Robert Crumb (Pocket Essential series)

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Other books by this author Quentin Tarantino Film Soleil

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Robert Crumb D.K. Holm

www.pocketessentials.com

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First published in Great Britain 2003

This edition published in 2005 by Pocket Essentials, P.O. Box 394, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1XJ, UK

Distributed in the USA by Trafalgar Square Publishing, P.O. Box 257, Howe Hill Road, North Pomfret,Vermont 05053

Copyright © D.K. Holm 2005

The right of D.K. Holm to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publisher.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or binding or cover other than in which it is published, and without similar conditions, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publication.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1–904048–51 X

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman

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Acknowledgements I should like to recognize the unwavering and cheerful assistance and support of the following people and institutions: Tim Appelo, Charles Boucher, Donald Fiene, Desiree French, Helaine Garren (who, among other things, offered a necessary and thorough reading of the text, accompanied by timely dispensations of food), Britta Gordon (for introducing me to Peter Brown, among numerous other services), Charles and Ingrid Gordon (for help in a move that made a book even possible), Damon Houx (who told me the first time I met him about a Crumb book I had never heard of), Anne Hughes, Shawn Levy, Patti Lewis, Cynthia Lopez, Andrea Marsden, Cindy Mason, Gregg Morris, Rebecca Rich, Michael Russell (a great cartoonist, editor, journalist, and movie reviewer), Charles Schwenk (for invigorating discussions of all manner of subjects from Saint Augustine to Marvel Comics), Sam Smith, Greg Tozian, Mark Christensen, Chris Ryall (my editor at MoviePoopShoot.com), Robert Wederquist (of the indispensable DVDJournal.com), and a certain copy editor who wishes to go unnamed, but who performed superb eleventh hour work on the first third of the book. In addition, I also wish to cite the embat-

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tered Multnomah County Library, Portland State University Library, and Powell’s Books for their seemingly endless resources. Acknowledgment is also due to Paul Duncan for, among many other things, reassuring emails. And finally of course Robert Crumb for submitting to yet another interview from an annoying intruder. Mr Crumb read the text of the first edition and made several key corrections, for which I thank him. Any remaining errors that escaped his eye remain, of course, mine.

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Contents 1. Introduction: Who Reads R. Crumb? 9 Out of the Past: Influences On Crumb (Pieter Bruegel, George Cruikshank, James Gillray),The Lure Of Comic Books (Carl Barks, E. C. Segar, Marge, Walt Kelly, Harvey Kurtzman), Crumb: The Consummate Cartoonist And Writer 2. The Genesis Of A Future Genius (1943–1964) Crumb Family Comics,Your Vigor For Life Appalls Me: Robert Crumb Letters, 1958–1977, The Yum Yum Book 3. The Bitter Years Of Early Struggle (1965–1970) ‘Mr Natural in Death Valley,’ ‘Dirty Dog,’ ‘Lenore Goldberg And Her Girl Commandos,’ ‘Joe Blow,’ ‘It’s Really Too Bad’

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4. Life On The Farm: Brutal Years Of Breakdown And Defeat (1971–1979) ‘Bo Bo Bolinski: He’s The No. 1 Human Zero’ and ‘A Gurl,’ ‘Pete The Plumber,’ ‘Fritz The Cat, “Superstar,”’ ‘Whiteman Meets Big Foot,’ ‘Singing In The Bathtub,’ R. Crumb And The Cheap Suit Serenaders 5. Retreat To Realism (1980–1993) ‘Excerpts From Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763,’ ‘Psychopathia Sexualis,’The ‘Devil Girl’ Series, ‘The Confessions Of Robert Crumb,’ ‘R. Crumb, “The Old Outsider,” Goes To The … Academy Awards,’ ‘When The Niggers Take Over America’ 6. Post-Crumb, The Later Years Of Fruitful Harvest (1994–2003) Art & Beauty,The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, ‘Bad Karma,’ ‘From Cradle To Grave’

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7. The Latest Confessions: An Interview With Robert Crumb

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8. Reference Materials

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Introduction:Who Reads R. Crumb? Yes, who actually reads R. Crumb? At first thought, you’d think that everyone would read the internationally famous cartoonist who created characters such as Mr Natural and Fritz the Cat and popularized phrases such as ‘Keep on truckin’.’ You’d think that everyone would respect the ‘godfather’ of the underground comics revolution of the Sixties, when his psychedelic and confessional content expanded the limitations of a medium that traditionally favoured superheroes or funny animals. Crumb’s Head Comix in 1970 and The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book in 1997 bookmark an era of profound change in the nature of a medium once viewed as kids’ stuff. Both books were bestsellers, and Crumb is also the recipient of the weird honour of having his complete oeuvre published in more or less chronological order in his lifetime. His letters and sketchbooks have seen print, the sort of honour usually reserved for grand old men of the arts community. Popular movies have been made of his work, an awardwinning documentary has been made about him, galleries and museums have exhibited his work, and merchandising – everything from calendars to statuettes 9

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– helps to keep his imagery and worldview in the public eye. But who actually reads Crumb? Hardcore feminists certainly don’t. Crumb’s rise to prominence coincided with the hippie movement but also the rise of feminism. Just as the cartoonist was enjoying a new-found freedom of expression, feminists were coming down on him for just the sort of fantasies he expressed. Cartoonist Trina Robbins, interviewed in Crumb, is characteristic of feminist reaction to Crumb: ‘I was used to what he had been doing which was really quite sweet.Then he did this one that was just incredibly hostile to women, very sexually hostile, and I wasn’t expecting it. I was really shocked. It’s hard for me to believe that he can’t just channel himself into doing better work.’ And he was certainly spurned by art critics. Except for a few, including Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s wide-ranging art critic, and Kirk Varnadoe, who included Crumb in his Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art show, ‘High and Low,’ Crumb has been as much ignored by the critics as were Will Eisner, Walt Kelly, and a host of other comic artists before them. Critical silence has greeted most of Crumb’s publications. No New York Times review, no Art In America profiles, despite the fact that Crumb, after a brief slowdown in the early Seventies, has been producing interesting, varied, and controversial work without interruption. Only recently has a change occurred in Crumb’s critical reception. Nor is he read necessarily by the fanboys.The pimply 10

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kids may own the comics, but it is simply merchandise that rests prophylactically in plastic sacks, untouched. Anyone familiar with the world of collecting knows that artists such as Crumb are more likely to be collected than read, for actually reading the comic would potentially damage it and reduce its value. Crumb, a collector of old jazz records himself, understands the psychology without necessarily appreciating the fanaticism that greets him. On record collecting, Crumb has written that ‘When I first saw some … old Race Record jackets with the original record inside framed on the wall in the homes of record collectors I would visit, how I envied and coveted this stuff!’ Here’s an imaginary profile of a typical Crumb fan. He’s a male, of course; a youngish-looking older guy, or a prematurely old youngster, already bitter at the world for the way he’s been mistreated. He is a collector, most notably of mainstream stuff like comics or graphic novels or music, but also probably of some kind of offbeat objects or cultural products, like city maps, say, or place mats from Southern spare-rib joints in the Thirties. He dresses in carefully selected vintage clothes, preferably from the Fifties; has glasses, or adult acne, or both. He knows way too much about obscure things and, because of his loathing of pop culture and contemporary society, he knows little about what’s going on in the ‘real’ world. He has problems with women. Frustrated in his encounters with bosses, collecting competitors, and women, he leads a life of resentment, glowering at the guys who get the girls. In Crumb’s work, though, he finds solace. Someone is 11

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putting down on paper exactly what he feels inside. Imagine Steve Buscemi’s Seymour in Ghost World and you’ve got the picture. This is a parody, of course, and slightly mean spirited. However, it does point to the very special place that Crumb occupies in the psyches of several generations of comic book readers. For a period of time, Crumb was in danger of being cast among the celebrators of white male rage, a popular phase of comedy in the early Nineties exemplified by ‘shouting’ or gross comics such as Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay and Sam Kinison. The sheer diversity of Crumb’s work, however, has warded off confining it to any one category. Crumb appeals to all walks of life, and to both genders. I ran into a friend on the street. She was going to grad school at the time and was in the middle of finals. I mentioned that I was writing a book about Crumb, but did so hesitatingly, adding unconfidently,‘You probably hate him.’ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I love Crumb’s comics.’ My friend admitted to a liking in general for the weird, the crazy, the ‘alternative,’ the seamy, the kind of difficult-to-take truth treated in Crumb’s comics and elsewhere – a shocking confession, coming from someone whom, based on her appearance, you would cast as a small town librarian or research assistant. For her to admit to a lust for outsiders such as Crumb was shocking, but gratifying. ‘I’ve thought a lot about this, because I get attacked for my taste in humour surprisingly often,’ she went on. ‘But I appreciate “offensive” culture for a couple of 12

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reasons. First, I find most of it funny. Even when offensive, it is still funny and I like to laugh. I guess my humour sensor is larger than my sense of what is truly offensive. George Carlin was right when he said that you can laugh at everything. Second, there is a notsosubtle political agenda embedded in my appreciation of raunchy culture. ‘I tire of hearing arguments for reasons why I should blindly embrace the cultural ideals of minority groups, merely because they are racial minorities. I am much more interested in intellectual and cultural minorities, and the purveyors of offensive culture are these minorities. ‘Anyone who tests the taboos of a society, as Crumb does in his comics, is helping that society to define or even redefine itself. Constant re-evaluation of what is acceptable is necessary for a dynamic, progressive society.’ Another friend of mine is a filmmaker who has done documentaries and public service announcements for public broadcasting stations. When I told her I was writing a book on Crumb, she was almost as excited as I was. ‘I love Crumb,’ she said, ‘and I love Crumb, the movie,’ she added. ‘I find Crumb a brilliant artist and progressive thinker as he channels all of his intellect, dysfunction, sexual perversions, pain, humour, and political incorrectness into his comics. The movie was fantastic for a myriad of reasons.The most obvious was the fact that the filmmaker had known Crumb and his family for 20 or more years, which gave him the insight 13

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and the access to portray Crumb as he really is. ‘I disagreed with the pervading criticism when the movie came out that the film tried to exploit how weird and dysfunctional Crumb and his family were. They were weird and dysfunctional and I think the film did a good job of leaving to the imagination what abuses the father must have inflicted on the family, and why the sisters didn’t want to participate, etc. I think the film is also successful in its message. For me it illustrated what might have become of Crumb had he not had this gift, or more important, had he not pursued it.’ It’s easy to categorize people and difficult for them to escape categorization once it’s been claimed for them. That’s the core of the gripe against both the media coverage of artists and scholarly studies of them. Orson Welles will forever be the man ‘afraid of finishing his films,’ both by newsweeklies and by scholars who have dedicated their lives to researching him. Our desire for narrative often causes a distortion; a need to make a personality fit into the procrustean bed of a priori story structure can ravage our idea of what people are really like. Also, it is difficult to acquire a fully rounded view of another person (Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson is 3,000 pages and counting). But often it is simply a natural inclination to recoil from the full weight of humanity in all its facets. As Eliot said, human beings can only stand so much reality. As Crumb himself said in a letter to his friend Mike Britt dated November 2, 1963, ‘People have to classify and categorize everything … It makes life look so 14

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much simpler … Life is much too complex and vague to draw lines and put everything securely under certain headings.’That’s what this book hopes to avoid doing.

Out of the Past: Influences On Crumb The first time you see a Crumb comic, you’re likely to think, ‘I’ve seen this style somewhere before.’ Crumb’s early cartooning manner was both comfortably old and agreeably new at the same time. It harked back to something you couldn’t quite put your finger on while portraying human beings and ‘funny animals’ in modern, candid situations. Though readers in the Sixties found his content uniquely comic book-like, his early style nevertheless evokes vague memories of noncomic book predecessors.This effect of instant recognition was especially pronounced in the late Sixties when various direct cartoon artist influences (Carl Barks,Walt Kelly) were still active. Connoisseurs of comics might have thought that Crumb’s style harked back to Segar’s Popeye, or further back to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. The dark lines, the cross-hatching, the crowded urban streets, the long flat landscapes across which Crumb’s characters sometimes wander, thinking aloud: these are characteristics Crumb’s work shares with his traditional comic book antecedents. But influences on Crumb’s style go deeper, and much further back.The more you learn about Crumb, the more you realize how much of a student of line drawing he is. Among the artists Crumb has expressed 15

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interest, respect, and a degree of influence for are Pieter Bruegel, George Cruikshank, and James Gillray.

Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525–1569) Time art reviewer Robert Hughes once famously called Crumb the Bruegel of the twentieth century.That was a canny connection. Crumb told interviewer JeanPierre Mercier, ‘It’s hard to be influenced by a guy like Bruegel. He’s such a perfect artist. Once in a while I copy a drawing of his and I look at his engravings. I don’t know how I’d say it influenced me. I like it and I study it and I look at it and any influence would be very indirect probably.’ Though Bruegel’s and Crumb’s styles wouldn’t be mistaken for each other, there is an emotional sympathy and general subject matter in common between the two artists. Still, Crumb liked the artist enough to include an engraving by ‘Pete Brueghel [sic]’ (The Witch Of Malleghem) in the center of the first issue of Weirdo and to draw a detail from one of his paintings in Art & Beauty. Bruegel was born in Holland, probably as early as 1525, and later studied in Italy. His paintings appear to have been very popular. He died in Brussels in 1569. Bruegel’s style was marked by a fondness for Italianate diagonal compositions and an attention to physical detail:A massive ship was to Bruegel what a street lamp is to Crumb. Perhaps under the influence of Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel specialized in drawing the common man; peasants in their various gatherings and celebrations. Hughes characterizes Bruegel as a master 16

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of ‘burning phantasmagorias,’ sweeping, crowded colonized landscapes in which multitudes mingle, each figure a narrative in itself. The connection between Bruegel and Crumb has more to do with the loose link of subject matter. Just as Crumb is heralded as the artist of the Everyman in the street, bravely dealing with his gross physical demands, Bruegel also chronicled the boisterous life of the average inhabitant of his world. Nicknamed Peasant Bruegel for his habitual retreat to village life as his choice of subject matter, Bruegel startled patrons of the arts at a time when religious art predominated. Even more important, Bruegel satirized human life and preferred ‘types’ to accurate portraits of real people. Life goes on; in Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus, Bruegel’s Boschian version of a religious painting, the mythical personage Icarus falls, from the sky, his wings melted by too-close proximity to the sun, as a farmer plowing a field behind a large steer goes about his work oblivious to the momentous mythological event occurring off in the bay to his right. Crumb too is drawn to the quiet dramas and tragedies occurring daily out of sight of the masses.

James Gillray (1756–1815) ‘I love Gillray,’ Crumb told Mercier. ‘It’s incredible. The details, the guy must have done nothing else but draw every minute for his whole life, thousands and thousands of detailed political cartoons and social commentary.’ An example of the cartoonist as thinker, Gillray was 17

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motivated by rage. Most of his caricatures were barbs against the political stupidity of King George III (‘Farmer George’), along with Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke, and Napoleon, among numerous others. Gillray’s bloated, bug-eyed royals, often sensually engorging themselves, are a parade of inhumanity. Gillray also brought a great theatrical sense to a cartoon, a whole tale told about an idiot. Gillray’s engravings were done fast, quickly distributed on the streets as broadsheets, making them spontaneous, lively, and timely. Crumb has not inherited Gillray’s eventual insanity, but he shares an interest in a crowded frame and in biting topical satire fueled by rage and hatred. Coincidentally, Crumb first became nationally known as a cartoonist by distributing the first issue of Zap on the street, much the way that Gillray’s cartoons and caricatures were issued quickly from the shop of his longtime associate, Miss Hanna Humphrey. Like Gillray’s work, Crumb’s cartoons evoked judicial scrutiny. Many of Gillray’s caricatures were blasphemous and licentious, as well as politically raw.

George Cruikshank (1792–1878) Though today little known by the general public, George Cruikshank was in his day a remarkably popular political cartoonist, caricaturist, children’s book illustrator, and finally artist. The son of an illustrator, Cruikshank later went on to rival Gillray as a caricaturist. He became a beloved figure after he began to 18

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illustrate books, of which he did over 850, including some by Dickens. Though popularly thought to be a Punch illustrator, the magazine having started up in 1841, in fact Cruikshank would have nothing to do with the publication, which he viewed as full of what he called ‘personalities,’ or ad hominem attacks. As Punch biographer Richard D. Altick notes, ‘If John Doyle and George Cruikshank had come aboard, Punch would have made a clean sweep of the most gifted comic artists of the day.’ Primarily what Crumb seems to have absorbed from Cruikshank is the same thing he likes about Gillray: broad characters and packed frames filled with detail. In his interview with Mercier, Crumb likens Gillray and Cruikshank to Will Elder, one of the many peculiarly distinctive cartoonists in the Mad stable in the Fifties. Elder’s style was notable for its clean line but also for the multitude of in-jokes he would insert in the background, as well as his reliance on secondary, or even tertiary creatures; creatures to contribute a parallel running gag, much like political cartoonists after Pat Oliphant were prone to do.

Other Influences Crumb has spoken highly of other artists and illustrators in interviews. Among them are British painter and engraver William Hogarth (1697–1764), Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (Jerome Van Aeken, c. 1450–1516), and American cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840–1902), who did ‘very beautiful black line political cartoons for 19

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Harper’s Weekly … very strong stuff.’ Crumb calls Nast ‘the master crosshatcher of all time.’ Finally, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) seems to hold a fascination for Crumb. He told Mercier,‘I like his work but it’s mostly him and his attitude about his work that I envy. I wish I could be more like him because he was very self-confident. He did what he wanted and didn’t worry too much about pleasing other people … He just did his work.’ The resemblance is more than just a sympathy and admiration. Both artists are as famous for their private lives as their art, and both enjoyed a series of liaisons with feisty, fiery women. Sadly, both also have had key members of their extended family commit suicide.And both have taken as subject matter the political realities of their times, as well as the frank treatment of sexuality. John Richardson, in his superb multivolume biography of Picasso, writes that Picasso was ‘at the mercy of that … Andalusian obsession, the mirada fuerte (literally, ‘strong gazing’) … [which] … helps us to understand his recurrent references to voyeurism; the way he uses art and sex – painting and making love – as metaphors for each other; and his fascination with genitalia.’ Crumb has a similar fixation with ‘looking.’

The Lure Of Comic Books Crumb has made it clear in interviews, memoirs, and letters that several comic strip and comic book artists have influenced or inspired him. Among them are Carl Barks, Marge,Walt Kelly, and Harvey Kurtzman. 20

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Carl Barks (1901–2000) Born in Merrill, Oregon, Barks was an artist and illustrator who early on fell into the sphere of Walt Disney and never left it. He went to work for Disney in 1935, where he first was a storyboard artist and gag writer, and he worked on 35 Donald Duck cartoons as well as such features as Fantasia. In November 1942, Barks left the studio and made an arrangement with Western Publishing to draw Disney comic books for them. Barks wanted to develop his own characters, but Western hired him to do Donald Duck stories. He worked for Western for the next 25 years. In the twilight of his life he did oil paintings of his Donald Duck characters (about 150). He died in Grants Pass, Oregon, in 2000. Barks did invent a few characters for Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Among them are, of course, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the world’s richest Scots duck, as well as the Beagle Boys, Gladstone Gander, Donald’s lucky cousin, the inventor Gyro Gearloose, and his helper, Gyro, a light bulb. Barks’s influence was pervasive, yet almost invisible, and to many kids in the Fifties, Barks was Disney.Their experience of the Disney canon was filtered through Barks’s interpretation of Donald Duck and his nephews. As children, Charles and Robert Crumb collected Barks’s comic books, and his ‘medium shot’ approach to laying out panels is one influence on Crumb the cartoonist. Legend has it that one particular pair of 21

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panels was an influence on Crumb. The panels show Donald Duck in crisis mode. Barks drew two panels of Donald, just sitting, staring. In a regular comic, one would have sufficed. But Barks pulled a movie effect and provided emphasis by drawing two.

E. C. (Elzie Crisler) Segar (1894–1938) At the end of his autobiographical documentary, The Confessions of Robert Crumb, the artist alludes to how beloved his early Popeye-style comics were. This is about the only reference I’ve so far been able to find in which Crumb cites the cartoonist whom many think Crumb’s style most resembles. Elzie Segar’s King Features strip Thimble Theatre, chronicling the adventures of Castor Oyl and his pal, Ham Gravy, had been appearing since 1919. In 1929, he introduced Popeye. Within a year, Segar dropped Ham and developed a romance between Popeye and Castor’s sister Olive. The hamburger-obsessed Wimpy appeared in 1932, and Swee’pea was added in 1936. Most kids from the Fifties probably knew Popeye from the Max Fleischer cartoons made about him, starting in 1933 with the release of ‘I Yam What I Yam.’ The Popeye series of 228 Popeye cartoons started to appear on American television in 1957. In 1980, Robert Altman directed a poorly received movie version of Popeye starring Robin Williams as Popeye, and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl. Segar died of leukemia in 1938, and Thimble Theatre was taken over by a succession of cartoonists. 22

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Eventually the strip was taken over completely by one of Segar’s assistants, Forrest ‘Bud’ Sagendorf, in 1958. From the 1940s until 1984, Sagendorf also wrote and drew Popeye comic books for Dell (then for Gold Key, King, and finally Charlton) that are sought after by collectors. Sagendorf died in 1994. Curiously, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, the Thimble Theatre/Popeye comic strip was written and drawn by former underground cartoonist Bobby London (‘Dirty Duck’). Crumb’s bellowing characters talking from the side of their mouths bear a remarkable resemblance to Segar’s cast. Segar was also a master of coherent, logical action from panel to panel, and Crumb has that knack as well.

Marge Henderson Buell (1904–1993) and John Stanley (1914–1993) Marjorie Henderson Buell was that unique personality, a female cartoonist in the early twentieth century. She created Little Lulu as a single-panel cartoon strip in the Saturday Evening Post magazine, where it ran from June 1935 until 1947. In 1945, Little Lulu became a comic character written and drawn by John Stanley. Stanley was a refugee from the Max Fleischer animation studios who ended up at Dell Publishing. Stanley worked on the Little Lulu comic until around 1961. Stanley started out doing the whole comic, but its popularity soon exceeded his ability to keep up, and Stanley collaborated with artist Irv Tripp, who is cred23

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ited with developing the more ‘cartoony’ style for Little Lulu. Stanley wrote the comic books and made preliminary sketches, while Tripp did the final drawing. The Stanley-Tripp version of Little Lulu is viewed by comic book historians as the best youth market comic book ever published. In the ‘B.C. versus A.D.’ phases of Little Lulu, Marge’s version is brattier, with the girlish Lulu using her intelligence to best Tubby and his ‘Boys Only’ gang, while the Stanley version of Lulu was friendly and more supportive of her friends. But there is little doubt that Stanley’s Lulu is the more influential. In 1972, Crumb wrote to his friend Mike Britt, ‘I just bought a complete collection of Little Lulu comics up to 1954 for $200 … mostly all in mint condition … Great stuff, those old Lulus.’

Walt Kelly (1913–1973) The begetter of Pogo and a host of other characters created a unique blend of funny animal stories with a political edge. Born in 1913, Kelly worked for Disney from 1935 to 1941 and had credits on Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Fantasia. Kelly also worked on comic books and introduced Pogo in a Dell publication called Animal Comics in 1941.The daily strip version of Pogo started out in the New York Star in 1948 and 1949 and then was picked up for syndication (the Star having collapsed). Comic-book-oriented kids especially liked collecting the series of trade-paperback-sized reprints of the popular strip that began to appear in 1951 with Pogo. It 24

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was followed by I Go Pogo, and the books continued to appear into the Seventies. There was always a political, Democrat-partyoriented political sensibility to Kelly’s Pogo, but the satire increased as the Fifties wore on. In his book The Jack Acid Society Black Book, he ridicules Joe McCarthy and other witch hunters. Crumb loves animal comics, and Kelly is the master of the genre. Crumb is also a master of the daily strip format and the punchline, and perhaps even Kelly’s model served Crumb well when his own comics became more political. Crumb told Mercier that he liked Kelly’s work because it ‘reflected this underlying feeling about old-time America,’ adding that Kelly was ‘great at lettering!… He had all the old lettering styles down very well.You know, a great logo is a great piece of art!’ In a l961 letter to Marty Pahls, Crumb cited a poll reported in the book Comic Art In America. ‘Children were asked why they didn’t like Animal Comics … They were told by the kids that Animal Comics was too dull … no violence or excitement … just a lot of little bunnies with blue bowties … something like that … I like them.’

Harvey Kurtzman (1924–1993) Among the cartoonists who most influenced Crumb, Harvey Kurtzman is probably the only one he actually met. Crumb contributed to Kurtzman’s magazine Help! and black-and-white home movie footage exists of Crumb and Kurtzman together, creating a comic. 25

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Kurtzman is, of course, best remembered for the early Mad comic book, which he founded in 1952. He supervised the first 28 issues, employing such artists as Will Elder, Jack Davis, and Wally Wood, but quit in 1956 after a falling out with EC publisher Bill Gaines. Kurtzman went on to create Trump (for Playboy magazine), then Humbug, then Help!, where he employed Terry Gilliam, Gloria Steinem, Gilbert Shelton, and Crumb. Today he is probably most recognizable for doing the Playboy feature Little Annie Fanny, started in 1962 with Elder. Kurtzman was an artist and a writer, providing Crumb with an almost unique model within the industry. The comic book Mad and its subsequent magazine form were major influences on underground comics. An argument could be made that the protest movements of the Sixties may not have occurred were it not for skepticism of the culture bred by Mad. The magazine taught young people that nothing in the Fifties could be taken seriously. Kurtzman’s comic undermined everything that mainstream culture manufactured. By the time the Sixties rolled around, its readers were already well aware of a ‘credibility gap’ between ‘reality’ and what politicians and the nightly news proclaimed. Mad went on to influence even more publications, such as Spy, an American imitator of Private Eye. Spy, though controversial and much hated by the subjects of its profiles and jabs, the mocking tone of the magazine went on to pervade most other American magazines, from Entertainment Weekly to Sassy.Yet Spy itself would 26

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have been unimaginable without the prior partial model of Mad. Thus Kurtzman’s legacy fanned out in numerous directions, many of them not even comic books.

Crumb: The Consummate Cartoonist And Writer Though on the surface it may seem ridiculous to compare Crumb with artists who dwell well outside his craft, doing so illuminates aspects of Crumb’s art that might remain under-appreciated. To compare Crumb to James Joyce isn’t to say that he is as great an artist as the Irish expatriate. But then again, what’s outrageous about asserting that in his field Crumb is as great an artist as Joyce? Comparing Crumb to a number of artists is telling. Like James Joyce (1882–1941), another behatted, bespectacled sartorial exception to every group, Crumb abandoned his homeland for Europe (though he did so later in life). Crumb lives in France, while Joyce kicked around Italy and Switzerland before ending up in Paris. Like Joyce, Crumb is a poet of busy streetlife. Crumb is a student of the sort of urban isolation that people, though mostly males, can feel in a crowd. He also has affinities with the Bloomian wandering mind, of the thought processes that grapple with the injustices of life and the cliquishness of society. It’s not beyond the pale to imagine Crumb illustrating passages from Ulysses the way he’s tackled Kafka and Boswell. Like Joyce, Crumb feels a disdain for his homeland; like Joyce he abhors a 27

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hollow modernity and instead honours popular culture of the recent past. Music was just as important to Joyce as words and images, along with a set of sexual fetishes, and the same goes for Crumb. As artists, they are both painstaking. Biographically speaking, also like Joyce, Crumb has been married to a woman whom he publicly celebrates as the bedrock of his life. Crumb also bears some personal and artistic resemblance to the British poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985).A crafter of deft, witty, jargon-free, and poignant poems, in his later years Larkin was, in the popular imagination, a beloved crank and misanthrope, noted for his melancholy yet amusing verse about jobs, growing old, and sexual isolation; but after his death, temporary revisionism recast him as a misogynist, racist, and political retrograde. Crumb’s career is following a similar arc. Crumb continues to test the limits of the affection he has inspired with stories that push the boundaries of political correctness. Like Larkin, Crumb inspires an obsessive identification with his views, problems, and sometimes surly attitudes toward society and relationships; people who love him think that he is speaking directly to them. Also like Larkin, Crumb developed key and lasting friendships with fellow artists who were his equals. For Larkin, it was Kingsley Amis, Bruce Montgomery (Edmund Crispin), Barbara Pym, and Robert Conquest. For Crumb it was various commercial and underground cartoonists from Harvey Kurtzman to Spain Rodriguez. And then there is the music connection. Larkin 28

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favoured American jazz from the pre-war era and wrote about it extensively, blaming the decline of three major art forms on the three Ps – Ezra Pound, Charlie Parker, and Pablo Picasso; Crumb seems to abhor music from the Fifties on, favouring folk and ethnic music and performers whom most Americans haven’t bothered to familiarize themselves with. And, finally, it’s salutary to compare Crumb with American movie director Woody Allen (1935–). Like Allen, who began as a comedy writer for television in its early days and contributed gags to New York City newspaper columnists, Crumb began at a low level in his field (drawing greeting cards). Both artists seem confessional, and both explore the complexities of domestic relationships. Both ‘started out funny’ but have changed drastically over the course of their careers, in some cases leaving behind former fans still nostalgic for the energy and humour of their early work. Allen writes, directs, and performs equally; Crumb draws, but also writes and performs – once again, there is the music connection. Allen, as is well known, loves New Orleans jazz, and part of his public persona is that he plays clarinet in a band at Michael’s Pub in Manhattan every Monday night (his performances on the road with this band were chronicled in Barbara Kopple’s 1997 documentary Wild Man Blues). Crumb has played guitar and banjo in several bands, among them the Cheap Suit Serenaders, and has been reviewed and interviewed as a musician, though obviously not as extensively as he has as a cartoonist. Whole books could be written about the similarities 29

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between Crumb and these artists. Suffice it to say that noting some resemblances between Crumb and a novelist, a poet, and a film director – three of the most important artists of the twentieth century – suggests the breadth of his own artistry and his membership in an awe-inspiring club.

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The Genesis Of A Future Genius (1943–1964) The prime elder of the Crumb family, Charles V. Crumb, was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota. ‘My father was raised on a farm,’ Crumb has written, ‘one of 14 children … My father’s people were all farmers.’ The name Crumb, he continues,‘is supposedly of old Saxon origin.’ Crumb Sr. entered the Marines around 1936. Charles Crumb married Beatrice Hall of Milford, Delaware. ‘My mother came from an unstable urban lower-middle and working class family who shifted up and down the east coast.’ Their first child, Carol, was born in 1940 (or ‘41). Charles Jr followed in 1942, Robert was born on August 30, 1943, followed by brother Maxon in 1945, and the family was rounded off with sister Sandra in 1956. Robert was born in Philadelphia, but the kids were Marine brats, and the family moved frequently. By the time he was 15, Robert had lived in Philadelphia; Pennsylvania; Albert Lea, Minnesota; Ames, Iowa; Oceanside, California; Upper Darby, Pennsylvania; and Milford, Delaware, the town that seems to have had the most lasting and dire effect on the brothers. At the urging of his wife, Crumb Sr. left the Marines 31

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in 1956 and entered the world of business. He later wrote a book called Training People Effectively. By all accounts, he was a stern man who was disappointed that all his male children were ‘sissies,’ more interested in comic books than football. The Crumb children were raised as Catholics, and the Crumb parents never divorced, instead choosing to lead separate lives after years of squabbling. The elder Crumb seems to have become a typical Fifties male in a bland suit with the common views of his times. A figure not unlike him pops up a lot in some of Robert Crumb’s early underground comics (Charles V. Crumb died in 1982). Crumb’s mother was apparently addicted to diet pills from the Fifties through to the Seventies, and spent her later years in front of the television, surrounded by cats. Crumb told one interviewer, ‘My mom has been watching television non-stop for four years. She sleeps on the sofa in front of the set and she never turns it off.’ Except for Carol, the whole brood drew comic books, under the supervision of Charles Jr, who was a stern taskmaster. ‘I was trying to compete with him,’ Crumb told a class of students in 1971. ‘He made me feel like shit if I couldn’t draw as good as he. He’d criticize my cartoons, tell me how to draw better. I was always trying so hard to please him that finally I got so good, he gave it up.’ Chuck And Bob, Brombo The Panda, and Foo were among the titles they worked on, and they even formed a family group called the Animal Town Comics Club. They would try to sell some of their comics door to door. 32

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In his teen years, Robert Crumb began collecting 78-rpm jazz and blues records, in addition to the EC horror comics and Walt Disney publications that he was already collecting. Friendships with two other boys (Marty Pahls and Mike Britt), conducted mostly by mail, took Crumb outside the family, where he was desperately unhappy, and outside his school milieu, where he was equally an outcast. ‘I was one of those social rejects, but then, you know, a lot of people were – nothing unusual about being an outcast in high school,’ he told an interviewer in 1972. Crumb worked summer jobs to pay for his collecting habit, and after high school, instead of going to college, he worked at the American Greetings Corporation, later promoted to the Hi-Brow department, which specialized in fanciful and joke cards outside the mainstream of the usual greeting card style. Crumb worked in this department for four years (like fellow expatriate Gore Vidal, Crumb only worked a nine-to-five job for a short time in his life) and during that time met Dana Morgan, marrying her in June 1964.Their honeymoon trip through Europe was enhanced creatively by the sketchbooks given to Crumb as a wedding gift by his colleagues at American Greetings. Drawing in sketchbooks became a lifelong habit. The marriage appears to have been rocky, with Crumb frequently leaving and returning. He found himself slipping into the same routine as his father, a dressed-down corporate drone trapped in a dull cycle of work and strife-filled home life. 33

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Crumb Family Comics Publication history: This anthology was edited by Maxon Crumb and published by Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1998, Hardback, 204 pages, Illustrated, ISBN 0 86719 427 8. Story: Crumb Family Comics gathers together material by most of the Crumb family. There are essays and paintings by Maxon, cartoons and letters by Charles, essays and reprinted stories by Crumb, colour portraits of notable figures by son Jesse Crumb, sketches and stories by daughter Sophie Crumb, and collaborations between Crumb and Aline. The book also contains a cryptic introduction by credited editor Maxon Crumb, as well as Charles Crumb’s ‘talent test’ for the Famous Artists Schools, some of his squiggle page comics, made famous in the movie Crumb, and excerpts from four letters he wrote as an adult to Robert Crumb from 1981 on. Terry Zwigoff starts off the book off with a foreword and concludes it with an afterword in which he defends his film from critics who misunderstood his intentions. Background: Published in 1998 in the aftermath of Zwigoff ’s movie Crumb Family Comics serves as a valuable adjunct to the movie and even tells the reader more about the family than could possibly have been imagined. In his foreword, Zwigoff explains that gathering Crumb family art was ‘an idea that’s appealed to me since I got to know Robert, Maxon, and Charles in the early 1970’s [sic].’ Zwigoff rightfully praises the art in the book for the same qualities that the Crumb family shows in his movie: ‘It’s honest and it’s personal 34

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and those are rare qualities to find in any art form.’ Analysis: What’s fascinating about the Crumb family art is how different it is from one person to another while still being recognizably part of the same family. Maxon has a more mechanistic style.Though highly individual, Maxon’s art has echoes of Picasso, Basil Wolverton, and even Rube Goldberg, whose complex interlocking machinery designed to perform simple tasks is a concept here put to sexual purposes. Zwigoff told an interviewer (the author of this book, in fact) that at the time of Crumb’s release Maxon seemed to blossom with the attention he got in the aftermath of the film. Maxon has continued to write and illustrate books, including Hardcore Mother (City Zen, 2000,Trade paperback, 113 pages, illustrated, ISBN 3 83111 511 7). Not to put too fine a point on it, Maxon didn’t seem to like his mother very much, and there are hints of anger at Robert Crumb in his introduction as well. Maxon’s and Charles’s work, for example, is distinct yet startlingly similar. Charles, who seems to have simply stopped drawing comics in his teen years, has a very warm style, much influenced by Carl Barks and other ‘funny animal’ comic artists. As shown in Crumb the movie, Charles’s style was overtaken by a squiggle line drawing technique that was at first distinctive but which came to overtake the art altogether, like a strange virus killing its host. In the end, he would fill page after page with unreadable automatic writing. Charles committed suicide in the late Nineties. Had he been able to continue as an artist, he might have ended up not unlike Brice Marden, a Bronxville, New York-born 35

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abstract painter whose squiggly lines and colour schemes resemble Charles’s work. Also included in the book are written excerpts from Crumb’s notebooks. One traces his family history. Another discusses the ‘Chinese curse,’ a hex that supposedly befell his family because of actions his father engaged in as a Marine in China during the war. The Crumb Woman: This is a book about the Crumb men, for the most part, and the ‘Crumb Woman’ doesn’t figure in it in an original manner beyond the reprints of his series, ‘My Troubles With Women.’ Confessions: The most important revelation in the book is Charles Crumb’s admission that he was, as he puts it, a ‘homosexual pedophile.’ This lends an insight into the Crumb family dynamic that the movie wasn’t in a position to offer at the time of its release. Collectibility: The book is still in print at $19.95 for an oversized trade paperback. Bearing in mind that books from dealers whose wares are offered on the world wide web are often overpriced, hardback copies of a limited edition of 400, signed by five of the living Crumb relatives represented in the book (Aline, Jesse, Maxon, Crumb, and Sophie), have been offered online for as much as $100. The Verdict: Crumb Family Comics is an essential text for anyone trying to understand the Crumb family dynamic.

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Your Vigor For Life Appalls Me: Robert Crumb Letters, 1958–1977 Publication history: This collection was published by Fantagraphics in 1998, Trade Paperback, 250 pages, Illustrated, ISBN 1 56097 310 2. Story: Essentially, these letters chart the rise and fall of his friendships with two late childhood friends, Marty Pahls and Mike Britt.The book also has a fine, detailed, and contextualizing introduction by Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth. Background: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who write letters for all the world to see, and those who believe that personal correspondence is indeed private. Crumb is a member of the second fraternity. The letters in this book, though an invasion of privacy, provide a remarkable insight in the developing artist. Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me comprises 50 letters, ranging in date from 1958 to 1997, the bulk of them written when the budding artist was from 15 to 20 years old, with a handful of letters written later. The letters are written to two people, Mike Britt, whom he had met in eighth grade, and Marty Pahls, an older kid with aspirations to become a writer, and who had initiated correspondence with the Crumbs after seeing an issue of their parody magazine Foo. Pahls, whom Crumb’s ex-wife elsewhere calls ‘weird,’ was later to marry Crumb’s sister Sandra and then edit some of the early Complete Collected Crumb comics, before dying in February, 1989. 37

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In his letters (and we only get his side of the correspondence), Crumb mostly discusses comic books and music; specifically, funny animal comics and cartoonists of the past, whom he admires, and old jazz records he had recently begun collecting. In his letters, Crumb, who had just emerged from a tumultuous wrestling with religion, raises such issues and questions as free will, authenticity, and faith. Crumb declares himself ‘an ardent feminist,’ and there is an interesting subplot concerning an African-American friend of Charles’s whom Crumb finds sympathetic. Crumb shows a critical scrutiny of comic book art, and evinces a real work ethic that he tries to force on unwilling others. Analysis: Though it’s not unusual these days for the letters of a still living person to be published, it probably is a little unusual for the letters of a cartoonist to see print. Cartoonists, after all, are associated with images rather than words. But as this book makes clear, Crumb should be esteemed not only as one of the great modern cartoon artists, but also one of the form’s best writers. It’s odd to read the teenaged Crumb complaining about his inability to draw girls (he couldn’t do noses), because he was to go on to be one of the best celebrators of the female form. And it’s odd to hear Crumb express an interest, in fact sympathy, for old American values and early society, for he was soon to be one of the fiercest critics of his country. And it’s even more odd for Crumb to express such nervousness about travel, for in a few short years he was 38

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to evince a restlessness that put in him the same league as the beat poets and novelists. Crumb would go from a nervous Nellie traveller, worried about bus connections and getting stranded, to a modern Beat. Crumb had already moved around the country a lot with his peripatetic parents. Like Mark Twain, Crumb had seen a lot of the United States and its people, more than most Americans, and was positioned better than others to satirize it. If the book has a problem, it’s that only Crumb’s letters are printed. Had the volume included his recipients’ replies (perhaps unfeasible for budgetary reasons), the reader would have enjoyed more of the dialogue these letters represent and perhaps would have seen Crumb’s badinage in better context.The publication of Kingsley Amis’s selected letters in 2001 allowed the reader to see both sides of a dialogue between the novelist and the poet Philip Larkin, already published. Similarly, the letters of Barbara Pym, published before Larkin’s, illuminated the poet’s letters when later read in tandem with Pym’s collection. A partial collection of letters, however carefully selected, can only give a distorted view of their author. In fact, if these letters remind the reader of any other artist, it is Philip Larkin. Both betray a surprisingly detailed interest in jazz and popular music of the past. Both brooded in print on their difficult, complex relations with the opposite sex, the push-me, pull-me of isolation versus socializing. And both pondered racial tension, though from different perspectives. The Crumb personality, as revealed in these letters, is 39

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at times not particularly pleasant. Bearing in mind that Crumb was only a kid and did not intend these letters to be read by others, he comes across as stingy, hectoring and greedy. He demands that his friends send him records, books, comics but is on the tardy side in returning them, and appears reluctant to lend his own stuff. Nerds may be nerds to athletes, but they are still males, and, within their own circles, aggression and competition find expression. Curiously, the eventual nomad is here a trembling traveller, fearful of getting on the wrong bus when venturing out to visit Pahls or Britt in different cities. Anyone who has been a comic book nerd will instantly recognize these various traits, which don’t define the whole person. Outside observers will not feel so alienated when reflecting how much Crumb’s letters remind them of themselves. Nevertheless, Vigor is an essential addition to Crumb’s body of work. It reveals intentions, themes, and desires that would bear fruit in later years. It explicates cryptic aspects of Crumb’s cartoons, such as the various real-life girls who pop up later in his work. Most important, Crumb’s letters are a reminder that Crumb the artist is as much a writer as he is a cartoonist. In several, he gives writing advice to his recipients, and he shows an unusually vast knowledge of ‘unfashionable’ American literature and history of the time. Crumb’s taste, it seems, veered from a very early age toward the humble, honest, unpretentious quality of American arts and literature, a perhaps illusory pastorality that, at least for Crumb, represented an alter40

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native to the self-satisfied corruptions of the day. He preferred to look back, rather than be in the present. Like the character Old Mose in John Ford’s The Searchers, Crumb was ‘born old.’ The Crumb Woman: The later ‘confessional’ Crumb is close-mouthed about the true nature of his interest in women. Perhaps his fantasies had not yet taken a final form. Instead, Crumb has the usual teen complaints about shyness, and girls’ preference for powerful, attractive men. Confessions: By its very nature, the letter is a confessional format, but Crumb uses these letters to do other things: complain, wheedle, manipulate, compete and brag. Collectibility:Your Vigor For Life Appalls Me is still in print and at this writing goes for its cover price of $14.95. The Verdict: It’s a measure of the esteem in which Crumb is now held, or at least the degree to which a market exists out there for any Crumbiana, that his letters were published when he was still in his fifties. Nevertheless, Your Vigor For Life Appalls Me is a crucial text for getting a deeper view of the cartoonist, one that in a sense contrasts with the person called ‘Crumb’ who appears in his confessional comics.

The Yum Yum Book Publication history:The Yum Yum Book was originally published by the Scrimshaw Press of San Francisco in 1975 in a hardback for $6.95 (ISBN 0 912020 50 4). It 41

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was reprinted by Snow Lion Graphics in November 1995 in softcover (ISBN: 0 943389 19 4) with an introduction by Harvey Pekar.The cover of the first edition officially titles it R. Crumb’s The Yum Yum Book, but the first page of the story, which is also the title page, bears the title ‘Oggie And The Beanstalk.’ Story: The mock fairy-tale story of ‘Oggie And The Beanstalk’ begins with a frog or toad named Ogden (Oggie for short), sent to university by his father.There the amphibian doesn’t fit in. He can’t compete with his classmates, he can’t make it with girls, and a lazy return to the Church fails. After a drunken binge, Oggie returns home and squashes a bunch of ladybugs cleaning clothes in his lodgings and then buries the pulpy corpses under the stones of the floor. Oggie and his friends are surprised the next day when a giant green stalk rises from the burial place. One of the vines grabs him by the foot and carries him into the sky, and he lands in a lush, green, fruit-bearing Arcadia. There, Oggie lazes about, grows bored, and then meets a giant teenage nude woman of Rubens-esque dimensions named Gunthra. After some initial tension, Oggie and Gunthra begin to frolic. But they have a falling out, and in despair Oggie climbs back down the stalk. Upon his return, Oggie finds that the beanstalk has infested the city. Accused of having inspired this invasion, Oggie is jailed, tried, and sentenced to death. But Gunthra eventually follows Oggie down the beanstalk, and rescues him just in time. With a kiss, she turns 42

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Oggie into a boy of an equal size to her. Leaving the decimated city, they set sail for a land where they can spend their lives together. They discover it in a skyline that looks suspiciously like Manhattan, where Oggie and Gunthra live the rest of their lives in traditional domestic bliss. Background: Crumb drew ‘Oggie And The Beanstalk’ when he was nineteen years old, over the course of six months from late 1962 to early ‘63, using (according to his introduction) Prismacolor pencils, theoretically averaging a little over one page a day. When he was finished, he gave the book to his fiancée, later his wife, Dana Morgan, whom he had met in the interim. The book was stored with other materials for several years, then published when Crumb was thirty, possibly at the urging of his then lawyer, Albert Morse, and/or Dana (who owned the copyright). In the introduction, Crumb writes, ‘Personally, it embarrasses me now, but probably a lot of people will like it better than the stuff I turn out currently. Others, I’m sure, will put it down for being too cute, etc … I’ve changed a lot and so has my work, but this does have a certain innocent charm.’ Analysis: The Yum Yum Book is Crumb’s first major work, and it’s all here, all the themes and character types that were to populate his cartoons for years to come. There’s the giant woman. There’s the miniature male following her around. There’s the Arcadian landscape that Crumb returns to often, even as late as 1998 in Mystic Funnies No. 2 (discussed later), a landscape that alternates for him with the crowded streets of a bland, dense city. And there’s the portrait of a society teeming 43

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with selfish, oblivious people.The story even starts with a splash page of Oggie overwhelmed by a crowded city street, the first of many in Crumb’s later underground comics. One of the most interesting sequences in the tale is a dialogue between Oggie in prison and a pipesmoking intellectual cat named Lampe.The cat explains to the out-of-it and now jailed Oggie what has happened to the city since the advent of the stalk.The town has been deemed cursed (a Chinese curse?), deprived of shipping routes, and all the frogs have been massacred in an Anurian holocaust thanks to the storm of hatred stirred up by ladybugs. But so impressed with this disaster is Lampe, who is writing a book on these dire times between puffs on his pipe, that he can’t believe Oggie when the frog describes the paradise at the top of the stalk. Oh, and look for Fritz the Cat in the lower right-hand corner of page 3, a classroom scene appearing on a splash page. The Crumb Woman: Gunthra is the first of the great Crumb women. She is big, pink, and lazy, lolling around on the grass when not engaged in competitive sex games with Oggie. Often when Crumb introduces a new female character in a similar context, there is a lengthy multipage dance of seduction. But Gunthra is pre-LSD, pre-underground, and so, though she is nude, she doesn’t do much. Compare the equally long sequence between the Moron and the Fairy Godmother in Mystic Funnies No. 2 with this much tamer version to see the changes thirty-five years have wrought. 44

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Confessions: ‘Oggie And The Beanstalk’ is, unsurprisingly we would learn later, an autobiographical work. The tale presents Oggie’s father as a cold man who doesn’t understand his son. And a brief fling with the Church comes to nothing for Oggie; it’s a tedious experience for him, and he is even kicked out of the building. In general, Oggie is a victim, spurred by women and belittled by his buddies, but in fact he isn’t a perfect person himself, being somewhat lazy and easily bored. In short, he has all the carefully observed traits found in most Crumb males, and Crumb selfportraits, to follow. Collectibility: Copies of the 1975 edition of The Yum Yum Book are offered online for between $35 and $75. Identifying a true first edition is difficult, but the book probably had only one print run. The hardback wasn’t put together well, and the pages have a tendency to fall out if the book is poorly treated. The trade paperback reprint is also out of print and is offered for around $18. The Verdict: The Yum Yum Book is a rather amazing production for a nineteen-year-old. The colouring is beautiful, the framing is relaxed and confident, and the story is coherent over its 143 pages. Except for its sexual content (tame by today’s standards), it’s a work that was perfectly publishable at the time. It’s an important step in the Crumb story because it is his first large effort and announces many of the themes, character types, and situations that were to preoccupy Crumb for the next forty years.

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The Bitter Years Of Early Struggle (1965–1970) ‘I escaped to San Francisco when I met two guys in a bar [in January 1967] who said they were driving west.’ Thus Robert Crumb told Rolling Stone how he first took the path that led to his becoming the father of underground comics. But the groundwork for this revolution in comic book art had begun much earlier, in June 1965, when he started taking LSD. Still in Cleveland, and still working for the Hi-Brow division of American Greetings, Crumb was in a difficult marriage and was trying to break free of corporate America, with minimal success. And acid was legal at the time. Taking acid ‘changed my head around,’ he told an interviewer.‘It made me stop taking cartooning so seriously and showed me a whole other side of myself.’ His acid trips were a mix of good and bad. Expansive though they may have been, a hit of acid he dropped in New York in October or November of 1965 caused a six-month state of mental fuzziness. ‘It started out like any other LSD trip,’ Crumb told bibliographer Donald Fiene.‘But then, somewhere in the middle of it, everything went fuzzy … It was in this state that I broke up 46

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with Dana [for the first time], and I remained in this weird electric fog for several months.’ This fuzzy state ended only when he took another trip on some powerful acid with Dana in April 1966. Confusing as the experience might have been, it was in this period that Crumb invented most of the characters who were to populate his comics for years to come. ‘All this crazy stuff came out of my brain.That’s how I invented all those characters – Mr Natural, Angelfood McSpade, Mr Snoid.’ In this brief but productive phase of major creativity, Crumb resembles certain artists (and even some scientists) who accomplished most of their primary creative work by their early twenties. Dylan Thomas is an example.The poet more or less coasted on the poems and poem fragments that he conjured up in his teen years to early adulthood. Unlike other artists who succumbed to this cycle, however, Crumb stayed remarkably prolific for the rest of his life. Then in January 1967, Crumb made a break for San Francisco, which had entered his consciousness as a place where good work was being done by a group of young psychedelic poster artists. He ran into two friends, Skip and Tim, during happy hour in Adele’s Bar in Cleveland. They said they were driving to San Francisco, and Crumb asked if there was room for one more. Once ensconced, Crumb felt guilty about abandoning his wife and soon summoned her. At the same time, he started contributing to publications such as Yarrowstalks and, encouraged by someone who promised to publish an independent comic book, started drawing the first two Zaps. 47

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‘I figured it out somehow – the way to put the stoned experience into a series of cartoon panels,’ Crumb wrote in the introduction to Vol. 4 of the Complete Crumb Comics. ‘I began to submit LSDinspired strips to underground papers … not for pay … never gave it a thought … but they loved them.These 1967 strips of mine contained the hopeful spirit of the times, drawn in a more lovable ‘bigfoot’ style.The stuff caught on. They wanted more. Suddenly I was able to churn it out … late that summer one of the underground paper publishers asked me to do an entire issue of his paper Yarrowstalks (corny hippie spiritual stuff – ‘yarrowstalks’ are what they used to throw the I Ching). This went over so well that he suggested I draw comic books and he would publish them.This was a thrilling idea to me – a dream come true.’ After a complicated series of difficulties, Zap No. 1 was published by Don Donahue in early 1968, and Crumb sold it on the streets, much in the manner that he and Charles would sell issues of their magazine Foo door to door when they were kids. Crumb formed alliances with various new publishers, met other burgeoning cartoonists who wanted the freedom that underground comic books offered, and the underground comic book as a phenomenon took off. The means for distributing comic books was derived from a network already in place to distribute rock posters. Crumb travelled a lot during this period, meeting cartoonists and record collectors all across the country. By the end of the Sixties, Crumb had a son, Jesse, 48

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born in 1968, and had bought some property in Potter Valley, in Northern California. He came to be involved with several women, though he also has said that he didn’t feel any more a part of the hippie movement than he did of his high school. ‘I never did become a hippie… I used to live in the Haight-Ashbury and go to the love-ins and all, but I never could get into the spirit of it somehow.’ By the middle of 1970, Crumb experienced something akin to a nervous breakdown.There was an important and obvious difference between the early underground comics and commercial comic books:The undergrounds were in black and white. This two-tone colour scheme did two things. It created a sense of ‘seriousness’ that colourful comics usually didn’t exude. And it links underground comics to daily newspaper strips and Mad magazine, which are the true inspiration for the kind of comics that Crumb, at least, was trying to produce. Less like a given month’s batch of Archie or Superman or Marvel comics, underground comics embraced the anarchic spirit of Mad.

‘Mr Natural In Death Valley’ Publication history: ‘Mr Natural In Death Valley’ was first published in Zap No. 0, in October 1967. It has been reprinted several times, most prominently in The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 4, Fantagraphics (1989, Trade Paperback, ISBN 0 930193 79 2, pages 85–89) and in the Fantagraphics collection The Book Of Mr Natural (1999, Oversize Trade Paperback, 120 pages, ISBN 1 56097 194 0). 49

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Story:A hungry Mr Natural, wandering in the desert, is hosed down by Flakey Foont.Telling Mr Natural that he wants ‘just a couple of straight answers,’ the elusive guru plays hard to get, putting Foont off. Mr Natural fools him with the mirage of a city in the distance and then lists all the things Foont should do to achieve enlightenment (‘Buy some asparagus [sic]! Then meet a new person, go home, take LSD, say a prayer…’). Dismayed, Foont complains, ‘Why do I keep thinking you can tell me anything?’ and they tromp off in different directions. Background: Mr Natural is Crumb’s most frequently drawn character. His constant acolyte Flakey Foont is a close second. Mr Natural first appeared in Crumb’s sketchbooks in 1966. This was during a several-month phase in which Crumb was feeling ‘fuzzy’ thanks to some bad acid he had dropped in New York. Under the influence of the LSD, as well as a stack of Forties comic books he and friend Marty Pahls had picked up in Chicago for a nickel each, Crumb also invented the Snoids, Eggs Ackley, Shuman the Human, the Vulture Demonesses, Shabno the Shoe-Horn Dog and numerous others both obscure and famous. As Crumb tells the story, he was listening to the radio when a disc jockey announced that a just-finished tune was by ‘Mr Natural.’ Crumb incorporated that name into his sketchbook. Mr Natural probably has as many antecedents as Alfred E. Newman. His short, robed body and long beard put one in mind of a cross between Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls and a Thirties cartoon character. The 50

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style in which he is drawn evokes old Segar Popeyes. Crumb bibliographer Donald Fiene has traced Mr Natural’s source back to a character called ‘The Hitchhiker.’This robed, long-bearded figure spoke one surrealistic phrase (‘Nov shmoz ka pop,’ a sentence that has popped up in some early Crumb strips) and was created by Gene Ahern (1895–1960) for the ‘Squirrel Cage’ section of the Sunday edition of his newspaper strip Room And Board, which began publication in 1936. The first Mr Natural strip appeared in the San Francisco underground newspaper Yarrowstalks No. 1 (May 5, 1967), published by David Auten and Brian Zahn. Mr Natural became a regular, and Flakey Foont made his first appearance in issue No. 3. Mr Natural went on to make his national debut in Zap Comix No. 0, then in issue No. 1 in 1967 (No. 1 came out before issue No. 0, but was drawn second). In 1970 Crumb did three issues of a self-titled Mr Natural comic, and also did a short-lived weekly strip for the Village Voice in 1975. One thing to note about Mr Natural is what he has not become, which is an endlessly exploited commodity, such as an animated cartoon character. Crumb has only allowed two non-Crumb uses of the character, first as a small squeeze-toy, distributed by Kitchen Sink Press in 1993, and then as a ceramic table lamp figure, produced by his son Jesse Crumb in 1998, in a limited edition. Analysis: Mr Natural is the guru’s guru. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the hippie movement 51

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was an interest in Asian religions. Crumb skewers that aspect of hippiedom with Mr Natural, an apparent fraud who bedevils his disciple Flakey Foont with cryptic and contradictory remarks. Foont is Mr Natural’s Sancho Pancha, his Lou Costello to Mr Natural’s Bud Abbott. He seems to have made his first appearance in ‘Mr Natural Outwits Flakey Foont’ but is now almost unimaginable without Mr Natural, although true to the nature of their dynamic, Mr Natural is imaginable without Foont. Foont is tortured by doubts and torn between the life of the mind and sensual pleasures. He is especially weak in the face of Mr Natural’s opaque Socratic questions. Mr Natural tricks him constantly, one of his worst tendencies being the gift of various girls. One of the early ones is Ruth, a hippie who ends up becoming Foont’s domestic burden with their two kids. Their relationship puts the reader in mind of Charlie Brown and Lucy but has a larger context, the ‘unanswerable questions’ of the rinzai branch of Zen Buddhism. Foont is probably the worst Buddhist in the world. Fakery would be irrelevant in the real world if Foont were able to get something out of it to aid his training. ‘Mr Natural In Death Valley’ is also one of the earliest stories in which Crumb used a thicker line and a larger panel size. The Crumb Woman: The almost feral Mr Natural is always in the market for another giantess for his own collection or to give to Foont. Confessions: With the creation of Mr Natural and 52

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Foont, Crumb owned up to his disenchantment with or his skepticism of the hippie movement, of which he was presumably a committed member. Instead, he felt like an outsider. He has told interviewers that he hated rock music, felt alienated at love-ins, and couldn’t handle the insecurity of the lifestyle. Crumb elucidates these feelings fully in his introduction to Vol. 4 of the Complete Crumb Comics. Collectibility: Most Mr Natural stories are easily available in modern reprint editions for the cover price.The three issues of Mr Natural the comic book from the early Seventies are offered by dealers online for sums ranging from $50 to $100. The Verdict:Aside from the phrase ‘Keep on Truckin’,’ which Crumb didn’t invent anyway, Mr Natural remains Crumb’s most enduring creation. He is also a sly dig against what Crumb took to be the vacuity of much hippie thought.

‘Dirty Dog’ Publication history: This story was first published in Zap No. 3, December 1968, and reprinted in the Complete Crumb Comics,Vol. 5, Fantagraphics, 1990, pages 74–76. Story: The tale of Dirty Dog begins simply enough. God, in the form of a funny bunny rabbit, sits at a large television floor camera and invites us to join him in scrutinizing a typical Earth dweller. This creature is Dirty Dog, one of Crumb’s earliest urban wanderers, garbed in a long coat, alone with his thoughts, failing to connect with the people around him. When he 53

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attempts to pick up a cute dog girl standing next to him at a street signal, she absolutely ignores him, continuing to stare straight ahead. At this rejection, he plunges further into the depths of despair. In response, he slinks into an adult bookstore and comes upon a copy of a magazine called Lez Be Friends. As Dirty Dog flips through the issue, he imagines himself frolicking with the two girls. He has found his selection. Dog takes the magazine to the intimidating clerk, and with cheery beams emanating from his head, Dirty Dog exits the store, with a presumably satisfying afternoon of masturbation ahead of him. As God says, ‘Poor ol’ Dirty Dog! But he’s happy!’ Background: When he did ‘Dirty Dog,’ Crumb had been publishing cutting-edge comic stories for some time. On the one hand, even amid the enthusiasm he met within the counterculture, he must have already been receiving criticism for the ‘outrageousness’ of his sexual content. On the other hand, given the times, the artist must have been aware that a censorship trial might come up sooner or later. Intentional or not, ‘Dirty Dog’ is a compassionate defense of the right to view pornography. In fact, by March 1970, bookstore owner Si Lowinsky was on trial in Berkeley for selling Snatch magazine. One of the defense witnesses was Peter Selz, who was curator of the art museum at the University of California-Berkeley. The jury voted for acquittal, another landmark in the counterculture’s battle over freedom of speech. Analysis: Like Wally Wood’s Disneyland orgy drawn 54

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for Paul Krassner’s magazine, The Realist, ‘Dirty Dog’ shockingly takes funny animal characters who have a Disney flavour to them and casts them in licentious roles. Dirty Dog himself could be a variation on Pluto, and the clerk looks like one of Mickey Mouse’s villains. ‘Dirty Dog’ begins with a quote from a song,‘Rather drink muddy water, Lord/ sleep in a hollow log/ than be up here in New York City/ treated like a dirty dog.’ Crumb’s interest in old-time blues songs gives him his title. But though the song suggests that the story is taking place in New York, the setting feels like the West Coast. One clue appears in the opening panel:A ‘supermarket’ in the background sports what looks like a Nazi swastika but which is, in fact, a decorative emblem found on many pre-war West Coast houses. A lot of Crumb themes and images are here in miniature. Urban, jobless wanderers.The city landscape, meticulously drawn by Crumb. The blend of funny animals and animal lust, so to speak. Crumb’s midcareer drawing style is at its peak here. Particularly relevant are two frames on the third page. Both are close-ups of Dirty Dog. In the first, the fantasy he has just had vanishes in a ‘pop’ of exploding air. Dirty Dog looks apprehensive, with beads of sweat hopping off his brow and a focused, intense look in his eyes. But Crumb doesn’t stop there. He follows that image with an almost identical panel of Dirty Dog now looking to his left. This sort of emotional detail is unusual in comics but harks back to Carl Barks, who on occasion would dedicate two panels to Donald Duck in 55

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repose when the convention would be to stick with one.The story doesn’t require the additional panel, but it helps the reader also ‘wake up’ from Dog’s fantasy and share for a moment the cold reality he has re-emerged into. The Crumb Woman: In his fantasy, Dirty Dog says,‘Eat her shoe you dirty bitch!’ in an early manifestation of a unique Crumb interest. Collectibility: Zap No. 3, published by the Print Mint, was a double issue, the second half to be read by flipping the magazine over and beginning again from a secondary cover. A true first printing is offered by dealers for about $100. The Verdict: ‘Dirty Dog’ represents perhaps the clearest, briefest, and funniest defense of pornography ever written. Shunned by his fellow funny animals, Dirty Dog finds solace in the fantasy of erotica. The bunny rabbit, looking down on him and perhaps guiding Dirty Dog to the right magazine, is not an Old Testament God (judgmental, vindictive, harsh), but a New Testament God (compassionate and understanding).

‘Lenore Goldberg And Her Girl Commandos’ Publication history: ‘Lenore Goldberg And Her Girl Commandos’ was first published in Motor City No. 1, April 1969, published by the Rip Off Press. It was reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol. 5, July 1990, pages 112–119, and in R. Crumb’s America, Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1995 (pages 56–63).The adventures 56

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of Lenore Goldberg were continued in a fifteen-page story in Motor City No. 2. Story: Lenore, leading a team of four, including freckle-faced Janet Jones, bursts into a meeting of American intellectuals. After subduing the guards, they challenge the prejudices and politics of the group. Having made their point, the women leave, only to find the building surrounded by the police. All escape but one, who is killed by the police.Those remaining agree to meet again later, and Lenore is next shown in bed with her boyfriend. Background: Crumb sometimes maintains that he was apolitical before the Sixties. His childhood letters, however, belie that claim. He was certainly unhappy with America. As he writes in The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 5, Crumb and his friends S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams had long discussions about the role of art in society. ‘They had this image of themselves very clearly as art out-laws, sticking it to the booshwah, the big lie, the mass delusion of mainstream culture, both high and low. I was coming from a rather more conventional cartoonist-as-entertainer background … For better or worse, the influence of Wilson and Williams began to show in my work. I, too, became more of a rebel.’ Crumb told Mercier that ‘Lenore Goldberg’ is almost a satire on feminism in a way, taking the hippie ‘woman’s lib’ thing and putting the super hero comic tradition on top of it … I thought it had some good points but there’s a lot of stuff I did where I think I was caught up in taking my role too seriously as a spokesman for my generation.’ 57

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Analysis: Radicals confront a bunch of uptight squares with their hypocrisy.This was a scenario played out a million times in the Sixties.The Commandos do so mercilessly.The story sets up a dichotomy: dried-up boring intellectuals ruling a country they are out of touch with, versus vibrant women freed of the constraints that inhibit free speech and sexuality. Though the intellectuals and their acolytes have the power, the Commandos have moral authority. There are more sexual politics than straight politics in the confrontation. Mid-speech, Lenore is distracted and looks down to find one of the intellectuals licking her boot (‘I … I … can’t help it … I’m hopelessly neurotic … I … I … ’). Hauling him to his feet, Lenore congratulates him (‘You broke th’ mental barrier!!’), and Janet offers up a boot (‘Here! You can lick mine!! Feel free!’). The intellectual runs from the room sobbing. Another intellectual is compelled to admit that he wishes her to ‘suck me’ but ‘N-not here!!! Later … in my hotel,’ before also being reduced to a blubbering mass. The humour often isn’t subtle. A cop (named Muncie) beating Janet Jones screams, ‘You’re Sick! You’re Sick! You’re Sick!’ as he pounds her face into the cement sidewalk. Janet survives to appear in Motor City No. 2. ‘Lenore’ shows Crumb at the height of his narrative powers. The eight-page story follows a traditional sixpanel page with variations, but with jagged, parallelogram squares, as if the world were out of joint. One of the best panels is placed in the middle of the story’s sixth page. It shows the intellectuals in the aftermath of 58

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the invasion, shaken, each alone with his or her thoughts.You can almost feel the silence in the room. In the opening splash panel, Lenore is shown fending off a cop with a finger to the throat, crowing, ‘Thank God for Yubawazi!!!’Those unfamiliar with mainstream comics of the Sixties won’t recall the delightfully wordy full-page ads for this faux martial art featuring this catch phrase. The Crumb Woman: Lenore Goldberg is an early, coherent manifestation of a figure who is soon to populate Crumb’s comic: the brash, athletic, big-legged woman who takes no nonsense and no prisoners.That she is cast here in the role of an activist is not important. She is a vibrant creature whose activism merely conforms with Crumb’s fantasies. Long-haired, widehipped, short-skirted, and booted, the Commandos are not that far from the clan of the Vulture Demoness, just without the political component. Confessions: With whom does Crumb feel affinity? The rebellious girls? Or the stuffed shirts with their sexual secrets? I would hazard to guess that, though he may admire the girls, a lifetime of scorn from the feminine contingency has made him feel more like the awkward intellectuals grappling with their sexuality in the face of female ridicule. Collectibility: True first publications of Motor City are offered online for around $100. The Verdict: In this early example of Crumb’s political bent, Crumb manages to mix his sexual fantasies with his politics.Those who were not born before the ‘revolution’ cannot know the sweetness of life. 59

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‘Joe Blow’ Publication history: ‘Joe Blow’ first appeared in Zap No. 4, June 1969. It has been reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol. 6, Fantagraphics, 1991, Trade Paperback, pages 341–39, ISBN 1 56097 056 1. Story: Joe Blow and his wife are home. He intrudes on his daughter, Sis, who is masturbating. Popping a pill, he instructs his daughter to come to him ‘front and center’ and fellate him. Joe Junior returns home from a baseball game only to find his father and sister having intercourse. Disturbed, he goes into the kitchen, where Mom provides solace by dressing up in stockings, black underwear, and boots (‘Gee … You must be the greatest mom a guy ever had!!!’). In the aftermath of their sexual antics, Junior and Sis realize now what they must do and march off to make ‘even more new discoveries … and to build a better world.’ Background: In their sexual excesses, many of the early underground comics of this period feel more like ‘Tijuana bibles,’ the oblong dirty comics that featured movie stars and other prominent people in sexual situations, than funny animal books. But this excess was planned. Under the influence of cartoonists Spain Rodriguez and S. Clay Wilson, Crumb began to let out the anger, political frustration, and sexual fantasies in his mind. In fact, the freeing up of fantasies has become a large component of his philosophy. Crumb is impatient with cartoon stories that hew to the conventional and do not show evidence of autobiographical exploration. Analysis: ‘The family that lays together stays 60

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together,’ runs an old joke, and Crumb’s story is a pictorial representation of that quip. It’s also the story that irked some of the interviewees in Terry Zwigoff ’s Crumb.What’s important about the story is not what it advocates but rather what it implicitly attacks. What Crumb puts on display in this story is the falsity behind the surface of the robust American family. Sex isn’t avoided, sexual feelings aren’t hidden in Joe Blow’s family, but are out in the open. Parodying the kind of inspiration comics one might find coming from religious publishers, Crumb mockingly suggests that incest could lead to a better America. The Crumb Woman: Mom’s willingness to dress up in black stockings and boots makes her a pre-eminent Crumb woman. Confessions: Crumb is of course not admitting to actual incestuous activities in this story (though in the cramped, hothouse atmosphere of post-war American life, sexual tensions were rife). Instead, he is exploring the uptightness of American life as represented by his Marine father and his family. This is the opposite extreme of Whiteman (or Flakey Foont).The Joe Blow family is perfectly happy in its taboo-busting togetherness. Collectibility: Zap No. 4 is offered by dealers on the Internet for sums ranging from $20 to $50. The Verdict: In its efforts to ridicule down the number one taboo in America, ‘Joe Blow’ is an achingly hilarious broadside directed at the residue repression of Fifties America. 61

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‘It’s Really Too Bad’ Publication history: ‘It’s Really Too Bad’ first appeared as the lead story in (Plunge Into The Depths Of ) Despair. The 28–page publication with a cover price of 50 cents was published by the Print Mint in 1970. It is reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol. 6, Fantagraphics, 1991, Hardcover, January (pages 90–94), with an alternative cover to the magazine also included on page 88. Story: Less a conventional comic story than the storyboard for an industrial or education movie, of the kind that kids in the Fifties might see in a classroom or on television on a slow-paced Sunday afternoon, ‘It’s Really Too Bad’ is designed to bring the reader to the brink of despair. It is a tone poem set to the hollowness of contemporary American life. One of the most brilliant three panel progressions in all of Crumb’s work, it’s like Bob Dylan’s story-of-atypical-life as an argument for drug use that forms the last stanza of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (‘Get born, keep warm/Short pants, romance, learn to dance/ Get dressed, get blessed/ Try to be a success/Please her, please him, buy gifts,/Don’t steal, don’t lift/ Twenty years of schoolin’/ And they put you on the day shift’). Background: The conformist Fifties, the America rejected by Kerouac and the Beats, was also to have a profound influence on the hippie movement in general and on the peripatetic Crumb in particular. It’s a rejected life encapsulated by just three panels in this story.‘The man in his youth is pathetically hopeful and optimistic …/ As he grows more ‘mature’ he begins to 62

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‘face up to the harsh realities’ of life …/ and he ends up old and embittered, regretful of shattered dreams, feeling cheated by fate, his days filled with aches and pains so that he looks forward to death!!’ Analysis: It’s telling that the cartoon immediately preceding this lead story (found on the inside front cover of the comic) is the ‘autobiographical’ ‘Morbid Sense Of Humour,’ in which an artist, vaguely resembling Crumb, admits to finding ‘the strangest things amusing’ and to being ‘fascinated by … by … psychological sadism … with you, the reader, as victim!!’ ‘It’s Really Too Bad’ is bound to make any thinking American deeply depressed. Confessions: ‘It’s Really Too Bad’ is in many ways another story about Crumb’s father. Collectibility: First printings of Despair (which is hard to determine, Despair having no copyright information inside and few, if any, variations from printing to printing) are offered by dealers from $40 to $75. The Verdict: One of Crumb’s brilliant comics, it also introduces his ‘lecture’ mode. Its tone is essential to understanding Crumb’s later confessional comics.

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Life On The Farm: Brutal Years Of Breakdown And Defeat (1971–1979) For Robert Crumb, the Seventies were all communes, lawyers, divorce settlements, the IRS, and Keep On Truckin’. It started out with a period of exhaustion that seemed to be the hangover of five years of peak creativity, domestic restlessness, and growing fame. Crumb had been everywhere. Between 1968 and 1970, he published around ten comic books filled exclusively with his own work and contributed to scores of others. He did an album cover for Janis Joplin, and Ballantine Books published an oversized anthology of his work. As the Seventies began, he published XYZ Comics, a comic including a collaboration with Charles, who had suffered a breakdown, material that harked back to the work they did in Oceanside, California. Crumb also formed a band and bore witness to the creation of a movie based on Fritz the Cat. The Seventies would be much different. He told one interviewer,‘I’m a has-been … Jeez, I’m old hat.There’s a million stories about me. I’m part of the 1960s – passé.’ In comparison to the previous five years, Crumb 64

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did much less work. There was another anthology, R. Crumb’s Carload O’ Comics, and there were still the single comic publications, but there was a change. It was in this phase that Crumb killed off his character Fritz, and his work took a more explicitly confessional bent. Not long after what Crumb has characterized as a nervous breakdown, he met Aline Kominsky (né Goldsmith). In July of 1974, he moved to Winters, California, with her, then later to Dixon. After another move to Madison, they married in early 1977. Meanwhile, a lawyer named Albert Morse brought actions against various businesses and publications for using Crumb material without permission.There were over 1, 000 suits. This income would lead to tax troubles, over $28,000 in back taxes. In 1976 a judge ruled that ‘Keep on Truckin’’ and Mr Natural are in the public domain. Various colleagues came to his aid, and eventually Crumb was able to pay off the debt, but he signed over the Potter Valley house to his ex-wife and sold his current house, ending up back in Winters in a rented home. Crumb wasn’t inactive. Throughout this decade he continued to draw and publish. And in 1978, as the period came to an end, a German publisher began to issue reprints of his sketchbooks, just one sign of a building esteem that was to expand a few years later.

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‘Bo Bo Bolinski: He’s The No. 1 Human Zero’ and ‘A Gurl’ Publication history: ‘Bo Bo Bolinski: He’s the No. 1 Human Zero’ first appeared as one of a set of Bolinski stories in the Uneeda Comix one-shot from 1970. It is reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol. 7, page 78. ‘A Gurl’ made its first appearance in Big Ass Comics No. 2, from August 1971. It was reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics,Vol. 7, pages 57–62. Story: Bo Bo Bolinksi is found sitting in a chair, his arms crossed, staring at nothing. We view him from nine angles. He does not speak. Meanwhile, in ‘A Gurl,’ an unnamed lass is alone in her room. She is bored, starring out a window, her mouth drooping. She begins to fidget and ends up balancing on her toes, her teeth clamped on the windowsill. She stops, pounds her buttocks (appropriately enough for a magazine called Big Ass), and then masturbates. After a moment of post-come contemplation lying on the floor, she remembers that the news is about to come on and goes downstairs to watch TV. Background: ‘Zero’ is the last of about five one-page Bo Bo Bolinski stories chronicling the adventures of a lout. Bo Bo (‘a nutty little nobody from Newark, N. J.’) is easily amused by simple things, such as a rolling tyre. He tends to fall down after leaving a bar. He vomits a lot, in bars and on his girlfriend. The Gurl is one in a long line of Crumb women. Analysis: Both Bo Bo and the Gurl are common 66

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creatures in Crumb’s characterological universe. Bo Bo is like someone out of a Thomas Pynchon gang, a carousing ninny for whom Crumb seems to have a sweet affection. He’s like Crazy Guggenheim, the character that singer Frank Fontaine played on CBS’s Jackie Gleason Show in the early Sixties. In this particular strip, Crumb does not offer him a voice. Bo Bo sits, and we look at him. Bo Bo does not speak, and it is clear that there is nothing in his mind. Crumb’s fascination with this kind of character recalls the incomprehensible lowlifes and characters found in the strips of Segar and Ahern and in Abbott and Costello and the Dead End Kids movies. As for the Gurl, this is what teenage girls in America do (boys do it, too). They spend a lot of time in their room doing nothing, but a nothing with all the metaphysical weight of humanity behind it (all that’s missing from Crumb’s scenario is music). Perhaps responding to early complaints about his ‘sexism,’ Crumb here finds himself merely studying a girl in private, providing a peek into what lonely people do when they are alone (which, in Crumb’s view, is masturbate). Both these stories are more like art school assignments, portrait studies for a future project yet still fully realized. The Crumb Woman: With her prominent teeth and glasses, the Gurl looks more like Crumb than any woman he has drawn. Confessions: As Crumb revealed for the first time in a story for Mystic Funnies No. 3, he has had a lifetime of dental pain. Crumb’s teeth have been a source of discomfort for him since he suffered a foolish incident 67

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in his youth, in which he stepped into the line of fire of a kid hurling stones. That the Gurl can balance on her teeth may be a form of wish fulfillment on Crumb’s part. Collectibility: Uneeda Comix is offered by dealers for prices ranging from $15 to $110, while Big Ass No. 2 has an asking price of from $20 to $125. The Verdict: Both ‘Bo Bo Bolinski: He’s the No. 1 Human Zero’ and ‘A Gurl’ find Crumb in a serene, contemplative mode.

‘Pete The Plumber’ Publication history: ‘Pete The Plumber’ was first published in Your Hytone Comix by Apex Novelties in 1971. The story was reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics,Vol. 7, 1991, pages 112–120. Story: While helping a client with a plugged toilet, Pete The Plumber is horrified to see the woman fall into the bowl. With mounting bills at home and the police looking for him, Pete decides to commit suicide by flushing himself away. But after descending through numerous pipes, he only ends up in a room with many other feces-covered failed suicides. Eventually, he and the others make their escape, at the urging of one of their number who wants to stay behind alone. Bursting through a manhole cover, they emerge from the depths and march down the street. The next day, Pete returns to work with renewed vigour. Background: ‘Pete The Plumber’ was conceived and published at the height of the madness that Crumb calls 68

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the early Seventies. In the introduction to The Complete Crumb,Vol. 7, he notes that he was ‘amazingly prolific in this period,’ but partially it was because ‘all the small publishers of underground comics at that time pleaded with me to supply them with comics … I felt it was my sole responsibility to keep these several little companies in business.’ It should be noted that Crumb still does this. He has been incredibly loyal to the publishers he started with and has no exclusive contract with any one house, preferring to ‘spread the wealth’ around. Analysis: With its talking toilet plungers (Pete’s buddy and assistant, Plungo) and its dot-eyed characters who talk out of the side of their mouths, ‘Pete The Plumber’ is an optimum story for showing how Crumb draws upon the quality of mid-century and earlier comics and animated cartoons. Crumb is also a master of the dingbat and the sound effect. Crumb obviously worked hard at, or had a knack for, coming up with onomatopoeic words to illustrate the noises of his cartoon world. (My favorite in this story is ‘ngogn ngogn ngogn,’ the sound of clanging pipes as Pete makes his descent.) Another habit with Crumb is the increasingly crowded panel (or the succession of panels that get smaller and smaller: See ‘Bad Karma’ in Mystic Funnies No. 2). These most often lead to purgation of some kind; that happens twice in ‘Pete The Plumber,’ first when Pete commits suicide and later when he makes his escape. Also, for all the comic’s ‘underground’ freshness,‘Pete The Plumber’ shows a profound sympathy for the 69

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lower-class economic condition and an ‘old man’s’ obsession with bills and a crabby wife. His only solace is his loyal buddy Plungo. ‘Pete The Plumber’ also introduces a theme that one would expect to see more often in Crumb’s work, given how much of it teeters on the edge of despair. The subject is suicide. People close to Crumb have committed suicide, and the artist has admitted to contemplating the act, roughly around this time. But, surprisingly, suicide does not figure in his work, which suggests that beneath the cruel despair he chronicles, there is a strangely sunny optimism of spirit lurking there. The Crumb Woman: ‘Pete The Plumber’ is nearly female-free.The exception is Pete’s wife. She is a typically harassed, tired American housewife. Confessions: ‘Pete The Plumber’ continues the cloacal obsession that occasionally pops up in Crumb’s work. The Snoids, little creatures who live in the bowels of pretty girls, and the large buttocks of many of the Crumb women attest to that theme in his work. In a story from around the same time, Honeybunch Kaminski uses her poop as a weapon against the mercenary Mr Man (a straight-laced hustler with a taste for degradation like the ‘liberals’ Lenore Goldberg faces off). More important, the story is dedicated to ‘my good ol’ Uncle Pete.’ Collectibility: First editions of Your Hytone Comix is offered by dealers for as little as $15. The Verdict: The panel of Pete in the toilet about to commit suicide (‘Good-bye cruel world’) by pulling 70

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the plunger is priceless. Crumb is critical of much of his output from this period, but ‘Pete The Plumber’ is indicative of the darker strain that was coming to dominate his work.

‘Fritz The Cat “Superstar”’ Publication history: The last Fritz the Cat story first appeared in The People’s Comics in 1972. It’s been reprinted several times, most recently in The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol. 8, Fantagraphics, 1992 (pages 122–136). Story: Fritz, now a popular media personality, is home frolicking with his latest girlfriend, Abigail (an alligator). His lawyer shows up and proceeds to bore Fritz with tedious number-crunching. Next, Fritz goes to a meeting with Ralphie and Stevie, the producers of his latest film. Afterwards, he sees a sexy rabbit walking down Sunset Boulevard. He picks her up, and after unloading all his angst on her, makes his attacks. Next he’s off to be a guest on Johnny Giraffe’s talk show. On the street afterward, he runs into his old girlfriend Andrea Ostrich. Their encounter turns sour for Fritz, and he leaves. However, Andrea follows him into the hallway, where she stabs him in the head with an icepick. Fritz:Yet another casualty of the Sixties. Background: A book (movie dramatization) could be written just about the background of this particular story, which is almost bigger than the strip itself. The death of Fritz the Cat is the culmination of a thread that began in Crumb’s childhood. 71

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As a child, Crumb, to amuse his siblings, made pencil-drawn comics featuring a family cat named Fred. Later collaborating with his brother Charles, he created further adventures for Fred, whom Charles renamed on paper Fritz. The character stuck with Crumb, and his first published cartoon was a Fritz strip, sold to Help! magazine. Eventually, after his profile rose, Crumb published more Fritz stories, refashioning tales he had conceived much earlier but had never been able to publish. In one, Fritz was a distracted layabout with female problems. In another, he was a secret agent. In the third big story, ‘Fritz The No-Good,’ he gets involved tangentially in radical politics. The whole Fritz biography is gathered in The Complete Fritz The Cat (Belier Press, 1978,Trade Paperback, 128 pages, ISBN 9 7464 16 8). At the height of his hippie fame, Crumb was approached by Ralph Bakshi and Steven Krantz to let them adapt the Fritz character for an animated film. Apparently against his wishes, but under the urging of his first wife, who had his power of attorney, the project went ahead anyway.The subsequent film, Fritz The Cat, released in 1972, and its sequel, The Nine Lives Of Fritz The Cat, also produced by Krantz but directed by Robert Taylor, proved to be a souring experience for Crumb, who has discussed the history of the films in numerous interviews, but the full story of the making of Fritz the Cat the movie is recounted in Mike Barrier’s detailed two-part article in Funnyworld magazine (‘The Filming of ‘Fritz the Cat,’ issue Nos. 14 and 15, spring 1972 and fall 1973). The only method 72

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Crumb had at hand to cleanse himself of the whole affair was to kill off Fritz. Crumb told interviewer Mercier, ‘Actually I felt sorry for Bakshi! He really tried to do something! He really did try!… [But] There is something missing in his creative approach, in his vision. Something’s lacking there. It all comes out a little half-baked … Too bad! He really broke his butt to make these animated cartoons … He is a seething character, intense and neurotic …’ Analysis: Though born from Crumb’s revulsion of all things Hollywood,‘Fritz The Cat “Superstar”’ ended up a very funny parody of the commercial entertainment industry, with a sad peek into the loneliness and premature aging that world induces. The first Fritz stories were drawn in Crumb’s early sketchy thin-line style, an unusually light and airy look for a comic, but somewhat similar to Jules Feiffer’s strips. By the time of ‘Fritz The Cat “Superstar”’ Crumb was in the full flower of his confident dark-line style. But this, too, was to change and evolve. The Crumb Woman: In ‘Superstar,’ the women tend to be the compliant brand of Crumb woman, star-struck by even a meager fame, and willing to do anything to stay close to her famous man. Confessions: If there is any ‘confession’ within this story, it’s subterranean and has to do with the artist’s own sense of world-weariness. Collectibility: Various editions of The People’s Comics go for wildly fluctuating prices, ranging from $5 to $50. The Verdict:‘Fritz The Cat “Superstar”’ marks a significant stage in Crumb’s career. By killing off a character 73

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whom other cartoonists might have viewed as a gravy train, Crumb was re-affirming his rejection of corporate America. But the story is entertaining in its own right, not just as a stage in Crumb’s career. Fritz has had a messy life, and this was, in a way, its inevitable conclusion.

‘Whiteman Meets Big Foot’ Publication history: This lengthy story first appeared in Home Grown Funnies published in 1971. It was reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics, Vol. 8, 1992 (pages 8–29). Story: On a vacation with his family in their new Winnebago, Whiteman is kidnapped by a Big Foot. Back at his camp, Big Foot gives Whiteman to his daughter Yetti, and, though at first resistant, Whiteman grows fond of the giant, hairy beast. At Whiteman’s urging, the two attempt to visit civilization so that Whiteman can reassure his family about his new life. Unfortunately, Big Foot is captured and Whiteman returns to his home, sullenly doing nothing all day, to the irritation of his wife. Then the institute where Yetti is under study invites Whiteman for an interview on Yetti’s eating habits and other behaviours. Yetti and Whiteman escape, and after dressing her in urban clothes,Whiteman attempts to secret Yetti in the Winnebago and return her to the wilderness. His wife catches them. But Yetti grabs Whiteman and they run off. In the last panel,Whiteman and Yetti have returned to their domestic bliss. 74

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Background: ‘Whiteman Meets Big Foot’ appeared in one of the many one-shot comics Crumb did in the Seventies. Other titles included The People’s Comics and Black And White Comics. At 22 pages, it is almost epical in length, aside from some of the early Fritz the Cat stories, it was the longest comic book tale he had drawn to date. Whiteman is, of course, the same character Crumb wrote about in the story ‘Whiteman,’ from Zap No. 1 in 1967. Analysis: A little-emphasized aspect of Crumb’s work is his interest in nature and the environment, evinced in posters and cartoons such as ‘A Short History of America,’ originally published in Co-Evolution Quarterly No. 23. But fans of the highly-urban seeming Crumb would probably be surprised at how much of a country fellow he really is. Crumb has lived most of his adult life in isolation from dense urban centres, and as he told Mercier,‘You really have to work hard to get away from people in the United States. As big a country and as wide open as it is, it is hard to get out to the wilderness … Here [in France], I just walk up there … I tried very hard to find a place like that in California, where I could go out in nature, but it was just too difficult!’ The Crumb Woman: Yetti is an early version, after Gunthra of The Yum Yum Book, of a thereafter common Crumb figure, the giant female. Confessions: Crumb has discussed how the original Whiteman from Zap was based on his father. This story’s Whiteman, however, has some of the earmarks of Crumb himself, the harassed domesticated man finding 75

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sexual fulfillment with a giant female. Crumb has also revealed that he has a mystical side and is a sucker for anything to do with flying saucers, and other Fortean occurrences, into which Big Foot sightings fall with some ease. Collectibility: First printings of Home Grown Funnies are offered by dealers for as much as $60. The Verdict: ‘Whiteman Meets Big Foot’ has the coherence and concision of a movie plot.Taken up by a filmmaker, it might make an excellent short or even feature-length film. In effect, ‘Whiteman Meets Big Foot’ shows the confidence with which Crumb can plot out a complex tale and make it work, hitting all the narrative high points and all the emotional ups and downs.

‘Singing In The Bathtub,’ R. Crumb And The Cheap Suit Serenaders Publication history: This Shanachie compact disc is copyrighted 1993, with an ASIN of B000000DSP. It’s a CD reissue of the third Cheap Suit Serenaders record originally released on Blue Goose records in 1978. Background: Crumb had been recording music, off and on, since 1972. But his interest in music began back in his youth when he started collecting old 78-rpm blues and jazz records at the same time as his friend Marty Pahls.As his collection increased and his interests expanded, his collection grew to include international folk music, among many other genres. By 1972 he already had over 900 discs. 76

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Story: The Cheap Suit Serenaders, at least in this manifestation, include Crumb (on banjo and guitar), Terry Zwigoff (cello and banjo), Robert Armstrong (accordion, musical saw, banjo, guitar and steel guitar), Bob Brozman (steel guitar and Mano-Uke), Allan Dodge (violin, viola, ukulele, mandolin, and harmonica), and Tom Marion (guitar and six string banjo), along with John Lundberg (vocals on one tune), Geoff Antipa (saxophone), Paul Woltz (saxophone), and Rick ‘Gizmo’ Elmore (trombone and tuba). Singing in the Bathtub contains 14 tunes:‘Singing In The Bathtub’ by Herb Magidson; ‘Chile Blues’ by Rodney Rogers; a traditional tune called ‘Dream Of Heaven;’ ‘Suits Crybaby Blues,’ an original by Armstrong, Crumb, and Zwigoff; a ‘Collier Medley’ of the ‘Ben Hur March’ and ‘Napoleon March;’ ‘Shopping Mall’ by Armstrong; ‘Yearning and Blue’ (the perfect Crumb title) by J. C. Cobb and Al Dodge; ‘Hula Girl’ by Sunny Cunha; ‘Pedal Your Blues Away’ by Miller-Wells-Griffin; ‘La Gima Polka’ by Fazio; ‘Sing Song Girl’ by McCarthyHanley; ‘Home’ by Van Steeden and Clarkson; ‘My Gal Sal’ by Paul Dresser; and ‘Hano Hano Hawaii’ by Kealoha. Though Crumb met Janis Joplin and drew the cover for one of her records, and was asked to do a Rolling Stones cover, he actually hated that kind of music. By way of contrast, in the Crumb Family Comics, he lists the six ‘Tunes That Are Always Running Through My Head.’They are ‘Kentucky Blues’ (Fess Williams and his Royal Flush Orchestra from 1929), ‘Love Is Like That’ (Ray West and his Cafe Ray West Orchestra from 77

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1930), ‘Decatur Street Rag’ (Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra from 1925), ‘No No Blues’ (Willie Baker, from 1929),‘Jig Walk’ (Ben Bernie and his Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra, from 1926), and ‘Bay Rum Song’ (Billy Hays and His Orchestra, from 1929). In 1972, after something of a nervous breakdown the previous year, Crumb organized the Keep on Truckin’ Orchestra with Robert Armstrong and Alan Dodge, and with them he made a few 78 records. They performed live in Aspen in April, 1972, and then on New Year’s Eve in San Francisco. Renamed the Cheap Suit Serenaders, they became intermittent and ineffective street musicians near Fisherman’s Wharf. In 1974, the band recorded its first LP, and in spring of 1975 the band went on a college campus tour. But after reviews in Rolling Stone and an invitation to appear on Saturday Night Live in 1977, Crumb decided to drop out of the band, as he would later choose to leave the Zap comic collective. He recorded with them occasionally after that, but in July of 1978, amid many moves and tax problems, Crumb made his last recordings with the Serenaders, including the material on this CD. In the introduction to the Complete Dirty Laundry Comics, Crumb recalls those times. ‘Hanging out together, playin’ old tunes ‘n’ eating donuts, havin’ adventures on the road, flirting with girls … So we had a few ego battles, so I was pestered to death by comic fanboys and media hypsters at every fuckin’ band job, what’d they [the other band members] care? But y’know, it really was fun for a while … It was the only one time in my life I ever had like a group of buddies 78

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to hang out with … So they were riding on my coattails, I still liked all those guys. Mainly, I think I quit because I wanted to get back and devote more time and energy to the drawing … And I did … I think my work improved a lot right around that time, and I have come to despise the “business” part of the music business.’ Analysis: Figuring out the connection between the artist Crumb and the musician Crumb is like trying to reconcile Noam Chomsky’s political views with his linguistics: It can be done, but the connection is evanescent and subtle. Obviously, the man just loves music, and like most people, feels the urge to perform himself. But there is a deeper relation between the kinds of comics Crumb draws and his musical tastes. To Crumb, the early American music he likes bespeaks authenticity. In an interview excerpted in the introduction to Your Vigor For Life Appalls Me, Crumb made clear his loathing of popular music.‘I hate Sinatra. I can’t stand him, his attitude, the whole gestalt, to me the sensibility of that music is just repulsive.The whole sensibility of all that Fifties, Sixties pop music of the middle class, that bourgeois element that tended towards admiring and liking this kind of sleazy, almost gangster-Mafioso kind of lifestyle … I much preferred the new teen-age music of the Fifties, that down-andout rockabilly, criminal juvenile delinquent music, I couldn’t stand [Stan] Kenton and all that slick Las Vegas sounding big-band jazz. Ugh. I just can’t stand it.’ The Crumb Woman: She is the target of these songs, not the subject. Confessions: The only song on this particular disc that 79

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has a confessional element is ‘Suits Crybaby Blues,’ in which the musicians lament, ‘Nobody likes our music. They all want stuff that’s loud.’ Collectibility: This disc is still in print for the rather typical price of $14.95. The Verdict: Crumb’s musical excursions sometimes tax the patience of his fanboy followers, but to not understand the music connection is not to understand Crumb.

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The Retreat To Realism (1980–1993) Whew! The Seventies. Relatively quiet, compared to the Sixties, but what a decade! Tax problems, relationship shuffles, major decisions of a personal and public importance.Yet Crumb survived. Less is known, or at least is currently accessible, about the next 13 years of Crumb’s life, and that’s for a very simple reason: Donald Fiene’s detailed bibliography of Crumb ends in 1980. The struggling author of a book on Crumb must hail Fiene as a sterling example of the bibliographer’s art, even though he modestly calls his book a checklist. His work is equal to the standards set by other serious bibliographers, such as Michael Juliar on Nabokov and Dan Laurence on Shaw (two artists in comparison to whom Crumb is just as prolific, and who also published in many obscure and difficult-to-find publications). But Fiene goes beyond the bibliographer’s mandate to include what amounts to a biography of Crumb, a year-by-year account of what Crumb was doing and where, presented as a humanizing adjunct to the cold list of works. In the event that Fiene ever updates his book, we will have a definitive biography of Crumb and of Sixties and Seventies American popular culture. 81

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As the Eighties opened, Crumb was 37. In many of his Seventies interviews, the artist presented himself as passé, a has-been, washed up, while reminding his interlocutors that, yes, he still does music and some cartooning, thank you very much. Married to Aline, still living in Northern California, Crumb served on the editorial board for Winds of Change, where he also published illustrations. He was also soon to be the father of a girl, Sophie, born in 1981. The most significant changes seem to have occurred later in the decade. In 1985,Terry Zwigoff, Cheap Suit Serenader and documentary filmmaker (Louie Bluie), began putting together Crumb, and Crumb himself spearheaded another documentary about himself for British television. But probably the most far-reaching project for Crumb was the publication of his own magazine. Weirdo made its debut in the spring of 1981. It was distributed by Last Gasp Eco-Funnies (spelled Last Ghasp on the first issue) with a cover price of $2.25. The magazine lasted 28 issues, its final cover price $4.95. Most of the later issues are still in print (early ones are offered by dealers for between $8 and $20). It ceased publication (for now?) in the summer of 1993. Over those 12 years, Weirdo came out on average of about twice a year. Officially, Crumb’s editorship lasted through the first eight issues (the eighth was published in the summer of 1983).With issue No. 9, readers were invited to send art and letters to Peter Bagge (first in New Jersey, then 82

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Kirkland, Washington). With issue 17, Aline Kominsky took over the magazine until its final issue (re-titled Vierre D’eau for the nonce). Nevertheless, Crumb’s sensibility permeates all 28 issues. Crumb has explained that, ‘The whole idea for Weirdo magazine came to me in a flash in the fall of 1980. I was performing my daily meditation exercise one day when the vision of this kooky, screwball magazine erupted in all its tacky, low-life dumb-ass essence, a style-mix of the old 1940s and Fifties girlie-andcartoon “joke books,” Harvey Kurtzman’s early Mad and Humbug and their sleazy imitators, and the selfpublished ‘punk’ ‘zines of the period.’ There is something purposely cheap about the early issues, and much of the text is written out by Crumb, including letters to the editor, giving the magazine a uniform Crumbian appearance. Weirdo was very much a family affair, with close friends and even his children contributing material. Robert Williams, Drew Friedman, and Spain Rodriguez were among the notable names, but several ‘unknowns’ made their first appearance in Weirdo’s pages. From its strong covers to its blend of stories about sex and domesticity by both Crumb and other artists, and in its embrace of Fifties low culture in the form of various fake ads and in articles that explored minor cultural objects and companies, it’s an unpredictable, yet strangely personal, magazine. Yet at the same time, there is something ambitious about it. ‘My favorite part of doing Weirdo, aside from the photo-funnies, was making the covers. I was so 83

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deeply inspired by the early Mad and Humbug covers with those detailed borders and creative title logos. I always thought the cover was the most important part of any magazine, in making each issue a powerful artifact in its own right.’The magazine was not universally popular. Crumb laments the fact that his photo-funnies were never popular, and Raw editor Art Spiegelman is said to have called the magazine as a whole ‘a piece of shit.’ The most personal aspect of Weirdo was the series of fumetti that Crumb authored. He did about 15 of them and then dropped the format after issue No. 8, with the advent of a new editor. Crumb describes his motivation for this hybrid photo-essay in his introduction to Vol. 14 of the Complete Crumb Comics. ‘A big part of my excitement was my anticipation of all the fun I was going to have putting together my own ‘photo-funnies’ featuring cute girls, just like in the old pin-up mags, a brilliant idea I couldn’t wait to get started on.’ Stories included such titles as ‘Suburban Cowgirls,’ with black and white photographs, augmented with boxes and word balloons and special effects noises by Crumb. Early images are credited to ‘Stomp’ Ganos, later ones to T.‘Stiglitz’ Zwigoff.The series ended with ‘Girls Turned Into Vibrator Zombies,’ starring cartoonist Dori Seda, a notably un-Crumbian woman. Crumb’s fumetti do not appear in the collected Crumb; they can only be seen in the early issues of the magazine. ‘It was decided not to include any of the photo-funnies in the Complete Crumb series,’ Crumb 84

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wrote. ‘There’s not much in the way of art work in them.’ He attributes what he perceives to be the unpopularity of his fumetti to the divergence between his taste in female physiognomy and the general public’s. ‘I s’pose if I’d used only skinny women the photo-funnies would have been more popular, but no, I had to go chasing after my own big-assed ‘muse’ with my usual obsessiveness.’ Weirdo also represents aspects of Crumb that get little recognition: his generosity to other cartoonists, the breadth of his interests, his political sensibility, and his charming interest and celebration of the domestic world.A thorough examination and history of Crumb’s Weirdo years by the present author can be found on-line http://homepage.mac.com/dkholm/iblog/index.html. Finally, to round out the decade, in 1987 Fantagraphics introduced The Complete Crumb Comics. This massive undertaking was up to 16 volumes as of this writing.

‘Excerpts From Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763’ Publication history: With a banner introducing the story as ‘A Klassic Komic,’ ‘Boswell’ first appeared in Weirdo No. 3, Fall, 1981.The story is copyrighted 1981. It was reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics,Vol. 14, 2000 (pages 38–42). Story:‘Boswell’ recreates 12 entries in James Boswell’s diaries, beginning Tuesday, 14 December, 1762, and going through Thursday, 28 July, 1763. In the first entry, 85

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presented in text only, Boswell laments that he has not partaken of London’s sexual offerings. Then the diary goes on. Friday, 17 December, 1762: Boswell attempts to seduce an actress whom he calls Louisa, and then has dinner with a churlish Thomas Sheridan and his wife. Tuesday, 21 December, 1762: Sitting next to Louisa on a couch, he suddenly flings himself on her, only to be rebuffed. Saturday, 25 December, 1762: Boswell makes the rounds of various notables such as actor and bookseller Thomas Davies, including a simian-looking Oliver Goldsmith, where they debate the merits of the poet Thomas Gray. Wednesday, 12 January, 1763: Boswell finally conquers Louisa, having sex with her five times in one night. Thursday, 20 January, 1763: Boswell has a sleepless night thanks to guilt feelings and an eruption of gonorrhea. Thursday, 30 March 1763: Boswell has sex with a whore in a park. Tuesday, 12 April, 1763: Boswell passes on a large-rumped whore who demands too much money. Thursday, 19 May, 1763: Boswell takes two whores to an inn. Friday, 20 May, 1763: Boswell makes the rounds with some of his intellectual friends. Wednesday, 20 July, 1763: Boswell dines with Dr. Johnson, who expounds on goodness. Thursday, 28 July, 1763: As Johnson and Boswell are walking down the street, they are approached by a hooker, whom Johnson shoos away, then philosophizes about her lot in life. Background: ‘Excerpts From Boswell’s London Journal’ inaugurates Crumb’s so far short-lived ‘Klassic Komic’ series. James Boswell (1740–1795), biographer of Samuel Johnson, was the son of a Scottish lawyer. He 86

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aspired to the writer’s life and cultivated friendships with prominent literary figures in London and abroad. His extensive and frank diaries were discovered in the 1920s and have enjoyed slow publication through Yale University Press since 1950. Boswell is surely one of the great diarists after Samuel Pepys and until Franz Kafka. Klassic Komics is an allusion to Classics Illustrated, a series of comic books initiated in 1941 by publisher Albert L. Kanter, who, perhaps without cynicism, sought to utilize comic books as a medium for educating children in the great classics of world literature. The series was taken over by the Jerry Iger Shop in 1945.The first issue was an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers in October 1941. Classics Illustrated later distinguished itself by using paintings on its covers rather than coloured line drawings. According to the invaluable article ‘Understanding Classics Illustrated,’ by Dan Malan, in the 1993 edition of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, the series also enjoyed distribution as a book, rather than a magazine, thus both costing a bit more but having a longer shelf life than its competing monthly publications. New titles ceased in 1962 with an adaptation of Faust, but the idea of Classics Comics has been revived several times, including First Publishing’s attempt in 1990.Thanks to revisions and re-done adaptations, there are almost 1400 different versions of all the Classics Illustrated comics. Analysis: With the advent of Weirdo, Crumb began to explore and question the possibilities of comic book art, and one of the outcomes was an interest in appropriating other people’s realities in comic book form. 87

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First up was Boswell. Among the things that seem to have drawn Crumb to this subject matter is the vast difference between Boswell’s idealistic and even fanlike adulation of his writing gods and the gross indecencies he pursued in private. And it should be noted that given some of the other adaptations that lay ahead, Crumb comes across as a well-read man with eclectic interests. Crumb does a remarkable job of evoking 18th Century London, and his likenesses are close to his subjects while still having the Crumb flavour. Crumb Women: It’s hard to tell if Boswell was a misogynist or just a hedonist, or both. The women in the story are viewed through Boswell’s eyes and id, and yet Crumb found here a sympathetic subject who appeared to share with the cartoonist an affection for largerumped woman. Collectibility: Early copies of Weirdo are offered from $8 to $20. Verdict: Despite its modesty and subservience to its source material,‘Boswell’ announces a major change in Crumb’s work in both drawing style and subject matter. Yet it remains also remarkably of a piece with Crumb’s other work, showing a character in the throws of doubt and lust alternately, while also featuring another famous ‘couch’ scene, a recurrent setting in Crumb’s universe.

‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ Publication history: With a banner headed ‘A Klassic Komic,’ the story first appeared in Weirdo, No. 13, 88

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Summer, 1985. A note to the reader dates it March 1985. The story was reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics,Vol. 15 (pages 34–43). Story: ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ recreates and illustrates 16 cases from the 238 recounted in Dr. R. von KraftEbing’s psychoanalytic volume of the same name. The comic announces that the excerpts are culled from the twelfth German edition of Kraft-Ebing’s book, published in 1906. The story begins with an introduction by a cartoon Kraft-Ebing, who notes that ‘few people are conscious of the deep influence exerted by sexual life upon the sentiment, thought and action of man in his social relations to others.’ After that, Crumb recreates the following accounts: Case number 2 (senile dementia in an 80–year-old man with homosexual leanings); Case number 9 (absence of sexual feeling in a young man); Case number 11 (hypersexuality in a married man); Case number 31 (onanism and vampirism); Case number 35 (defilement of women by soiling them in public); Case number 48 (sadism in women, a wife who must suck the blood from a cut on her husband’s arm for sexual satisfaction); Case number 59 (a married man who likes to be walked on by prostitutes); Case number 75 (a married man with a fetish for nails in the soles of women’s shoes); Case number 97 (self-cannibalism); Case number 98 (hair fetish); Case number 110 (ladies’ handkerchief fetish); Case number 114 (shoe fetish); Case number 152 (androgyny); Case number 165 (lesbianism); Case number 220 (male sadism); Case number 231 (compulsive bestiality). 89

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Background: After ‘Excerpts From Boswell’s London Journal’ in Weirdo issue No. 3,‘Psychopathia Sexualis’ is Crumb’s second ‘Klassic Komic’ and further explores Crumb’s interest in the past, in the differences and continuity between past societies and the present, and the discrepancies between people’s public and private lives. Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, a baron, was born in Mannheim, Germany in 1840, died in 1902, and was a professor of psychiatry at Strasbourg from the age of 32. His magnum opus was published in 1886. Kraft-Ebing was succeeded by Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey as catalogers of sexual aberrations, but Kraft-Ebing was the pioneer. His findings were so shocking that the frank portions of his cases were printed in Latin.Though he was associated with Freud, Kraft-Ebing seems to have concluded that sexual aberrations were organic, or associated with syphilis, rather than based on developmental interruptions. On the cover of Weirdo No. 13, Crumb alludes to other cases, numbers 78, 88 (an eye fetish), 142, 160, 170, 180, and 229. It’s a parade of characters that in sheer volume is unlike anything previously shown in Crumb. Also on the cover, Crumb calls Psychopathia Sexualis the ‘dirtiest book ever written’ (illustrated by ‘America’s dirtiest cartoonist!!’). Analysis: There are a number of recurring ideas reiterated here. One is Crumb’s view of man as relentlessly obsessive about sex, which occupies all his waking hours. The implicit message is that quashing these impulses does no good. Science is shown to fail in its 90

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attempts to explain or treat these obsessions. An exception is Case 114, the victim of a shoe fetish. He finally attains full heterosexual potency when his physician, Dr. Hammond,‘advised him to hang a shoe up over his bed, and look at it fixedly during coitus, at the same time imagining his wife to be a shoe,’ a rare happy ending in these tales. Stylistically, Crumb cross-hatches like crazy in this story, and with its top hats and canes, its ankle boots and full skirts, provides the cartoonist with rich, atypical fodder for his pen. For the most part, the case histories are presented in medium shot. There is something Oscar Wildeish about case 152’s androgynous male. Case 75 is a classic Crumb character, a shoe fetishist with sweat beads popping off his head and dark, clouded eyes focused on something interior. Confessions: If there is anything ‘confessional’ in ‘Psychopathia Sexualis,’ it is indirect and found in Crumb’s choices among the 238 cases in Kraft-Ebing’s book. But the subtext of the story may well be confessional. Crumb, the self-revealed sex obsessive, may feel a certain kinship with this line-up of sexual renegades whose minds are preoccupied with their sexual fantasies. Crumb Women: This is a man’s tale. It’s a catalog of mostly male sexual perversions. The women here are, for the most part frigid wives, prostitutes willing to don shoes and walk on a client, or victims of the men’s bizarre predilections.The one exception is case number 165: ‘Congenital Sexual Inversion in Women 91

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(Virginity),’ which is a 38–year-old woman who wore male attire and pursued women. After her death, an autopsy revealed ‘dura adherent to vault of cranium. No atrophied brain. Convolutions broad, not numerous, regularly arranged.’ Collectibility: Like other copies of Weirdo, No. 13 is still in print for its cover price of $3.95. Verdict: Is it possible for Crumb’s vision of humanity to get any darker? And here he is drawing upon an important figure who also peered into the darkest recesses of human behavior.We see a lurid interest in the oddities of the mind, yet also compassion in Crumb’s account of Kraft-Ebing’s patients. This is an important chapter in Crumb’s ongoing factual chronicles.

The ‘Devil Girl’ Series Publication:The Devil Girl stories ran in unofficial serial form through four issues of Hup comics.The first story, ‘Here He Comes Again!’ appeared in Hup No. 1 (Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1987, pamphlet, unpaginated), on pages 27–33.The second story,‘The Meeting,’ appeared in Hup No. 2 (Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1987, pamphlet, unpaginated), on pages 23–35 (which include the back cover). The third story, ‘He’s A Natural Man,’ appeared in Hup No. 3 (Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, 1989, pamphlet, unpaginated) over pages 25–34 (which include the back cover). Finally, the series’ most famous story, ‘A Bitchin’ Bod,’ appeared in Hup No. 4 (Last Gasp EcoFunnies, 1992, pamphlet, unpaginated), on pages 21–33.The tale of Flakey and Cheryl receives its coda92

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like last mention in Mystic Funnies No. 1 (Alex Wood, 1997, pamphlet, page 26), when Flakey Foont complains about Mr Natural foisting her on him in the first place. Story: The four Devil Girl stories chronicle Flakey Foont’s relationship with one Cheryl Borck, otherwise known by her nickname, Devil Girl. She is a tempestuous female whom Mr Natural has recently recruited to his cult. When they first meet in ‘Here He Comes Again!,’ Flakey is married to Ruth and has two kids. But he is lured out by Mr Natural to meet his new acolyte, this aggressive girl with a long tongue who immediately captivates the mind of the domesticated Foont. In ‘The Meeting,’ Foont is summoned to a meditative gathering, but goes only on the basis that Devil Girl will be there, as he has found himself fixated on her. Hypnotized by Mr Natural’s flute, Devil Girl is then victim to Foont’s sexual imagination, until they tear up the apartment and Mr Natural throws them out. In ‘He’s A Natural Man!’ Foont discovers that Mr Natural has mounted the Devil Girl’s head on his wall as a trophy. But it’s just a trick, and after a sexual encounter with the old codger, Devil Girl admits that Mr Natural is the only one who knows how to handle her because he is a ‘natural man.’ But that humiliation is but a prelude to worse indignities visited on DG, which include Mr Natural seemingly beheading her in ‘A Bitchin’ Bod.’ He presents the now headless Devil Girl to Foont as a gift, but after toying with her, Foont feels guilty. He returns her to 93

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Mr Natural, who ‘retrieves’ the Devil Girl’s head, which now looks more devilish than ever, with flaming hair, almond eyes, and sharp teeth. Background: Hup made its debut three years after Crumb gave up the actual editing of Weirdo. Published concurrently with Id, comprising selections from Crumb’s sketchbooks, Hup represents a burst of energy that belied the artist’s age, taking him through his 40s. These comics also preceded renewed interest in the artist, fanned by Terry Zwigoff ’s Crumb. Analysis: The sequence of Devil Girl stories hark back to an early Mr Natural-Foont tale, ‘The Girlfriend,’ from Mr Natural No. 2, October, 1971. In that story, Mr Natural annoys Foont by dropping in when Foont is expecting a visit from his girlfriend (later his wife) Ruth Schwartz. Mr Natural and the leather-clad, bespectacled Ruth run into each other, and, beguiled by Mr N., she submits to Foont’s passion, inspiring a mid-fuck phone call to Mr Natural thanking him for his help. Hup represents, among other things, a deeper exploration of Crumb’s sexual fantasies, all within the context of a vaguely ‘male’ magazine.‘Hup,’ the word, is of course also the first word in the basic training marching chant. (Is that why Crumb stopped after four issues? ‘Hup,Two,Three, Four’?) But Crumb has used the word ‘hup’ before. In the story ‘It’s a Hup Ho World,’ originally printed in CoEvolution No. 21, 1979, and reprinted in R. Crumb’s America, page 37, it’s used as a musical nonsense word. One recurring figure in Hup is the helmet-haired 94

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‘host’ of the magazine, Stan Shnooter, who announces on the inside cover of Hup No. 1, that this is a more mature enterprise then ‘those dazzling escapist fantasies designed to keep you in a state of arrested adolescence.’ He’s wrong, of course. There is still a lot of ‘unmasculine’ male angst and worry here:There isn’t that much distance between ‘hup,’ the march command and ‘hulp,’ the gasp that Foont often utters as his feet fly into the frame.Thanks to the animated cartoon style title panels of ‘Bitchin’ Bod,’ the reader is put in mind of the movie-like quality to Crumb’s work at this stage, confirmed when Zwigoff chose ‘Bitchin’ Bod’ to ‘animate’ in his documentary. Crumb Woman: The Devil Girl is consistent with other Crumbian representations of aggressive women who strangely give themselves over to sensual pleasure, even at the hands of inferior males. As we come to know the Devil Girl, she grows more monstrous and extreme, but she is not all that distant from the Vulture Demonesses and Yetis of Crumb’s earlier fantasies, a figure as alluring as she is terrifying. Confessions: Crumb has suggested to interviewers that both Flakey Foont and Mr Natural represent aspects of his character. But is it possible that the Devil Girl also represents an aspect of Crumb’s real-life persona? The Devil Girl template may in fact represent an aspect of Crumb’s complex psychology, the strongwilled careerist subject to the demands of his own hedonism. Just as Devil Girl (and so many other females, from the ‘feminists’ Crumb battles in ‘R. Crumb Versus the Sisterhood’ in Black And White 95

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Comics, from 1973, to the Fairy Godmother in Mystic Funnies No. 2) can’t help but submit to her sexual side once a male figure attacks her, the ‘Crumb’ portrayed in his autobiographical comics is easily distracted from his comic book work by the dictates of his roving passion for women. It’s a thin analogy, but it’s arguable that there’s a little bit of Crumb in all those crazy women. Collectibility: All issues of Hup are still in print, with cover prices ranging from $2.50 to $2.95, though some dealers offer ‘fine’ condition copies for as much as $25. The story, ‘A Bitchin’ Bod,’ has been reprinted several times and figures prominently in Terry Zwigoff ’s Crumb. Kitchen Sink eventually issued Devil Girl chocolate bars and Dark Horse distributed a Devil Girl lunch pail. Through Jesse Crumb a limited edition signed statuette of Devil Girl is available. Verdict: After the material that appeared in Weirdo, the four issues of Hup represent Crumb’s best narrative work of the Eighties and Nineties. The artist is in full command of his craft. Other strong stories that first appeared in Hup include ‘My Troubles With Women, Part II,’ ‘The Story O’ My Life,’ ‘Nausea’ (a Klassic Komic), ‘Can You Stand Alone And Face Up To The Universe?’, ‘If I Were A King,’ and ‘You Can’t Have Them All: Magnificent Specimens I Have Seen.’ That’s quite a run of iconic, much-reprinted stories.

‘The Confessions Of Robert Crumb’ Publication history: A 55–minute quasi-documentary made for the British Broadcasting Company’s arts 96

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program, Arena, and aired in 1987, The Confessions Of Robert Crumb is now available for home viewing from Home Vision Entertainment, 2002, DVD, ISBN 0 7800 2482 6. Story: After ‘shocking’ the viewer with a brief précis of Crumb’s sexual preferences, Confessions settles into a chronological account of the artist’s life up through the mid-Eighties: his early family life, with rare home movie footage of his parents and siblings; his first marriage; his move to San Francisco; his rising fame (which he says induced a resentment and unhappiness that darkened his work at the time), and his subsequent nervous breakdown, brought on by lawyers and agents and the movie version of Fritz the Cat. The film also takes detours to Crumb’s view of modern life, his interest in music, and his reaction to fans and fandom.The film ends on a rather happy note, with Crumb discovering a renewed interest in drawing that took his work in unusual and unpredictable directions from the early Eighties on. Background: It’s not yet fully known how this documentary came about, but BBC producer Mary Dickinson seems to have approached Crumb to collaborate with her on the piece.Though most people have probably seen Terry Zwigoff ’s 1994 documentary, Crumb, which portrays the cartoonist as a product of a dysfunctional family, Confessions offers up a slightly different view of the cartoonist and makes a fine companion piece and counterstatement to Zwigoff ’s bleaker though still sympathetic film. At Confessions’ conclusion, Crumb still lives in 97

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Winters, California, where he describes himself as a family man and breadwinner who worries about bills, mows the lawn, bickers with the wife, and takes crap from his bratty daughter. Zwigoff ’s Crumb, begun a couple of years later and released in 1994, picks up where the earlier film leaves off. It follows the artist’s move to France, where Crumb, having lasted long enough to become respectable (like politicians, ugly buildings, and whores, in Mark Twain’s famous quote), enjoys international recognition. Crumb also goes deeper in the Crumb family dynamic. What made Crumb succeed as a documentary is that Zwigoff, a longtime friend of the artist, really knew his subject, though it’s a slant on Crumb that the cartoonist himself would probably not have selected. For example, Zwigoff places Crumb in the larger context of comic book history and the world history of art.And it dwells on the still painful subject of his brothers Charles and Maxon. Analysis: Here’s an interesting question: Is Crumb really ‘confessional?’ And just what is a confessional writer or artist anyway? One way to address the issue is to cite the granddaddy of confessors, Saint Augustine. His The Confessions (published c. 400) is the chronicle of a conversion. But what was he confessing to, and to whom was he confessing? Augustine is ‘confessing’ to difficult truths, and he is confessing them to God.‘I do this, my God,’ Augustine wrote, ‘not because I love those sins, but so that I may love you. For love of your love I shall retrace my wicked 98

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ways. The memory is bitter, but it will help me to savour your sweetness, the sweetness that does not deceive but brings real joy and never fails. For love of your love I shall retrieve myself from the havoc of disruption which tore me to pieces when I turned away from you [Book II, i].’ Among other things, he confesses that he loved a woman but abandoned her to further his career. And such a dire tale still has currency. Crumb, on the other hand, is confessing to the authentic lust that in large part defines his character, to sexual peculiarities and thoughts that many entertain but few are willing to share with the public, thoughts that are so horrific to the self that one often leaps to attack them in others. Augustine presents confession as a means for the corrupt to treat sin in a truthful fashion. We are so corrupt that if we don’t confess, our corruption will only deepen. Crumb, on the other hand, is confessing to the public. But why? I believe he does so in part to help create a new kind of society in which people like himself can exist equally with others. Crumb confesses to change the world. Crumb was raised a Catholic, and, obviously, confession plays a large part in Catholic ritual. The views of Saint Augustine, an early bishop and theologian of the Church, also permeate the theology of Catholicism. Crumb would have encountered these views even if he didn’t read Augustine’s Confessions or City of God. Among Augustine’s influential views is the belief that sex should be confined to procreation, that the sex act is inherently corrupt. Through the corruptions of sin, 99

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sex has become dirty. (Protestants, in contrast, tend to view pride as a large part of sin.) This is an extreme view of human nature, but Crumb may share it, in part.While revelling in his own sexual shenanigans, he is also putting forth human nature as irredeemably corrupt. With whom can the reader identify more, Saint Augustine or Crumb, the saint or the sinner, the pearl diver of the soul or the chronicler of domestic disturbance? Perhaps they are not really all that different. Just as Jesus, for example, attacked the Pharisees as ‘white sepulchers’ (beautiful crypts on the outside but filled with death and corruption on the inside), Crumb, very much influenced by Fifties culture, views the orderly world of suburban life as one rife underneath with sexual perversion, greed, and disharmony. As Peter Brown writes in Augustine of Hippo, ‘Wandering, temptations, sad thoughts of mortality and the search for truth: these had always been the stuff of autobiography for fine souls, who refused to accept superficial security.’ Crumb is a chronicler of the domestic. Though on the surface there may not be all that much difference between Blondie and certain aspects of Crumb’s comics about his home life, done by himself or in collaboration with his wife Aline in Dirty Laundry, the point of them is that Crumb refuses to leave any aspect of his life unexamined. Crumb himself was later drawn to other ‘confessors,’ though never to Saint Augustine himself. For Weirdo, Crumb eventually did stories adapted from the diaries of Franz Kafka and James Boswell, and a story about 100

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science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s paranoid religious fantasies. It’s important to think back on the nature of comic books at the time that Crumb began to issue Zap and its successors in San Francisco. Consumers could choose from funny animals, Archie, superheroes (though there were neurotic heroes in the comics over at Marvel), or political cartoons. What Crumb introduced was … himself. By inserting R. Crumb the cartoonist into his cartoons, the medium suddenly became very personal. It’s possible that someone else would have come up with the concept of the confessional comic book. But Crumb was the man who did it. Without his precedence, subsequent artists such as Peter Bagge, Joe Sacco, and so many others would have not had the forum, much less the freedom, to pursue their individual visions. ‘If you do exceptionally good work,’ he says in the narration to Confessions, ‘you’ll be hounded to death. The media and people with ideas, they’ll kill you, they’ll destroy your concentration forever. They won’t let you breath.You’re either on or you’re off.You’re in the limelight, blinded by the glare, or in the gutter being stepped on.’ The Crumb Woman: The film is rife with Crumb women, from some dance class students Crumb spies on, to the ‘perfect woman’ offered up for illustration by ‘Professor’ Crumb. Confessions: ‘Nuff said. Collectibility: Crumbologists, that corps of fanatical 101

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Crumb aficionados who must have copies of everything the artist has ever done (be it napkin sketches or wedding announcements for friends), have long known of this program.The film appeared on VHS a couple of years ago, and now Home Vision Entertainment’s DVD release helps the Crumb buffs to fill out their collection. The Verdict: The Confessions Of Robert Crumb, which bears the imprimatur of Crumb himself by virtue of his writing the script, is more for fans of the artist than for students of the documentary form. Still, the short movie has its charms, and, in a way, you get to know Crumb much better than you do in Crumb. Crumbologists, though, will not learn anything new from Confessions. For one thing, Crumb is a confessional artist to begin with, and all the ‘confessions’ have already been vented in his work. However, it is fun to see Crumb enact certain of his sexual fantasies and revisit places from his past. The Confessions Of Robert Crumb makes a fine companion piece to Zwigoff ’s Crumb.

‘R. Crumb, ‘The Old Outsider,’ Goes To The … Academy Awards’ Publication history: Commissioned as a piece for the American mainstream film monthly, Premiere, ‘… Academy Awards,’ first appeared in its April 1991 issue. The story was reprinted in Hup No. 4, 1992, pages 11–14, and R. Crumb’s America, Last Gasp, 1995, pages 52–55. 102

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Story: As the tale opens, we find the artist at home, receiving tickets to the Oscar ceremony. He goes to ‘that hateful Megalopolis,’ Los Angeles, where he observes the pre-ceremony antics, sees some protesters, walks down the red carpet, and sees Spike Lee at a pre-ceremony lounge looking as isolated as Crumb. From the third balcony he watches the broadcast, but finally can’t take it and leaves early, marvelling at the fans outside and their commitment to the stars inside. Background: Premiere hired Crumb to go to the 1990 Oscar awards, which may have been one of the last big events of American excess he witnessed before moving to France. The magazine published the story to coincide with the following year’s event. Analysis: In 22 brilliantly crafted panels across four pages Crumb immerses us into the, to him, hateful world of Hollywood, while also speculating about its attraction to the public.‘Why do they care so much … What’s in it for them?’ In the penultimate frame, he quotes Thomas Merton, who advises avoiding places where ‘they gather to cheat and insult one another.’ One thinks of Crumb as a strictly comic book guy, contemptuous of American pop culture, but movies permeate his work just as they do of most contemporary American artists. Many of his stories draw upon the models of cartoons, educational films, and narrative films. He’s also appeared in a few films, was the ‘star’ of Crumb, and participated in the making of his own documentary for British television. In interviews, Crumb has alluded to how he has seen films such as 103

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The Exorcist, and seems versed in the work of Woody Allen and other favoured filmmakers. ‘… Academy Awards’ contains several high- and lowbrow movie references embedded into its text and images. Crumb quotes Kurosawa (‘To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes’) as he walks down the red carpet. Unable to look up, he stares at the Oscar statuette images woven into the rug.When Aline comes into the room in the last panel, bearing a stack of videos to watch that night, ‘Crumb’ reacts: ‘Movies? Did you say … movies?’ adding in a box, ‘Slowly I turned … step by step … inch by inch.’ The box quotes a scary character from the old Abbott and Costello movie Lost In A Harem (1944), who is inspired to violence whenever a certain name or word is mentioned.The bit itself is derived from an old burlesque routine. The Crumb Woman: Crumb draws himself ogling the muscular leg of a girl straining to see a star from behind the barricades. His horror of the ‘classic’ high-fashion American woman is captured in panel 15, which portrays four over-dressed and over-made up Medusas staring maliciously.‘And the women – Oh lord save me – The women were truly terrifying, with all their ‘glamour,’ their predatory eyes, their cruel, lipsticked mouths … EEK!’ Confessions:‘… Academy Awards’ is explicitly autobiographical. Collectibility: Old copies of this issue of Premiere are offered by dealers for around $10. The Verdict: No better story by Crumb captures in miniature form the artist’s puzzlement and despair over 104

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American behaviour. The country’s obsession with fame, stars, and show business looks bleakly pathetic in the hands of the dyspeptic artist.

‘When The Niggers Take Over America’ Publication history: ‘When The Niggers Take Over America’ was first published in Weirdo, in the issue retitled Verre D’eau, No. 28 (Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, Summer 1993 pamphlet, unpaginated); it has been reprinted in R. Crumb’s America (Last Gasp EcoFunnies, 1998, Trade Paperback, 94 pages, ISBN 0 86719 430 8), pages 72–77. Story: ‘When The Niggers Take Over America’ is another story in Crumb’s occasional ‘slide show’ or educational documentary style. The narrative begins with a vision of black triumph, with the robust leader of the black army being fellated by the President of the United State’s wife while The Prez looks on. At the point of spurting orgasm, an aide shoots the President through the head. The narrator of the piece then lays out this dire vision of the future in more detail. He charts uncontainable black rage. Armies of blacks on the rampage through white suburban neighbourhoods raping women. Black leaders like tribal kings carried through the cheering streets on the backs of Caucasian servants, ‘your daughter’ chained nude to his throne. Black masters meaner than the old white slave owners. Plantations wherein whites sing to ease their pain in parody of the supposed roots of black music, and whip105

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pings done for public amusement. The narrator also envisions a world of breakdown, because the ignorant inheritors of the globe won’t know what to do with it. But the story doesn’t end with the blacks. In part two, ‘When The Goddamn Jews Take Over America,’ the narrator provides a dire vision of Jewish practices akin to prejudices common out of the writings of Henry Ford, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and other diatribes. Powerful Jews control the media and hypnotize youth.They wreck the economy in their relentless greed. Jews invented psychoanalysis in order to manipulate coveted shiksas into sex. Finally, in a one page coda, the narrator urges and envisions a banding together of the white races, all marching proudly toward an apocalyptic nuclear purification of the planet, final destruction the only way to finally cleanse the planet of the niggers and Jews, as the Good leave it behind on their way to heaven.‘Our dear Lord Jesus Christ awaits us with open arms on the other side. Amen.’ Background: If Crumb wanted Weirdo to go out with a bang, this was it. He had abandoned editing the magazine, and Aline was then in charge.And his wife has the notable tendency to free Crumb unconditionally to express whatever is coming out of his imagination. He told interviewer Mercier that ‘Neo Nazis … actually reprinted it in one of their magazines … It was a joke on them, and they don’t even get it.’ For Crumb, the humour of the piece was ‘implicit in being so extreme.’ Analysis: ‘When The Niggers Take Over America’ is arguably the most controversial recent comic story by 106

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Crumb. It’s an explosion of the racialist fears, beliefs, assumptions, and hate-triggers of the American middle and lower classes. ‘When The Niggers Take Over America’ raises the tired complaints about racism in Crumb’s work – tired because such a charge can never be thoroughly given a rejoinder to those who want to see his work as only racist, sexist, and hate-filled. It’s as if the artist had said, ‘Hey, you think I’m a racist? Wait ‘til you read this.’ Crumb not only plays with common prejudices, but goes even deeper into a more fearsome nightmare vision of evil and potential for cruelty. For the record, it should be mentioned that Crumb was surrounded by racism in Milford, Delaware, among other towns he lived in as a youth in the Forties and Fifties. As his letters show, he always resisted the common prejudices around him. Crumb has also been a student of black music since his youth, and both his wives have been Jewish. But one would like to think that such statements are unnecessary, so clearly is the strip a parody. It does happen to be, however, a parody that treads a very thin line between the ridiculous and the hidden fears that Americans rarely lay claim to. In the spirit of the old National Lampoon, it plays with racialist notions.Yet not really.The common defense of such humour is that, by freely exposing prejudices, the work nullifies them, renders them impotent. This may be a bogus argument. Americans are bred to hate ‘difference.’ Indeed, all Western countries are, but Americans are also taught to feel guilty about their private feelings. In the end, what Crumb’s comic does 107

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is record what a nation was thinking at a specific time and place, a document left for some kind of vague posterity that with luck can make use of it. In the present, however, it merely amuses with its extremism, making it a parody of itself. ‘When The Niggers Take Over America,’ is actually elegant in the way it builds up emotion. The story begins with a nightmare vision of black rebels executing the President of the United States while he sees his wife perform fellatio on the new ‘king.’ From this vision, horrific to the sexual fears of white American males of a certain vintage, the strip returns to the present, lecturing the reader on the rage felt in African-Americans; then the fantasia returns, with a race reversal showing blacks running plantations where whites become musically inclined to ease their burden. In the Jewish half of the story, the narrative makes a transition from ancient prejudices to a rousing emotional white Christian celebration of nuclear holocaust to rid the planet of its vile vermin. ‘… America’ is not, strictly speaking, a comic book strip. It’s more in the tradition of propagandistic uses of the comic format, from the religious pamphlets of Chick and the (little-known) right wing fantasias of Spider-Man artist Steve Ditko. In tone, it harks back to Crumb’s early Despair story, ‘It’s Really Too Bad.’ That tale, a blend of existential brooding and cruel humour, also followed the ‘slide show’ format of disconnected images linked by ‘voice-over’ narration boxes that speak to the reader from a cynical, seen-it-all, no-hope viewpoint. 108

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There is no consensus among Crumb readers about the story. On an Internet chat board recorded in early 2002,‘Rev. Syd Midnight’ wrote that the story is ‘Easily the most offensive thing that Crumb ever did, and brother that’s saying a lot.’ Crumb-fan Dave Garrett wrote,‘I still think that those two pieces are the funniest comics I’ve ever read.’ Ethan wrote that ‘anyone who takes something like the ‘let’s eat some nigger hearts!!’ [sic et al] strip as an indication of his racism is way off, these are probably the same people who think Tom Tomorrow is evilly conservative.’ Jess responded, ‘ethan is 50% right. i *do* think that robert crumb is a racist. I *do* think he’s a misogynist. I still think he’s a genius. the really uncomfortable part is that he may be a genius because of his ability to express the little black droppings at the bottom of his heart.’While Kerry responded,‘ As a woman, I never felt outrage at his more ‘offensive’ strips about women. I don’t know why … I don’t find them threatening. There are a lot of reasons for this – one is that Crumb doesn’t exempt himself from ridicule. So it comes off as a confession or a revelation of what really exists rather than an act of aggression that is intended to hurt … Also, there’s something inherently burlesque in comics that leads you to expect the ridiculous: they convey impossible, satirical and ugly things in a way no other narrative medium can.’ The Crumb Woman: They are at a minimum. Basically the only women in the story are the victims of the black hoards, and the black women observing in the background while a scrawny white guy is being slave whipped. 109

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Confessions: In the Dirty Laundry story, ‘Euro Dirty Laundry,’ from 1993, Crumb has ‘Crumb’ say,‘Why, I’m practically a Jew myself. I’ve been hanging around with Jews so long … Often I find myself the only goy in a room full of yidlocks.’ But then, ‘Suddenly an ancient, evil fearfulness stiffens his Anglo-Saxon blood, that old insidious, poisonous unreasoning Jew paranoia!!!,’ and ‘Crumb’ thinks,‘Who are these dark oily people? How clever they seem! How sophisticated! What do they want from me?’ Crumb here is rather bravely exposing the core of his reactions, if only to refute it later. It’s this ‘unreasoning’ core reactionism that ‘… America’ ponders. Collectibility: This, like other copies of Weirdo, is still in print, and goes for its cover price. The Verdict: With this one comic story, Crumb both pushed the level of his outrage and excited yet further excitement from the group of readers who disparage the rawness of his material.

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Post-Crumb,The Later Years Of Fruitful Harvest (1994–2005) Robert Crumb was taken by surprise twice in his life. The first surprise came not long after he began publishing his comics when he was deemed the ‘dean,’ the ‘father,’ the ‘grand old man’ of underground comics. Thanks to this status, he was assailed by fanboys, publishers, movie people, lawyers, and tax investigators. The second surprise came 25 years later with release of the documentary Crumb. The fame Crumb’s early appearances in the media brought him was startling. But the second round of fame was staggering.The film, Crumb told Mercier, ‘escalated my notoriety, my fame hugely, way beyond what it was before … I was completely surprised.’ Fortunately, he was in France by the time the film came out. It’s hard to get a straight story as to when Crumb moved to France, or why. Mercier says the move occurred in 1990, but he was still signing introductions to The Complete Crumb Comics from Winters, California in that year. Meanwhile, a Dirty Laundry collaboration between Crumb and his wife, dated 1992, mentions that they moved to France a year earlier. The main impetus for the move seems to have come 111

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from Aline, but Crumb himself (after his worries as to how his 78-record collection would weather a transatlantic trip finally abated) seems to be have acclimated himself to rural France, with its village life, aperitifs, and walks in the nearby woods. The movie Crumb ends with their farewell to America. In Crumb, Terry Zwigoff paid curious homage to Crumb’s angst and universally recognizable drawing style. Just over two hours long, Crumb is a profile of the artist in extremis. Though seemingly meandering, the film actually has a fascinating and coherent narrative line. Zwigoff introduces the viewer to Crumb in his sanctum sanctorum, the small studio behind his house in Winters, California, listening to old blues 78s. He follows Crumb to his Mom’s house in Philadelphia, where the viewer meets Charles. Zwigoff catches Crumb on Market Street in San Francisco, one of the places where Crumb likes to sketch. He shows Crumb talking to his brother Maxon, then being interviewed by a reporter, and enjoying an uncomfortable photo shoot for Leg Show magazine. Finally, Zwigoff shows the artist packing up his possessions for the move to France (which is ‘slightly less evil than the United States’). Zwigoff and his editor, Victor Livingston, cunningly arranged the footage that came out of a lengthy shoot into a logical, orderly journey into the mind of an artist. As Zwigoff bird-dogs Crumb, he – and the viewer – learns fascinating, amusing, and touching things about the man, his art, his family, and his sexuality. It’s a Crumb fanatic’s dream. 112

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What first time viewers may be surprised at is how much the notoriously misanthropic Crumb laughs. Though it might be nervous laughter, especially when his sex life is under analysis, nevertheless it is a happy laughter. There’s one thing Zwigoff doesn’t tell us, however, and that’s why Crumb has become such a cult figure. People – or should I say men –- are obsessed with him. Collectors leave no avenue untrammeled in their efforts to acquire everything to which his name is attached. But the ‘ordinary’ Crumb fan, the one who doesn’t need to own original comic book pages or Crumb Tshirts, decals, stickers, or puppets, the fan who simply wants to read his work, knows exactly what sparks the obsession. Reviewers described the Crumbs as the most dysfunctional family in America. Sensible people watching the film will see them instead as the most typical. All families are weird, if you look at them from the outside. Maybe even the inside. Crumb is the optimum common man, one of those artists able to put into print what it’s really like to live in America. He feels the difference between what we are inside and how we come across in the hard real world and puts it on the page. He’s a champion of the regular Joe’s life in the quotidian. By being himself, he tells us about ourselves. Victorian writers and poets, those brilliant premoderns who thought of themselves as modernists, lamented the fact that their ‘true’ self resisted revelation. 113

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Somewhere between thought and execution, this self was lost, and they could only look on as that lesser ‘them’ was put forward to the outside world. In ‘The Buried Life,’ Matthew Arnold groaned that men had grown alienated from their real selves: ‘I knew they lived and moved/ Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest/ Of men, and alien to themselves/ And long we try in vain to speak and act/ Our hidden self, and what we say and do/ Is eloquent and well – but ‘tis not true.’ His pal Arthur Hugh Clough knew what Arnold was talking about: ‘Excitements come, and act and speech/ Flow freely forth – but no/ Nor they, nor ought beside can reach/ The buried world below.’ Such lamentations make the Victorians seem as much like us as the befuddled characters in a Woody Allen movie, and Crumb’s great achievement is to capture in the modern era this same problem of the buried self. Crumb both expresses the problem and conquers it. In his own drawings starring himself – and Crumb has always used himself as a character in his comics – he is the hunched, awkward figure who can’t get the girls, who rages at the hypocrisy of society, at the vacuity of media, but who can’t do anything about these problems. Crumb seems to have a direct line into male angst, and males of a certain background and psychology, when reading about Crumb’s experiences, know exactly where he is coming from. According to the Marty Pahls,‘The theme [of Crumb’s early comics] is almost invariably the sensitive young man against the callous, misunderstanding world. Girls are brainwashed victims of Hollywood and Madison Avenue; guzzling 114

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Cokes and wetting their Capri pants over Fabian, not noticing that Mr Sensitive even exists. Guys are Big Booby Bastards, period.’ In the film, Crumb says that around the age of seventeen he felt the need to succeed in art as an act of revenge against all the schoolgirls and bullies who abused him. Now, despite all his angst and despair, Crumb is doing quite well for himself. He lives in France. His marketing arm has come up with everything from plastic figurines of Mr Natural to screen saver software and candy bars. He has been bibliographed. After the release of Crumb, the artist soon found himself busier than ever.Aside from an increased output of publications, in spring of 1998 there was the show, ‘Out of Chaos: Art of the Brothers Crumb – paintings and drawings by Charles, Robert and Maxon Crumb,’ at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, and a CD of favourite recordings from Crumb’s massive record collection, called That’s What I Call Sweet Music, was released shortly thereafter. The Hip Pocket Theatre of Fort Worth presented R. Crumb Comix 3, a revue adapted from his work. The range of his activities has been phenomenal. In 2000, Crumb did a cover illustration for Fate magazine, of all things (suggesting again his interest in all things Fortean), and had a show at New York City’s Paul Morris Gallery. In 2001, there was something of a Cheap Suit Serenaders reunion at Berkeley’s Freight and Salvage Coffee House (though it is not clear if Crumb was there), and there were exhibits in Germany 115

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and France (at the Musee de L’Erotisme in Paris). In June, 2001, work by Crumb appeared in Legal Action Comics, an anthology of strips by over 70 artists published to raise money for artist Danny Helman’s legal defense fund. And Crumb’s work was featured as part of the ‘Eye Infection’ show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2001. In the summer of 2002, there was the coincidence of no less than five Crumb-related shows throughout New York City, including a show of Aline’s work at the Jewish Museum, Sophie’s at the Matthew Marks Gallery, and Charles’s notebooks as part of a group show at the 303 Gallery. Crumb’s work was among a group at Feigen Contemporary, and then he had his own show, again at the Paul Morris Gallery. Crumb has been remarkably active since turning 60 on 30 August 2003. Among other things, he submitted to a rare interview about his record collecting for Brett Milano’s book Vinyl Junkies: Adventures In Record Collecting (St. Martin’s Griffin, Trade Paperback, 230 pages; Crumb’s interview appears in chapter 11, pages 131 – 145). He continued to do New Yorker covers and the occasional comic story within its pages, and in 2004 David Eggers’s prestigious and culty magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly published a two-page strip by Crumb called “The Unbearable Tediousness Of Being” in its 13th issue, dedicated to “North American comic drawings, strips, and illustrated stories” (Crumb’s colour cartoon appears prominently early, on pages 14 – 15). Crumb’s story (meant only for readers for whom “every second of life on this planet is an excruciating 116

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ordeal”) is another examination of the blend of selfishness and guilt with which, in Crumb’s view, all relationships are marbled, and in this case told equally from the perspective of a woman trying to brush off a hopeless suitor. Crumb’s anatomization of relationships, via the contrast between the speech and the thought balloons of the characters, is on the level of lacerating domestic dramas of Ibsen, Edward Albee, and Neil LaBute. Crumb also published Gotta Have ‘Em, a collection of his portraits of women (discussed later). In the new century, Crumb’s work seems to be continuously on display in at least one institution somewhere in the world. Museum Ludwig in Köln (Cologne), Germany mounted a retrospective of Crumb’s work called Yeah But Is It Art?, curated by Alfred M. Fischer. The accompanying catalogue, edited by Fischer and museum director Kaspar Konig, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung in 2004, reveals the range of material on display, realizing the institution’s goal of creating “an international platform from which the full breadth of Crumb’s work shines and spreads throughout the world.”The book divvies up Crumb’s work into the usual components, one chapter devoted to each: his confessional tendencies, his interest in music, strong women, and proselytizing against the corruptions of the world. Each chapter opens with a survey of quotes drawn from Crumb interviews and book forwards.There is also a healthy selection of rare family photographs to accompany a chronology that takes Crumb through to early 2004. (Germany takes Crumb very seriously. The previous year the Karikatur Museum in Krems published 117

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a catalogue of its show from 2002, Die Vielen Gesichter Des Robert Crumb. The book is beautifully produced, but given its blend of familiar images and reprinted chronology, for rabid Crumb collectors only.) Meanwhile, Fantagraphics continued its long-term compilation of Crumb’s work in the encyclopedic The Complete Crumb Comics. Vol. 16, subtitled The Mid1980s: More Years Of Valiant Struggle appeared in early 2003, and 2005 saw Vol. 17, called The Mighty Power Fems. In spring of 2004, the University Press of Mississippi published R. Crumb Conversations (Trade Paperback, 244 pages), an anthology, edited by the present writer, of 18 interviews with Crumb conducted by various journalists and comics buffs between 1968 and 2002, including hard to find but revealing items such as Al Davoren’s interview with Crumb from the ‘zine Promethean Enterprises, and a delightful profile of Crumb’s life in France by Brendan Bernhard. In August 2003 Crumb made another cinematic appearance of sorts in American Splendor, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s film adaptation of Harvey Pekar’s autobiographical comic books. Crumb figures significantly in Pekar’s life, and is played in the film by James Urbaniak (Henry Fool) who does a good imitation of Crumb’s vocal and sartorial style. American Splendor, however, is a film that, from its first seconds, puts forward an utterly unpleasant central character. And, with their heads hung low, the filmmakers seem to be aware of this. Indeed, the whole goal of the directors is to find something, any thing good to say about their protagonist. 118

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American Splendor tells the self-aggrandizing story of an annoying Cleveland lad who grew up to be a clerk in a VA hospital. He had a collecting mania but also a lack of personal cleanliness skills (a contrary set of tendencies, usually). Nevertheless, as a comic book collector, then a jazz record collector, he eventually meets the similarly inclined R. Crumb, who had moved to Cleveland in the early ‘60s and got a job at American Greetings. The good luck to have Crumb in his life eventually leads, 13 years later, to Crumb illustrating some of the stories that Pekar has written about his life as a drudge in a large institution and in a typical American town that crushes its denizens. The film follows Pekar as he loses a wife, garners a certain measure of fame as a comic book creator, acquires another wife, appears on the David Letterman show, has his comics turned into a stage play, contracts cancer (which he manages to beat), allows his wife to adopt the daughter of one of his illustrators, and then has a movie made of his life, like his mentor/ competitor Crumb.This would all be very interesting if it weren’t so – boring. American Splendor begins innocently and bucolically enough. A bunch of kids are trick or treating. One is costumed as Superman. Another is Batman. A third is dressed as Robin.The last one is in “civilian” clothes. When queried by the lady of the house whose candy the lads are seeking, the non-costumed element of this group says with exasperation that he is not a super hero, but merely “Harvey Pekar.” At which the nickname 119

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prone kids in his clan cough into their hands,“Pecker.” Pekar is in fact put out that the dispenser of candy should interrogate him. Indeed, he stalks off, bemoaning the stupidity of all humanity, and throws his sack of candy onto the ground. But there are several things wrong with this scene. For one thing, the Pekar character is presented as if he were unaware of the rituals of Halloween. Is this conceivable? What kind of kid in America in the ‘50s did not know of this holiday? OK, so maybe Pekar didn’t know about it, never saw a horror film on TV, never went out before on the last day of October.The film does not convey that ignorance in a plausible manner. Plus, why would a kid hang out with a gang that takes the first opportunity to call him “Pecker”? And finally, what kid in the world would toss away a perfectly good sack of hard earned candy, especially a character who, later in the film, is shown to be an eager consumer of “gourmet” jelly beans? American Splendor is a fine, middlebrow celebration of a working class guy who made something of himself but who still isn’t happy.That the film is so enamoured of its supercilious central figure bespeaks a saintly patience on the part of its makers. But anyone who needs further evidence can simply pick up the August 15 2003 issue of Entertainment Weekly, which features a long-winded six-page comic book story written by Pekar about the impact the movie had on his life. There is a big difference between Pekar and Crumb. The cartoonist is an admirable person who has never sold out, while Pekar, whose conversation all too 120

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frequently turns to the issue of money, has apparently been dying to sell out since he was born. Given Crumb’s supposed press phobia and his pride in never selling out, it was surprising that the normally reclusive Crumb would commit to so heavily promoting another book, The R. Crumb Handbook, which came out in spring of 2005. To help promote The R. Crumb Handbook Crumb appeared on the BBC’s The Culture Show on March 10th, engaged in a public interview with the book’s cowriter Pete Poplaski at Foyles Bookshop and public interviews at the NFT with the Guardian’s Steve Bell, and at the New York Public Library in early April. Meanwhile, the NFT screened a series of Crumb related movies throughout mid-March. And there were showings of Crumb’s work at Bonhams’ Gallery, and at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Most dispiriting of all to those who respected Crumb’s disdain for commercialization, he designed a T-shirt for Stella McCartney, which she previewed on 17 March in London, and 12 April in New York City. The book itself is a 400-plus-page autobiography that includes over 80 photographs and 300 images from Crumb’s sketchbooks and comics, divided into four categories that Crumb views as “enemies of man”: fear, clarity, power, and old age. The publicity material for the book indicates that it is filled with Crumb’s controversial views on “Disneyland, growing up in America, hippie love, art galleries, and turning 60.” One might wonder why Crumb, who has always been autobiographical in his cartoons, felt at this late 121

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date to write an official “memoir.” He may have been influenced by the interest some writers, such as David Hajdu (Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina), or the author of this volume, have shown, in writing his authorized biography. Finally, in August 2004, W. W. Norton publishers of New York City won a bidding war for what may prove to be his magnum opus, a cartoon version of The Book Of Genesis. Piloted by his agent, Dennis Kitchen (his former publisher), the bidding resulted in a contract in, as they say in publishing, the high six figures, and news reports indicated that Crumb would deliver the book to Norton for publication in 2006. In an interview with the comics website Egon, Kitchen indicated that the high advance would give Crumb breathing space. The site quoted him as saying that the book “was based on an idea Robert had originally brought to me at Kitchen Sink … We couldn’t do it because it was late in the day there, but it was an idea that I loved, and I never forgot about it. I brought it up with Robert again a few months ago, and he said he’d still like to do it if he had the time and enough money to dedicate a couple of years to it, because it’s a major, major project. … We’re pleased it ended up [at Norton], and obviously, Robert’s pleased too, because he can take the time without worrying about compensation – that’s what advances are about. I can’t say what it was, but it was substantial, and allows him to work two years without worrying.” Norton announced that Crumb’s version of Genesis 122

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would be a “literal” account of the “non-fiction” book. Genesis, of course, is the first book of the Bible, and it chronicles the Creation, the story of Adam and Eve, what happens to their children Cain and Abel, and the stories of Noah and the Ark, the tower of Babel, Abraham and his son, Sodom and Gomorrah, Jacob and Esau, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, and finally the life of Joseph. This is not the first time the Bible has come under cartoon scrutiny. There is a rich tradition of religious mockery in underground comics, and 1987 saw the publication of Outrageous Tales From The Old Testament, an anthology in which numerous cartoonists retold some of the more extreme biblical tales. And obviously pictorializing stories or incidents from the Bible has a long tradition, with some of the genre’s practitioners, such as Bosch and Picasso, being direct or indirect influences on Crumb. If Genesis, which will appear when the cartoonist is 65 or older, proves to be Crumb’s last great work, his career will close as it began, with a long, epical tale set in a fantasyland. In 1962 Crumb began to draw what we now would call a graphic novel, The Yum Yum Book, which he eventually gave to his first wife and which was published in the 1970s (see the earlier discussion of The Yum Yum Book for more details). Just as that book announced in diluted, inchoate form many of the themes that would later plague Crumb’s work, Genesis may well draw together in definitive form some of the same themes, still haunting him: voluptuous women in edenic locations easily beguiled by wily manipulators, 123

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apocalyptic visions of nature’s destruction, the attraction to and revulsion from hedonism, and the chasm between successful people and failures. Crumb, a lapsed Catholic who lays claim to believing everything psychic, strange, and metaphysical that falls under the rubric Fortean, may be returning in some modified way, to the philosophical questions that tortured him in adolescence. Crumb may have evolved, but in many ways he hasn’t changed.

Art & Beauty Publication history: Subtitled ‘To Uplift & Enlighten,’ Art & Beauty was published by Kitchen Sink Comix in 1996 (32 pages, pamphlet with covers of sturdier paper, ISBN 0 87816 556 8). A second issue was announced for summer of 2002, from Fantagraphics (Kitchen having gone out of business). Story: Art & Beauty is a collection of 38 captioned images, 33 of them of women (either from life, from magazine ads and photos, or from personal photographs), plus one of a Sumerian statue, two that contrast a wilderness scene with Los Angeles, one of a dance contest, and one of an anonymous banjo player. ‘There is infinite, neverending variety to the human body,’ notes a caption, ‘and the poses in which it may be placed by the skilled artist. It is in these unusual angles of the body that the true artist finds inspiration for the creation of innovative and exciting compositions.’ Interspersed among the images are 43 quotes about art, culled, according to the contents page, from Pete 124

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Poplaski’s personal collection,‘Great Art Quotes for All Occasions.’ The quoted speakers range from Leonardo to Robert Hughes. Background: With the suspension of Weirdo, and the move to France, Crumb’s work eventually began to take on a reflective, inward turn.Though the self-lacerating questioning of Eighties Crumb didn’t exactly disappear, occasionally Crumb could show the relaxed spirit and a pure joy in drawing. Art & Beauty Magazine can be construed as an example of a kind of newly found harmony and relaxation. There’s nothing ‘dirty’ in Art & Beauty Magazine: no scenes of small snoids humping vixens from the rear. Instead, Art & Beauty is a series of simple poses, celebrating the female figure. Analysis: In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Oval Portrait,’ a driven artist sets about to paint an image of his bride. But he is so intent on the work that he doesn’t notice how the light is hurting his loyal mate or that indeed later that she has died. Poe concludes, ‘Yet, for one moment the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast and crying with a loud voice ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ Poe’s tale is a story of an artist so in thrall to art that he is impervious to the life around him. Life and art are inextricably entwined. Crumb, in interviews and ‘confessional’ comic stories is equally in thrall to his art and to the women he frequently, obsessively draws. Art & Beauty Magazine finds Crumb completely captivated by a set of lovelies, some from his own past, some copied from the media. 125

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If you have seen any of the original images from which Crumb copied, you can detect how much he altered them slightly to conform to his fantasies, for example making the legs heavier. Each drawing has a caption. Partially mimicking the kind of language that seeks to legitimize the content of hard core pornography from the Victorian era to the Sixties, the words serve as an amusing counterpoint to the on-the-surface innocent images of women sunbathing, exercising, looking at themselves in a mirror, or skating. A sense of serenity and natural simplicity pervades this scene. In addition, the artist has infused warmth and life into his fine penwork.‘A more splendid model could not be found by an artist.’ The bucolic tone fails to hide the lascivious sneer. From the front and back cover drawings of Aline, to the centre spread of some girls from the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, the book is an anthology, a scrapbook of Crumb favourites. Some are people from his real, private life. Each is rendered with an attention to detail and a thick, fine line with much cross-hatching and shading.The body builder Rachel McLish is shown on an exercise machine in an orgy of dark hatching. The emphasis is on shading and legs, the way light accents leg muscles already tensed by high heels (the drawings on pages 10 and 11 represent the pinnacle of Crumb’s leg art). The Crumb Woman: Art & Beauty Magazine is a legal brief on behalf of the Crumb woman. One can imagine the artist a smidge frustrated at the seeming international preference for the fashion model type over the 126

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more robust Crumbian woman, and maybe the feeling of isolation led to this anthology of images with their jokey yet serious captions. Confessions: It doesn’t get any more confessional than publishing a collection of drawings of women you like. But the collection of quotes that go with the images bears looking at, as well. Each quote reflects an attitude or a belief that Crumb has expressed over the years.‘Do not fail to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is it will be well worthwhile, and do you a world of good,’ said Cennini in the 1300s, and Crumb the sketchbook keeper would echo that sentiment, as he would virtually every other sentiment expressed in the quotes. Collectibility: Art & Beauty Magazine is still in print, with a cover price of $4.95. The Verdict: Crumb once revealed in an interview that for a long time he drew animals because he was intimidated by drawing people. He seems to have overcome that worry. The women in Art & Beauty Magazine are superb.Also, Art & Beauty Magazine is further evidence, if any were needed, that Crumb is still exploring both the extent of his artistry and the limits of the magazine and comic book format.

The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book Publication history: This awkwardly large volume, edited and designed by Peter Poplask, was published by Little, Brown and Company in September, 1997 (250 pages, $40, ISBN 0 316 16306 6), and in Great Britain by 127

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Bloomsbury in early 1998 (ISBN 0 7475 3816 6). Story: This anthology, published in America to coincide with the Christmas buying season, gathers together scores of examples of Crumb’s work from throughout his career, ranging from his earliest comics done in competition with his brothers, to some of his greeting cards, to work published in the Nineties. Stories, illustrations, magazine and album covers, paintings, and even sculptures are all represented, and some of the comic stories, such as ‘The Adventures Of Fuzzy the Bunny’ (based on an original story by Charles) appear in colour for the first time. Non-Crumbian images are included as well, from Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad magazine covers, to the covers of some of his favourite comic books, and there are numerous photographs as well. Selections from Crumb’s sketchbooks alternate with the stories, marking his development. Epoch marking essays by Crumb are interspersed throughout the book. Background: It seems that by the end of the Nineties, everybody was publishing a piece of Crumb. Besides this Little, Brown book, Crumb continued to do business with Fantagraphics (which was publishing his sketchbooks, the Complete Crumb Comics series, oneshots anthologies on Mr Natural and other subjects, and even some of his comic books), as well as some of the firms whom he had started out with in the Sixties: Last Gasp Eco-Funnies, Kitchen Sink, and others. But what did Crumb want out of all this publication? Perhaps, just to tell his story. In effect, the RCCTAB comprise a form of memoir. 128

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Analysis: In the hubbub about Crumb’s drawing style, one thing that is forgotten is that he is a damn fine writer. His ear for dialogue is superb. He knows how to construct a story.And his autobiographical writings, the only kind of prose work he seems to do, are fascinating. The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book is divided by long essays by Crumb, setting the stage for the art to follow. In these 17 lengthy essays, Crumb guides the reader through his art and life. Coupled with the introductions he has written for some of the Complete Crumbs, his whole story is laid out.These essays could be gathered together in a separate volume and serve as an autobiography. What’s important, however, is that the essays are well written. Crumb has a frank, unadorned writing style. He has a natural sense of writerly rhythm, breaking up paragraphs to create a sense of drama and flow. His images can overwhelm his words, but taken alone, the words rank as the work of one of America’s finest writers. The Crumb Woman: There are many sketches of the Crumb woman, and one section of the book toward the back is dedicated to the history of a huge wooden Devil Girl statue, carved by a team of artists after Crumb moved to France. Confessions: Crumb doesn’t tell the experienced Crumbologist anything he doesn’t already know, but Crumb does organize his life into handy chunks. Collectibility:The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book is still in print, in both hardcover and in oversized trade paperback, but is still offered online for many dollars above its cover price, even though the book was 129

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remaindered in some books stores for under $20. The Verdict: If you don’t know anything about R. Crumb, and want to figure out what all the noise is about, start here.

‘Bad Karma’ Publication history: ‘Bad Karma’ appeared in Mystic Funnies No. 2.The magazine is copyrighted April, 1999, but the story itself is signed and dated 1998 by Crumb. Mystic Funnies No. 2 was published by Last Gasp. The first issue of Mystic Funnies was published by Alex Wood in 1997, and a third issue was published by Fantagraphics in the Summer of 2002. Story: As the tale begins, the Moron, a Snoid-like character wearing short pants and a tiny sailor cap, is introduced trudging across a bleak landscape that consists solely of people’s heads.They are stretched out before him in the millions, bunched together, crying, pleading.Yet The Moron must walk on them in order to keep going. It’s a traumatic experience, and he can barely take it.‘What’s it all mean?’ he cries. One female head begs,‘Do me, Mister Big Shoes!! Please! Now!’ In defiance of her husband, whose head is right next to hers, The Moron does as asked, then falls asleep, drooling into the faces of the heads beneath his. Prodded awake by the hand of a God-like figure, he sees the landscape change from the heads of what was really his imagination to a stony world.The God-hand prods him forward, telling the Moron not to look back at him. But on the brink of a great chasm, the impatient 130

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Moron finally does look back, and instantly explodes into protoplasmic organic debris that slides down the wall of the chasm. ‘Isn’t there some force of love or compassion in the universe that, you know, cares about me?’ the Moron whimpers. At this point, in a surprise visit Mr Natural interrupts the story to offer a demonstration of the power of the media. After this two-page interlude, we return to the Moron, who awakens to find himself in an Arcadia, cuddled by its sole inhabitant, a gigantic nude woman, who identifies herself as his Fairy Godmother. She gives him a robe and they dance a bit, and then she announces that she has to go. ‘I have a lot of things to do … people to see …’ The Moron falls instantly in love, or lust, with his FG, and in typical Crumb fashion imposes himself on the weakly resisting woman. Across 13 pages, the Moron fondles his Fairy Godmother to orgasm, but his and her blissful state is interrupted by the appearance of a man on a horse, a cross between a knight in shining armour and a surfer. He whisks away the FG, whose name we now learn is Cassandra. She abandons her charge with barely a thought, but with instructions to make his way through a thick forest with a sword and clippers. But as the Moron embarks on this second journey, he is caught up in the unyielding brambles, suffocated by them, as the panels he inhabits increasingly decrease into nothingness. Background: There are hints in some of Crumb’s recent work that his mind is taking a spiritual bent.This is not uncommon of lapsed Catholics, who, in the 131

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twilight of their lives, find their minds tilting back to some version of the faith pressed upon them in youth. On the other hand, Crumb has admitted to a fascination with the mystic or unexplained side of life. In The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, Crumb tells us that, ‘I believe in everything … UFOs, Bigfoot, channeling, ESP … I believe it all!’ In any case, Crumb introduced Mystic Funnies in 1997 as a full-colour comic (note ‘Dirty Dog’s bunny God up in the right-hand side of this issue’s cover) that told several Mr Natural and Flakey Foont stories.There he presented a still frustrated, but now graying, Foont, still determinedly pestering Mr Natural with questions about the Big Picture and not grasping Mr Natural’s carefree, hedonistic approach to life. Crumb also brought back after a long hiatus Shuman the Human, a typically phony practitioner of the Eastern arts, resurrected from the old days. Crumb added yet more new characters, including Shuman’s Japanese girlfriend, Tuki, and Wendy, a one-eyed girl (has any cartoonist invented more characters than Crumb?). In Mystic Funnies No. 2, however, Crumb veers off in a new direction, with new characters but in vaguely familiar Crumbian settings and situations. Moreover, there is a deeper bleakness, a sense of unanswered questions, mixed in with the customary sexual hijinks. Analysis: ‘Bad Karma’ is about contingency. It’s about the horror of realizing that one’s actions have an effect on others and that their actions affect us. The Moron goes from literally walking on others to get ahead, to having his life affected by a brief interlude with the 132

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Fairy Godmother. The story evokes the existential quandaries of Fifties literature and films, which Crumb may have absorbed at the time in diluted form. The Moron is unhappy, but gets no answers.Yet he must act. More Beckett than Sartre, the story portrays an apolitical figure with little perspective on his lot in life, yet whose every move invariably has an effect on others. In his landscape of heads, Crumb has come up with a brilliant visual metaphor for life, or at least life in late twentieth century corporatized America. In its visceral vividness, it’s an image worthy of Samuel Beckett at his most abstract and specific. It also draws upon Herriman’s surrealistic Krazy Kat strips with their strange landscape and ritualistic antagonisms. At the same time, we also find Crumb, through the oracle of Mr Natural, showing alarm at and questioning the power of the media. Over two pages and across 18 panels, Mr Natural taunts the reader before stepping out like the Wizard of Oz to show the mechanics of manipulation.‘But see how you let me jack you around emotionally in a few comic book panels?’ he asks. ‘That’s what happens when ya give your attention to the media … you give them a hell of a lot of power!! The power of the Media, man …’ Technically, ‘Bad Karma’ is an orgy of dingbats. There’s onomatopoeia, symbolia, agitrons, spurls, squeans, oculama, plewds, blurgits, and waftaroms, as well as jarns, quimps, nittles, and other maladicta.They conspire to give the story a sense of roiling, subterranean action whose surface consists of journeys and seduction. 133

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The Crumb Woman: This story is all about the Crumb Woman. Except for the woman being blandly ethnicity free (but then again, she is a Fairy Godmother) and having a diastema, she is the optimum Crumb female. She is big, distracted, but easily swayed into a sexual liaison. In the throes of passion, the Moron notes that ‘Her normal obnoxious self seems to be temporarily out of commission. Heh Heh!’The Moron indulges his oral fixation (playing with the FG’s tongue and smacking her lips) and also indulges in his fascination with her footwear (‘I love to watch her legs kick and thrash around in those boots! … The sound of her heels knocking together is driving me crazy!’). The Fairy Godmother is also a typically Crumbian woman by virtue of her attention deficit disorder; she is hard to pin down, says whatever comes into her mind, and alternates between being dismissive of the Moron (‘Pffff! I think you like my boots better than you like me!’) and being flattered by his attention. Confessions: The Moron’s hacking through the thicket is reminiscent of a remark by Crumb to Mercier about his forays into the French wilderness around his village: ‘It’s very rugged and hard to get around in. I make my own path a lot of times, cut my way through all the thorn vines.’ And incidentally, the early version of Shuman the Human is popularly thought to be a version of Crumb’s brother Maxon. Collectibility: Mystic Funnies has a cover price of $4.95 and is still in print. The Verdict: A searing indictment of corporate America disguised, like so many Crumb stories, as a sex 134

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fantasy. Here, nearing 60, is the artist at the peak of his abilities.

‘From Cradle To Grave’ Publication history: ‘From Cradle To Grave’ appeared in Mystic Funnies No. 3, published by Fantagraphics in August 2002. Story: In this one-page story, a boy is born, but just as the baby is coming to enjoy suckling at his mother’s breasts, the clowns come.These four circus fools, some with X’s for eyes, race him along life’s path at high speed. Like the astronaut at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he ages before our eyes: childhood games, first date, first sex, marriage, daughter, bills, old age, sickness. In the end, they slide his corpse into its resting spot, their work done. Background: Death has started to crop up in Crumb’s work, as perhaps it must in an artist turning 60. He seems also to be pondering death. He told Mercier that ‘Death advises you every day and helps to put things in perspective.You realize the urgency of getting on with whatever it is you want to do with your life and not wasting time with nonsense. Time becomes valuable. Death is an instructor.’As the last comic on the last page of Mystic Funnies No. 3, the strip is like a parting shot of seriousness amid the frivolity. Analysis: In an early comic book story called ‘City Of The Future’ (first published in Zap, No. 0, 1967), Crumb envisions a wacky future that includes population control. At the age of 65, citizens are approached 135

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by a band of clowns (even if you are on the golf course, as in the story) delivering the ‘final exit’ of a cyanidefilled pie.Thirty-five years later, Crumb, consciously or not, revisits that notion with ‘From Cradle To Grave.’ But here he has greatly expanded the idea, while presenting it with great economy. Just as ‘It’s Really Too Bad,’ from Despair comics, summarized the grim life of a man in only three panels, ‘From Cradle To Grave’ accomplishes a similar task in 12; and, like the Despair story, also evokes Bob Dylan’s song ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ with its arch evocation of a life spent bossed by others, with drugs as the only solace. Like the landscape of human heads that the Moron must trudge in ‘Bad Karma,’ the four pall-bearing clowns in ‘Cradle’ represent a brilliant Beckettian metaphor for life. The boy in the story, as he grows older, is always puzzled. Only the four miniature clowns beneath him, propping him up through life, ‘know.’ The Crumb Woman: The Crumb woman is carried away by the same furies as the men. Confessions: Insofar as Crumb, like everyone else, must deal with death, the strip is confessional. Collectibility: Mystic Funnies No. 3 has a cover price of $3.95 and is still in print. The Verdict: A bleak, brilliant summary of the human condition,‘From Cradle To Grave’ shows the command Crumb has of his craft in using it to explore with an awe-inspiring economy his view of life. Call it the revenge of the nerd.As a constant complainer, he seems happier than ever. As his brother Charles might have 136

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said, ‘How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure.’

Gotta Have ‘em Publication history: Subtitled ‘Portraits Of Women,’ Gotta Have ‘Em was published by Greybull Press, dated 2002 but really only available in 2003 (232 unpaginated pages, hardcover with an embossed illustrated board in a slipcase, ISBN 0 9672366 8 1). Story: Gotta Have ‘Em gathers in chronological order some 240 sketches, cartoon excerpts, and portraits of the women Crumb has known, fantasized about, or seen in the media.The book kicks off with a revelatory introduction by Crumb, dated July 2002. Background: In his later years Crumb appears to have grown more reflective, given over to reviewing incidents in his past and reflecting on the people he has known. Gotta Have ‘Em is an outgrowth of this retrospection, Crumb being especially prone to dwelling on his past loves, crushes, and relationships. Also, Crumb has always been very generous with his material, spreading it around numerous publishing houses.When it published the book, Greybull was a relatively new firm, co-founded by photographer Lisa Eisner, along with Roman Alonzo and designer Lorraine Wild. It specialized in art and photography books. The press is named after Eisner’s birthplace of Greybull,Wyoming. Analysis: Basically a hardback variation on Crumb’s Art & Beauty series, Gotta Have ‘Em presents in sleek form the progression of Crumb’s style, from the early 137

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light lined sketches of his youth through his brush phase to the heavily crosshatched manner of his late style. The Crumb Woman: Like Art & Beauty Magazine, Gotta Have ‘Em is an explicit celebration of the Crumb woman. Confessions: Crumb calls Gotta Have ‘Em “an autobiography of sorts,” and the biggest revelation in the volume is Crumb’s confession in his introduction that he has had a long-term secondary relationship with another woman, identified here publicly for the first time as Carol Vinson, who lives on the west coast of the United States. From both the intro and the various portraits of her,Vinson comes across as a strong willed woman with even less tolerance for mainstream society than Crumb himself. Collectibility: Apparently Greybull printed only 500 copies of Gotta Have ‘Em. It retailed for $55 upon publication but already various dealers are offering it for as much as $600 dollars, for a limited edition version of the book signed by Crumb. The Verdict: In his old age, Crumb is beginning to take on the manner of his beloved Mad magazine, an institution that had no qualms about attempting to sell its fans the same material repeatedly, in annuals, mass market paperback reprints, and in recent years in prestige anthologies. Fortunately, Crumb also mixes in new drawings with the material that Crumb fans have already purchased in one form or another several times over. A rough estimation is that about a third of the book consists of images that are new to Crumb buffs. 138

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The introduction, however, makes it a must for Crumb aficionados.

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The Latest Confessions: An Interview With Robert Crumb The following interview with Robert Crumb was conducted by mail in April of 2002. Is there anything left for the ‘confessional’ Robert Crumb to confess? If so, I’m listening. Hmm … Let me think … Is there anything left to ‘confess,’ anything I haven’t told? Y’know, I’m probably one of the few, maybe the only human on this planet with no secrets. My deepest, bizarrest thoughts and fantasies are known by millions of people! Between my comics and published sketchbooks and the Crumb documentary, and various published interviews and articles about me, there’s not a corner or cranny of my life and psyche that hasn’t been publicly explored, put on display, held up for ridicule, for laughs, to ogle at, as an example, as a freak show, or just out of my own narcissistic compulsion to exhibit myself, like when Lyndon Johnson pulled up his shirttail and showed his scar. I wanted to be loved so badly that I was compelled to show them the worst, most despicable part of myself, to test their love. Once I agreed to be interviewed by 140

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a nice young woman journalist in Chicago, and after talking to me for about an hour she stared at me and said,‘Y’know, you’re actually a pretty nice guy! After reading your comics I thought you’d be some kind of a monster.’‘Well, ya see,’ I explained to her,‘I foist all that on the public, so it’s easy for me to be a nice guy in real life.’ I confess! When I was twelve years old I was sexually aroused by a dead sea-gull! When I was fifteen I had my first ejaculation while wrestling around with my little sister! I admit it! I once entertained briefly the idea of pushing my first wife off a high building! I was very very cruel to my younger brother Maxon when we were kids. I constantly tormented him psychologically. But I feel bad about it now. Even for a ‘confessional’ artist, it must be difficult to have things such as childhood comics or the letters from one’s teenage years published, regardless of how sympathetic or ravenous the fan base is. Or is it difficult? Yes, it is quite embarrassing to see stupid letters I wrote when I was 16 or 17 years old published for all the world to see! They never asked me for my consent, they just went ahead and published those letters … Legally, I guess, they only need the permission of the person who OWNS the letters, the recipient or his descendants, and they got that – for a price. But it’s equally embarrassing to look at a lot of my early published comics … Some of it appears 141

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very sophomoric, silly. I was a punk, trying to shock people, trying to, you know, stir things up, like an obnoxious guy at a party who does something stupid such as putting ice-cubes down the back of some woman’s dress. Some of my work is embarrassing in its attempt to make some meaningful or profound point about life. I often fell into the trap of taking myself too seriously and trying to live up to the ‘genius’ image I had of myself – a fatal, egoistic error that many artists, writers, even comedians make.You think you have to make some big, important statement to the world every time you pick up your pen, or brush, or whatever your tool may be.That’s a hard thing to overcome. I work on it every day. You have travelled extensively, whether by early family fiat or adult restlessness. In your experience, is that unusual among American artists, and would you ‘recommend’ that sort of life to aspiring cartoonists? I can’t speak for other American artists, but a lot of the travelling I’ve done was the act of running away from a situation. I had to get out of there! Very often, I was running away from a woman – a wife or a girlfriend. Often, I was running to the arms of another woman. In my youth I would sometimes run away to a strange city and just walk the streets, feeling utterly lonely and blue, lost and confused. I also did a lot of travelling when I played music in a band, but now I’ve quit the music business entirely. I can’t take the crowds anymore.Then there 142

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was the phase when I travelled at the invitation of others, who paid my expense. Comic conventions, publishers promoting books of mine and the like. I went through a phase of not being able to resist free airline tickets, free hotel rooms, the prospect of meeting girls who were impressed with my fame. But I always ended up feeling very depressed by this type of travel, and I rarely ever met any girls, so I’ve cut out most of that. Mostly I stay home now. Would I ‘recommend’ that sort of life to aspiring cartoonists? Not necessarily. Carl Barks, who wrote and drew those great Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge McDuck comics in the ‘forties and ‘fifties got most of his inspiration for the stories he did about far away places from his set of encyclopedias. But it’s true that when he was young he worked at many different kinds of jobs, including hard manual labor. I’m sure that helped to give him a broader perspective. This is another rather obvious question, but now that you have lived in France for almost a decade, has the distance softened or has it increased and hardened your stance on American culture and American history (which you were interested in as a teenager)? Every time I think my feelings about my homeland, the U.S.A., are softening, they turn around and pull some stunt that is so stupid, mean, arrogant or destructive that my contempt shoots right back up to where it was when I left there eleven years ago … 143

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And I go back every year and stay for a month or six weeks, and then it all comes back to me, what a bleak corporate monoculture it is over there! Horrible! Still, living outside of the U. S. for this long has given me a new perspective. Living in France, a somewhat different sort of culture from the U. S. A., I get to make comparisons. I can see the advantages and disadvantages to both countries. Some of the negative qualities of any given society are hidden from outsiders when they first arrive there. France, with its old ways, looked very appealing to the American disgusted with America’s shallow modernity. But after living for years in France, you begin to see the downside of those old ways, the narrow, insular, class-stratified, peasant-aristocrat mindsets that still pervade all social life here. The U. S. is free from a lot of that old baggage, which is why Europeans, first arriving in the U. S., find it so exhilarating. The U. S. still appears wide open to Europeans, even while they might also see Americans as uncouth, loudmouthed, simple-minded louts. After awhile, though, most Europeans start to miss the depth of culture that Europe possesses and the U.S.A. lacks. The U.S. is still a raw, unsettled land compared to Europe, believe it or not! You have been collecting stuff for a long time. Where do you keep it all? Or, as you have gotten older, do you start to cease taking a lot of it seriously and start throwing it out or selling it off? 144

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I’ve been an obsessive, compulsive collector since the age of nine, except for a brief interlude in the late Sixties when I was taking L.S.D. I guess the collective urge, along with my obsessive sex drive, has tapered off in recent years. I don’t spend nearly as much time dwelling on items that I ‘must have’ for my collection as I used to.That said, I recently found an old collector willing to sell me a whole bunch of fabulous and rare old 1920s blues records, stuff I’ve been trying to find for decades, such as Blind Blake’s ‘Diddie Wah Diddie’ and Memphis Minnie’s ‘Cherry Ball Blues.’ They’re not cheap, but not top dollar either. I’m still enough of a collector to be in a sort of euphoria over this deal, sort of like a heroin addict after a good hit of junk. Pathetic, I know, but there it is. Bukowski had the racetrack, I collect old 78 records.As for throwing stuff out – never! I never throw anything away. Fortunately, we have a big house here in France – it is full of stuff! I enjoy my stuff immensely, all my cultural artifacts: records, books, comics, toys, etc., etc. My appreciation deepens with age! Funny the way collecting is somehow a disreputable pastime … people have a certain contempt for collecting and collectors. It is viewed as creepy, and collectors viewed as creeps. Mel Gibson would never play a collector in a film. But serious collectors are preservers of culture. Quite often, it’s true, though – most collectors are creeps. Now that there is a website selling your wares, can we take it that you are now more comfortable with the 145

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commercial side of art? Or were you always comfortable with that side of things, just not the people involved with the commercial side? Actually, I don’t have a website. I have nothing to do with computers. Lucky me, huh? It’s my son Jesse who operates the ‘Crumb Products’ website. He invented it, he designed it, he sells the stuff. It’s his own little business. I get royalty payments. I never had any qualms with the ‘commercial’ aspect of what I do. Comics are intrinsically a commercial medium, an industrial product. It’s built-in. It’s not ‘fine’ art. You gotta make sales.You gotta make the stuff readable and entertaining. Keep ‘em laughing.You gotta turn out a certain amount of product in order to make a living at it – I’ve always known and accepted this part of it. Sure, I abhor the thought of becoming a commercial hack. That’s a danger that’s always lurking … But it’s no worse than the “fine” art world where, in order to be successful, you must learn how to kiss the asses of important critics, museum curators, gallery owners and other influential types in that world. If anything, that’s even more repulsive than having to deal with crass, venal publishers and other business people. Better to have a day job and keep the art purely a separate, sacred endeavour, free of the exigencies of money or kissing ass. Fortunately for me, I have a large enough following that I can earn a very decent living without having to ‘prostitute’ myself. I just have to keep it coming, keep a certain amount of new work coming out every year. 146

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But I am not what you’d call a rich man. I’m better off than most of my friends, but Art Spiegelman is much richer than me! I know, because he told me how much money he has! Here’s a boring question (but maybe they’re all boring): Any reflections on turning 60 (or are you doing a comic story about it)? Yawn … Ho Hum … oh yes, how boring it all is … I will turn 59 this year, on about August 30th (2002) … I seem to become increasingly concerned with being ready when the hooded figure with the scythe shows up … more and more it seems that all of life is about preparing yourself for that crucial moment when you must leave the body, leave everything that you know, love, hate … How you experience that moment may be the point of the whole life experience; what you’ve done in your life, how much time you’ve put in, how aware you’ve made yourself of that inevitable moment. I seem to feel more and more that the whole purpose of this life is somehow bound up in that fateful moment, the most ‘defining moment’ there is, after birth. If you don’t study death, if you ignore death, you’re just one of the cattle being led to the slaughter … you won’t know what’s up until you are already on the ramp, next in line to receive the final knock on the head, and suddenly it’ll dawn on you and you’ll have, maybe, two minutes left … too late to prepare for it then … and we’re all headed for that final moment … no 147

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escape … But I feel more and more that we all, us humans, are given this gift, this chance-at-a-chance, to … uh … to … uh … make something significant out of that moment … I’m not precisely sure just what … I’m working on it … How much pre-visualization do you do with a typical page of a comic book? Or does it just ‘come to you’? Or, do you imagine one specific frame, and build the rest of the page around it logically? Or is it too difficult (or too boring) to describe? I usually have sort of a vague idea what I want the finished page to look like over-all … A mood, a feeling … it is as much about the lay-out of the panels, the amount of darkness or lightness, the amount of ink on the whole page, the positioning of the characters, as it is about the story line. The look of the whole page is important, aesthetically, to the appeal of comics. Some of those old-time comicstrip artists understood this very well when making their big Sunday, full-page, colour strips. Many of those Sunday pages, in the 1910s & ‘20s, are beautiful works of art. Even some of the cartoonists of that time who weren’t especially aware of “composing” their Sunday pages made beautiful ones, unconsciously, just by the bold, vigorous simplicity of their style – early Mutt and Jeff, the Gumps, Buster Brown, and many lesser-known, obscure strips, are just charming as hell to look at … Usually the visual part is much better than the writing. The humour 148

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was most often very lowbrow in those early strips – in the last panel somebody is falling out of the picture after hearing the punch-line. These newspaper comic strips were looked down on by the upscale cartoonists of the weekly magazines coming out of New York; the New Yorker, Life, Judge, etc. Comic strips and comic books were for the working classes. Literate people did not read them, and often did not allow their children to read comic books. Really, what have you got against comic book fans; what did the fans ever do to you? Comic fans – God bless ‘em! Who ever said I had anything against comic fans? Did I ever say that? Where would I be without them? I’d still be working at the American Greetings Corporation in Cleveland. I just had to stop appearing at comics conventions, that’s all … I used to be invited to those things and for a few years I accepted and went to them, and because they paid my plane fare and hotel bill, I dutifully fulfilled my obligation to them, did as I was expected, sat at a table for two or three days signing autographs, signing books and making drawings for the fans. It was a lot of work. The only pleasure I had at those affairs was in meeting and talking to other cartoonists. Not that the fans were so awful as individuals, but cumulatively, after dealing with endless lines of them for hours, you can develop a sort of phobia towards them. And in my particular case, the fans were almost never attractive girls. If an 149

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attractive girl came to the table to get my autograph, it was invariably for her boyfriend, who was A Big Fan of My Work.‘And what about you? What do you think of my work,’ I would ask these girls. They’d shrug, say something like, ‘I don’t really like comics,’ or ‘It’s too weird for me …’ Comic fans … Once at one of these conventions I managed to strike up a conversation with a very cute, full-lipped young lady who was deeply involved in Star Trek fandom. I was asking her all about the inner workings of this particular sub culture, and she seemed to warm up to me. A young fellow came up and stood there listening to us talk for a bit, and then he intruded in our conversation and turned it to my work and begin to talk about some raunchy, sexually bizarre story I’d done, laughing and describing the action of the story in crude and vulgar language until the cute young miss was so offended that she turned and walked away. The young man then said, ‘Well, now that I got rid of her we can really talk!’ ‘b-but I liked her,’ I protested.‘Ah, she’s just a trekky! She’s not even into comics. Whataya want to talk to her for? Hey, didja read the Comics Journal interview with Jack Kirby,’ etc. etc. I hadda quit going to those comics conventions. I still get invited to them here in Europe, but I just don’t go. What’s the one thing about making comics, from the creator’s point of view, that the fans, the critics, the comics conventioneers, and the collectors don’t understand? 150

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They don’t understand – and of course, how could they? One comics critic, writing in the Comics Journal (a magazine about comics put out by Fantagraphics, in Seattle), named Cwiklik, once touched on this subject in an article, and that is, the amount of labour involved in drawing comics.To do a conscientious job takes so much time, dedication, concentration, and the financial return is such that you have to turn out a lot of comics in order to make a living, that very few artists can keep it up for very long. I maintain that it is a young man’s game (and now, to some extent, a young woman’s game). Few are the full-time professional comics artists who are middle-aged. No one who hasn’t drawn comics themselves can possibly know how much work is involved if you do everything yourself – if you write the story, lay out the pages, pencil, ink and letter them yourself. It’s an occupation for young, energetic, devoted, unbalanced nerds who have no other life. If you’re trying to draw comics for a living, you can’t do anything else much. The natural tendency, after ten or twenty years of drawing comics, is to slowly but surely slip into automatic, to turn into a hack … the drawing becomes mechanical, lifeless … It’s one of the occupational hazards … Most just fall by the wayside … There’s so little glamour, so little economic reward for all that work … you pass from youth to middle age, you got a family, you got house payments, you want to take a vacation once in a while … you find some more realistic way to make a living … 151

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People who don’t draw comics just don’t know how much work it is … All the comics artists I know who have tried making oil paintings or water colours, including myself, will tell you the same thing,‘This is so much more satisfying for the amount of work involved. Being a painter is so much more glamorous, the results of the labour are so much more immediate.’ This is also the reason why there are not that many really good comics. If you are into being an artist as an attention-getting device, it’s much easier to be a poet or a painter. And girls like poets and painters. Girls don’t relate to comics. Comics are a boy thing. And not a sexy boy thing like, say hot rod cars or sports. Comics are a wimpy boy thing, possibly, even a repulsive boy thing. When I was young, before I was famous, the fact that I was into comics and drew comics was a real hindrance to winning the favour of the girls. Any fool with an eight-foot canvas and some paint brushes had a better chance with girls than I did, no matter what sort of sloppy abstract smears he was making. Am I bitter? Oh, just a tad!

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Reference Materials

Selected Interviews With Robert Crumb ‘Robert Crumb: King Of The Underground Comics,’ Claude Chadwick [Marty Pahls], National Insider, Jan. 26, 1969 ‘America’s Best Loved Underground Cartoonist,’Vicki Hodgetts New York, June 22, 1970 ‘Crumb’s Comics Experience Fits in Underground,’ Johann Kubo, UMW Post, July 28, 1971 ‘The Reluctant Celebrity,’ Jerome Tarshis, San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, Feb. 27, 1972 ‘Who is this Crumb?’Thomas Maremaa, New York Times Magazine, Oct. 1, 1972 ‘Truckin’ Along with R. Crumb, Or Something,’ Gary Griffith, Cleveland Magazine, July, 1972 ‘What I Think Of All the Foolish Nonsense I’ve Been Involved In …’ Al Davoren, Promethean Enterprises, 1973–74 ‘What’s A Nice Counter-Culture Visionary Like Robert Crumb Doing On A Secluded Farm In California,’ Keith Green, Inside Comics, Spring, 1974 ‘Cartoonist R. Crumb’s Band Caught In A Time Warp,’ 153

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Laura Daltry, Rolling Stone, April 21, 1977 ‘Keep On Fuckin’: A Candid Conversation With R. Crumb,’ Clark Peterson, Screw, April 25, 1977 ‘R. Crumb,’ Peter Carlson, People, June 24th, 1984 ‘R. Crumb’s Savage Vision,’ Steve Chapple, Mother Jones, Nov./Dec., 1985 ‘Two Generations Of Weirdos,’ Michael Macrone, The Comics Journal, March, 1986 ‘The Shape Of Art,’ Gary Groth, The Comics Journal, Dec., 1986 ‘The Straight Dope From R. Crumb,’ Gary Groth, The Comics Journal, April, 1988 ‘Creme De La Crumb,’ Al Goldstein, Screw, Oct 17, 24, and Nov. 7, 1988 ‘The Life And High Times Of R. Crumb, Cartoonist,’ Milo Miles, The Boston Sunday Globe, July 21, 1991 ‘The Man Whose Muse Is Misery,’ Sharon Waxman, The Washington Post, May 25, 1992 ‘Monsieur Naturel: Crumb In France,’ Brendan Bernhard, L. A. Weekly, April 31, 1998 http:// www.laweekly.com/ink/98/23/art-bernhard.php A charming account by a writer who flew to France and weasled his way into Crumb’s house. ‘People: R. Crumb,’ Steve Burgess, Salon.com, 2 May, 2000 A short summary of the cartoonist’s career. The World According To Crumb, Jean-Pierre Mercier, National Center For Comics And Image, 1992,Trade Paperback, 64 pages ISBN 2 907848 03 8. The accompanying catalogue for an exhibit of Crumb’s 154

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works, in several cities, including Oxford. Following a brief biographical sketch, there is an extensive interview with Crumb. Later reprinted with changes as Que a peur de Robert Crumb? (Who’s Afraid of Robert Crumb?), Musee de la Bande Dessinee, 2000, Trade Paperback, 60 pages, 2 907848 22 4

Books About Crumb The Life And Times Of R. Crumb, Monte Beauchamp, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998, Trade Paperback, 182 pages ISBN 0 312 19571 0. Forty-five colleagues, admirers, and an ex-wife (from Terry Gilliam to Jim Jarmusch) contribute brief memories, testimonials, and appraisals of Crumb, many by admirers who don’t actually know him, originally published as an issue of Blab magazine. It’s interesting to compare Crumb’s memoirs of his early years in San Francisco in the introduction to Vol. 4 of The Complete Crumb Comics, with those of John Thompson in this book.

Articles About Crumb ‘The Filming Of Fritz the Cat,’ Mike Barrier, Funnyworld, Part One, issue Number 14, Spring 1972, pages 4–7, and 46, and Part Two, Fall, 1973, pages 26–29, 32–36, and 47

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Crumb Checklists And Bibliographies R. Crumb Checklist Of Work And Criticism, Don Fiene, Boatner Norton, 1981, Trade Paperback, 172 pages ISBN 0 9606654 1 2. Don Fiene’s essential, indispensable, massive and masterly bibliography, including lists of character names and appearances, and secondary material, has a cut off date of December, 1980. ‘The R. Crumb Checklist, II,’ Charles Boucher, CounterMedia, Winter 1991–92 A continuation of Don Fiene’s bibliography, including citations of album covers, exhibitions, t-shirts and sweatshirts, and writing pads, and key chains. Richly detailed but sadly out of date. Crumb-ology:The Works Of R. Crumb, 1981–1994, Carl Richter,Water Row Press, 1995, Hardback, 81 pages ISBN 0 93495 3244. This checklist covers Crumb’s work from 1981 to 1994.

Movies About Crumb Comic Book Confidential, Ron Mann, 1988, Home Vision Entertainment, 2002, DVD, 85 minutes, ISBN 0 7800 2563 6. Crumb is one of 22 comic book artists from the whole history of the medium interviewed for this documentary by Canadian director Ron Mann. Crumb, Terry Zwigoff, 1994, Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1998, DVD, 119 minutes, ISBN 0 7678 2150 5. The definitive, career-renewing film about the 156

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cartoonist, made by a long time friend. Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes, 2001, MGM Home Entertainment, 2002, DVD, 111 minutes, ISBN 0 7928 5096 3. The character of Seymour, played by Steve Buscemi, shares numerous traits with Crumb, among them a generally complaining attitude and an interest in old 78s.

Crumb On The Web Crumb Products: The official Crumb merchandising website, managed as of this writing by Jesse Crumb and Leland Horneman. The Crumb Museum: An unofficial Crumb site that also sells merchandise. The Crumb And Bukowski Parlor: An unofficial site with rare photos of Crumb with Bukowski. Crumb Update Page:An unofficial but useful page that announces new publications by and relating to Crumb. An R. Crumb Site: An unofficial site collecting images of R. Crumb’s extension album cover art, including the rare R. Crumb: The Musical! http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStr ip/Lobby/5158/cr umbcover.html R. Crumb Exhibition At Galerie Lambiek: A site with 157

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photographs of R. Crumb at a gallery opening in 1995. Another R. Crumb Page: Distinguished by a series of free electronic post cards, and a forum in which visitors ask obvious questions (‘Does Crumb have a foot fetish?’) that go unanswered. Uncle Carl’s R. Crumb Links: A fairly comprehensive collection of links to other Crumb sites, run by Crumb-ology compiler Carl Richter. Robert Crumb Articles And Interviews: A good, unofficial links site. Underground Comics: A catalog of underground comics for collectors, with cover illustrations and publication variants. Comic FAQs: Extensive survey of comic book history and art.

Other References The World Of Bruegel,Timothy Foote,Time-Life Books, 1968, Hardback, 192 pages The Inimitable George Cruikshank: An Exhibition Of Illustrated Books, Prints, Drawings And Manuscripts From The Collection Of David Borowitz, Richard A. Vogler, University of Louisville Libraries, 1968, Trade Paperback, 56 pages George Cruikshank: Printmaker: Selections From T he Richard Vogler Collection Richard Kubiak, The Santa 158

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Barbara Museum of Art, 1978, Trade Paperback, 64 pages James Gillray: The Art Of Caricature, Richard Godfrey, Tate Publishing, 2001, Trade Paperback, 240 pages, ISBN 1 85437 364 1 Punch: The Lively Youth Of A British Institution, 1841–1851, Richard D. Altick, Ohio State University Press, 1997, Hardback, 776 pages, ISBN 0 8142 0710 3 High & Low: Modern Culture And Popular Art, Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, The Museum of Modern Art, 1990,Trade Paperback, 460 pages ISBN 0 87070 354 4. The accompanying catalogue to an important and controversial show at MOMA in New York City. Confessions Saint Augustine, translated by R. S. PineCoffin, Penguin Classics, 1961 Paperback, 347 pages, ISBN 0 14 044 114 X A History Of Underground Comics, Mark James Estren, Ronin (published in the UK by Airlift Book Company), 1974, 1984, Trade Paperback, 320 pages, ISBN 0 914171 11 9. Heavily illustrated and highly detailed survey of the world of underground comics. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963–1975, Patrick Rosenkranz, Fantagraphics, 2003, Hardback, 292 pages, ISBN 1 56097 464 8. Updating and expansion of the author’s earlier book, Artsy Fartsy Funnies. ‘Understanding Classics Illustrated,’ Dan Malan, The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide (23rd Edition), Avon Books, 1993,Trade Paperback. A survey of the 159

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educational comic book publishing company. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry And Tales, edited by Patrick F. Quinn, The Library of America, 1984, Hardback, 1408 pages, ISBN 0 940450 18 6. There are surprising similarities between the emotions and views of the American writer and the cartoonist.

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