZapZap ComixZap Comix is the best-known and one of the most popular of the underground comics that emerged as part of the youth counterculture of the late 1960s. While not believed to be the first underground comic to have been published, Zap is considered to mark the beginning of the "underground comix"...
Books
- American Surreal
- Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus, 2002, ISBN 0-86719-561-4
- The Cunt Coloring BookTee CorinneTee Corine was a lesbian visual artist notable for the portrayal of sexuality in her artwork.-Early life and education:Corinne was born and grew up in Florida. Her mother introduced her to principles and techniques for making visual art...
- Dead KennedysDead KennedysDead Kennedys are an American punk rock band formed in San Francisco, California in 1978. The band became part of the American hardcore punk movement of the early 1980s. They gained a large underground fanbase in the international punk music scene....
: The Unauthorized Version, by F. Stop Fitzgerald and Marian Kester (1983) ISBN 0867193123 - StreetArt: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981StreetArt: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981StreetArt: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981 by Peter Belsito, Bob Davis and Marian Kester, and published by Last Gasp, was the first published effort to attempt to document the punk rock poster in the U.S....
- Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave
- LabourLabour (novel)Labour is to be the first novel published by JT LeRoy since it was revealed that it was the pen-name of Laura Albert. It is also another collaboration with illustrator Cherry Hood who also illustrated Harold's End....
- Notes From the Pop Underground
- Xcapees
- Turntable TimmyTurntable TimmyTurntable Timmy is a book authored by Michael Perry and illustrated by Doug Cunningham, and is a soon to be an animated cartoon. The book is published by Last Gasp, and the cartoon series is animated by Rebel Static.-The Book:...
, written by Michael PerryMichael Perry (author)Michael Perry is a writer and a humorist. Perry is a self described "Country Chronicler". Perry has written three best selling memoirs. He has also written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Backpacker, Outside, and Salon.com. Perry was born on a small farm in rural Wisconsin, and raised...
and illustrated by Doug CunninghamDoug CunninghamFor the football player of the same name see Doug Cunningham .Doug Cunningham is a former Nebraska State Senator from Wausa, Nebraska in the Nebraska Legislature and the Consultant-Director for the Hometown Merchants Association. -Personal life:Cunningham graduated from Wausa High School in 1972... - ZippyZippy the PinheadZippy is an American comic strip created by Bill Griffith. The character of Zippy the Pinhead initially appeared in underground publications during the 1970s...
Stories, by Bill Griffith, 1986. ISBN 0-86719-325-5