One of the original infamous Zap cartoonists of the 1960s, S. Clay Wilson creates shocking, violent strips inhabited by pirates, dykes and demons. Robert Crumb cites him as a liberating influence on his own work. Wilson has illustrated the books of William S. Burroughs and recently created a volume of children’s fairy tales, Wilson’s Grimm (1999, Cottage Classics). “I always wanted to be a children’s book illustrator,” he says, “but I took some LSD and took a left turn graphically.” Wilson refers to his dense style as “graphic agoraphobia,” a fear of open space. The illustration reproduced here was created in 1972 and originally appeared in Zap #7. Wilson says it represents “the monster of domestic strife entering my life in the guise of H.P. Lovecraft.”