Skip Williamson, a rambunctious creator of underground comics that merged his radical politics with his love of scatological humor, died on March 16 in a hospital in Albany, near his home in Wilmington, Vt. He was 72.

The cause was renal failure, his daughter Molly Hiland Parmer said.

For the underground cartoonists of the 1960s and ’70s, sex, drugs, profanity and violence were as common as superheroes in mainstream comics, and Mr. Williamson was among the most provocative. His characters were often visual grotesques, like Snappy Sammy Smoot, a dandy with googly eyes, gigantic red (or pink) lips, pomaded black hair and a delicate mustache. Smoot’s naïveté placed him in counterpoint with the era’s changing politics and mores.

Mr. Williamson found President Richard M. Nixon a particularly inviting target for caricature, distorting him a few degrees more than editorial cartoonists did. In a two-panel cartoon published in Class War Comix, Nixon wonders how to react to a phony newspaper article that accuses Vice President Spiro T. Agnew of killing thousands by flatulence.

“We’re in serious trouble, Spiggy,” a fretful Nixon says, applying a powder puff to his 5 o’clock shadow with one hand and holding lipstick in the other. “Cruel anarchists have perpetrated an incredibly effective, image-shattering hoax on the American public.”