Comix

The key to understanding comix is, of course, the x. Robert Crumb is usually given credit for swapping the second c in comics to the x in comix when, in early 1968, so the story goes, he was peddling Zap Comix from a baby carriage (or shopping cart) in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. First and foremost, the new spelling was a rejection of the North American comics industry and its restrictive and prudish Comics Code, a self-imposed system of censorship by mainstream com-ics producers that severely limited what types of stories, words, and images could appear in mass-market comic books (see Nyberg in this volume). A potent signifier, the x invoked a rejection of the code in favor of unbridled, libidinous, and uncensored expression. It foreshadowed the X rating for movies, which was instituted in November 1968, only months after Crumb released Zap Comix#1. Like X-rated movies, comix repudiated the notion that a vernacular art form, comics, had to be “family friendly,” embracing traditional standards of morality.