Robert Williams: Fearless Depictions opens at the Long Beach Museum of Art on February 6
and runs through late May 2026, showcasing a survey of the painter’s iconic art from 2001 to the present,
including nearly 60 oil paintings, several large-scale sculptures, multimedia works, and first edition issues (#0-
15) of the underground, satirical comic series Zap Comix. A giclee of the Zap No. 5 cover, illustrated by Williams,
is featured in “The Visual Adventures” (1970). It blends sci-fi, clown, classic, and semi-profane imagery and
warns in the top-right corner, “Adults Only!”
Robert Williams (aka “Mr. Bitchin’”) is a cartoonist at heart. His work bursts with color and chaos, fusing comics,
carnivals, surreal fantasy, and moral satire into highly detailed compositions. Beyond his own work, he gave
back to like-minded artists by founding Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine in 1994, which became a cultural
force, shaping the future of alternative art. Thanks to Juxtapoz, today’s generation of “outsider” artists can
exhibit in galleries and survive without feeling the loneliness Williams experienced in his earlier career.
Williams was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1943. He was instilled with a love of car culture at an early
age. His father owned The Parkmore, a drive-in restaurant frequented by hot rodders. Williams received his first
car at twelve years old as a gift from his father: a 1934 Ford five-window coupe. References to his childhood
environment appear throughout Williams’ work, where he fused car culture with underground comics.
Williams’s irreverent lifestyle and art stem directly from the Southern California environment he encountered
after moving to Los Angeles in 1963. He credits hot rods, outlaw bikers, psychedelic posters, the porn industry,
underground comics, and tattoo culture as influences. After art school, Williams resisted the limiting label of
“illustrator.” He continued on his own path, eventually landing his dream job in 1965 as studio art director for
Kustom Kulture legend Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, producing advertising and images for the SoCal hot rod crowd.
During this period, Williams was also a prolific oil painter, producing his iconic “Super Cartoon” paintings,
including Appetite for Destruction and In the Land of Retinal Delights. These works blended old-master
techniques with wild, psychedelic, and satirical narratives, setting a new standard for visual storytelling.
In 1969, with Roth’s studio closed, Williams joined the close-knit group of underground artists known as Zap
Comix and flourished within the era’s nonconformist, anti-establishment art movement alongside Robert
Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, and Victor Moscoso. There, he created the character Coochy
Cooty, his seminal underground comix antihero. His creation was unleashed in 1970 in Coochy Cooty Men’s
Comics and in many issues of Zap Comix, and it remains alive today in Williams’s oil paintings.
Many of Williams’s comix and “Super Cartoon” paintings were featured in his groundbreaking first book, The
Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams, published in 1979. The book’s title was intended as a statement against the
highbrow tone of the art world, which was antithetical to Williams’s work.
Of his paintings, Williams has stated, “My paintings are not designed to entertain you; they are meant to trap
you, to hold you before them while you try to rationalize what elements of the picture are making you stand
there.”
