snatch 02 angelfood mcspade

sn #02 Angelfood McSpade

Apex Novelties January 1969

Snatch Comics #2 came out just three months after the first issue and accomplished what some thought impossible; be even more outrageous than Snatch #1. The increased malfeasance is partly due to Rory Hayes joining Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson as a contributor. The 19-year-old Hayes was cajoled into drawing some smutty comics for this issue by Crumb and Don Donahue, and he was more than up to the task, though Crumb and Wilson also increase the raunch factor from the first issue.

Snatch #2 begins its offensive right on the front cover, as Crumb provides a quintessentially racist image of Angelfood McSpade waving hello (Hello ’69!) with her big cock-slurping tongue sliding across her blubbery upper lip. It was an overwhelmingly off-color statement in 1969 and no underground comic would really come close to its audacity for at least a couple years, with the singular, relatively abstract exception of Cunt Comics.

On the inside front cover, Crumb explains that Snatch artists “really like drawing dirty cartoons!” and that it helps them “get rid of pent-up anxieties and repressions.” The former part of that statement is verifiably true, but the latter part should not be discounted either, as it would become something of a mantra for both critics and defenders of underground comix in the decades to come.

Like the first issue, Snatch #2 is primarily filled with one- and two-page cartoons that show men and women enjoying sex in one form or another, though there’s a bit more extreme deviancy on display. Such as a farmer slicing off a chicken’s head as he’s fucking it (by Crumb) and a woman opening a bottle of beer with her pussy (by Wilson). Hayes provides an array of crude and ultra-violent vignettes of naked men and women cutting, punching and dismembering each other, demonstrating quite a few of those “pent-up anxieties” Crumb was referring to.

There’s plenty of jaw-dropping vulgarities in Snatch #2, but none are as jolting as Crumb’s center spread cartoon, “The Family That Lays Together Stays Together!” While not nearly as elaborate as “Joe Blow” would be a few months later in Zap Comics #4, “The Family” portrays a multi-generational family of seven in their home, with mom and dad fucking on the sofa, grandma and grandpa fucking in the kitchen, and brother and sister fucking on the floor… oh yeah, and the baby girl is getting fucked by the family dog. Not surprisingly, Crumb depicts them all with euphoric grins on their faces.

“The Family” was the first professional, graphically incestuous cartoon anyone had ever seen and it remains a shocking image even today. Why did Crumb dare to do it? Well, as Robert Williams said about Snatch, “We were seeing just how absurdly improper you can get before the authorities have to hunt you down.” Crumb’s subject matter had some catching up to do after S. Clay Wilson’s incendiary comics in Zap #2 and he rose to the challenge.

As well, “The Family” can be viewed as a derisive parody of the heavily promoted slogan, “The Family That Prays Together Stays Together.” That oft-quoted catchphrase was coined by an ad agency writer for the 1940s Roman Catholic Family Rosary Crusade led by Father Patrick Peyton. It caught on quickly and was plastered on over 100,000 billboards and endorsed by dozens of Hollywood celebrities. By the ’60s, the slogan had been embroidered by countless church ladies and gift manufacturers on millions of pillows and wall hangings. It was exactly the type of fad that made Crumb’s blood boil, and if his family didn’t display the slogan in his childhood home, he certainly knew families that did.

And who knows, maybe Crumb had a thing for one of his two sisters when he was a kid. Robert has said that he and his younger sister, Sandra, engaged in some quasi-sexual ”horsing around” when they were teens (which Sandra has denied). So maybe Crumb was working on his “anxieties and repressions” as well, but that doesn’t mean he advocated that families should “lay together.” As Crumb’s wife Aline stated, “When he does a thing about the ‘The Family That Lays Together Stays Together,’ anyone who thinks that he’s proposing that people should indulge in incest would have to be pretty dumb.”

The entire Snatch series is powerful because our laughter or groans of astonishment sometimes conceal a deeper reaction of recognition. Some of the images are disturbing because they simultaneously connect with our darkest fantasies while sparking self-loathing or guilt about our wicked imaginations…or most-private activities.

Snatch #2 is not only the creme de la creme of this brief series, but the creme de la Crumb as far as Robert Crumb is concerned. His incendiary cartoons are toxic to large mobs of narrow-minded, bible-belting, family-values mafioso. Throw in some lethal Rory Hayes bombshells and S. Clay Wilson torpedoes and you have an explosive annihilation of everything that everyone thought comic books should be or even could be.