LastGasp.com
Title
Last Gasp Online Catalog
Description
The Last Gasp Story
• Last Gasp is one of the largest and oldest publishers and purveyors of underground comic books in the world, as well as being a distributor of all sorts of weird 'n' wonderful subversive literature, graphic novels, tattoo and art books. If you ever wondered how such an institution first came into existence, read on...
• Once upon a time at a Christmas or New Year's party in the Berkeley hills almost thirty years ago, someone handed a very stoned graduate psychology student a copy of ZAP™ Comix and rekindled a forgotten love of comic books. "I remember reading it and remarking how close it came to the heightened mind-experience one got when stoned," recalls Ron Turner, owner and founder of Last Gasp. "It brought back all my love of comics, but in an adult form that I could appreciate. I went into the back room and started reading the damn thing over and over".
• The late sixties was a tumultuous time. Ron was attending San Francisco State University, and the Vietnam war was at its height. The student body was on strike and clashes between the five thousand daily protesters and the one thousand police officers present on campus were not an uncommon occurrence. "(During the strike) we'd regroup at night in someone's apartment and I'd always bring along a lot of comic books," he remembers. "...and what I liked was that everyone found them universally entertaining in some light. The early feminists found the books funny, ...the Panthers, and the black student union guys cracked up very much at Gilbert Shelton's depiction of Watermelon Jones. Angelfood McSpade by Crumb is considered to be a satire - no-one felt that anything was aimed at them. It was the satire they were enjoying, not (that they were) the target of bad humor. So that impressed me , (that) the cartoonists had such a good sense of things."
Languages
English
Logos
Additional Information
Related Domains
External Links
- Alexa: LastGasp.com
