Crumb scorned civility. Brill/ullstein bild/Getty Images
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How gleefully puerile, even by enlightened French standards, to reach the top of Paris’s grandest museum of modern art and be greeted by Big Ass Comics (“Weird Sex Fantasies with the Behind in Mind”). The Pompidou Centre is currently running an excellent exhibition on modern comics, which selects as its starting point the countercultural explosion of the Sixties. It shows how the glut of adult-oriented graphic novels available today dates back to that great decade-long loosening up, when scrappy underground artists began to tell absurd, erotic and deeply personal stories using a medium previously reserved almost exclusively for children.
The leader of this movement in the United States was Robert Crumb, a fogeyish eccentric whose explicit visions lit up hippy San Francisco. In addition to his big asses, visitors to the Pompidou will see Crumb’s early hit Zap Comix, with its cover promising “gags, jokes, kozmic trooths”, and Dirty Laundry Comics, a Seventies collaboration where Crumb and his late wife Aline depict themselves nude while a lady in the background yells “Get dressed!”.
Raised by a sadistic father and amphetamine-addicted mother, Crumb’s cartoons were both a means of escape and a vital outlet for the toxicity of his Philadelphia childhood. His elder brother, Charles, became a tormented recluse who lived with his mother and bathed once every six weeks, while his younger brother, Maxon, admitted to a history of molesting women. That Crumb transcended such horrors is a miracle.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, his sordid obsessions, Crumb became the most unlikely ladies’ man since Philip Larkin. With his big, eye-warping glasses, moustache, fedora, nasal whinge and jutting Adam’s apple, Crumb resembled at once a grandfather and a teenage boy. He prowled the epicentre of the hippy movement but preferred blues to psychedelic music, and eschewed long hair and bell-bottoms for the look of an insurance salesman. “I have a compulsion to reveal the truth about myself, for better or for worse,” he told the Louisiana Literature Festival in 2019. “Maybe it’s like a guy who exposes himself in public.”
At what point did this underground icon — described by the critic Robert Hughes as “a kind of American Hogarth” — emerge into the mainstream? Perhaps it was 2009, when Harold Bloom reviewed his graphic novel adaptation of the Book of Genesis in the New York Review of Books? Or else 2018, when a drawing of his character Fritz the Cat sold at auction for $717,000?
In fact, the cartoonist’s apotheosis came in 1994, with the release of Crumb. This remarkable documentary shows why all his lurid depravity matters: Crumb is an artist who draws utterly without fear, putting his darkest fantasies and prejudices on the page. His productions tread the line between art and porn, art and trash, from depictions of industrialisation and louche spiritual gurus to fantasies about nuns who want to chop off his penis. In today’s media landscape, when so much time is devoted to second-guessing how something will be received before it has even taken shape, it is almost impossible to imagine someone making art as provocative and uninhibited as Crumb’s. In one strip from Zap Comix titled “You may not think it’s funny, but I’ve got a morbid sense of humour”, a bespectacled artist resembling Crumb guffaws and sketches a woman as she is crushed by a bus.
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Subscribenice piece, thank you, as it helps more people learn of Crumb. But let’s be wary about too much publicity … he’s got to remain our underground dirty secret.
Great essay.
“it is a convincing case that, now more than ever, we need mavericks who scorn civility and create without fear.”
Amen.
brilliant essay.
The late 60’s / early 70’s are the pinnacle of expressive freedom and humor. I know, I was there. I even remember it.
Crumb and NatLampCo were utterly irreverent: They skewered everyone equally, without regard to race, color or creed. What glorious freedom!
Indeed. The youthful equivalent was the student Rag Mag. Do they even still exist, in our more censorious times?
Yes, Fritz the Cat and “Heading for Trouble” (NatLamp) made college bearable. I even went to see Radio Dinner at the Village Gate. Good times!
Needs illustrations.
Perhaps we’re meant to draw our own conclusions?
>The cartoonist who had no fear Robert Crumb walked the line between art and trash
When I read the headline, I thought Crumb had died. Guess not. Who’s your headline writer?
I wonder if the Pompidou Centre’s exhibition contains work by Jack T Chick?
The most successful underground artist ever?
But not PC!
I have a shoe box full of Chick comics – I live in the American South and find them quite often, sometimes in unusual places like the back booth of a local bar. They are surreal in nature and, yes, an acquired taste.
I am a fan of Chick’s art – if not his worldview. (My small collection of Chick tracts will not, I fear, prevent me from burning in the Lake of Fire come Judgement Day!)
Druids in the recording studio, inserting pagan spells into pop music through the mixing desk. Unforgettable stuff.
Check out our very own Edward Barker RIP
Just the cartoon version of disgust-maven director John Waters. Be sure to wash your hands with soap after picking up one of his comics.
Way back in the early ’90s the art department of a nearby university hosted a showing of Crumb’s work and promised a public Q&A with the man himself. I had been a fan since my high school days in the late 60s and early 70s so I drove over to witness this event. Walking through the exhibit I was disappointed to see that only cartoons of a sexual nature on display. Obviously, the curator wanted to stir up a controversy. Where was Flakey Foont? Shuman the Human? And of course Mr Natural was absent as well.
At the interview, people would ask Crumb a question and he would start to answer only to be interrupted by the curator who would provide a long and often irrelevant answer. Very annoying and Crumb seemed resigned to his fate.
Afterwards Crumb sat at a table and autographed items purchased at the gift shop. I walked up, handed him my treasured copy of Zap No. 1 and said: “I mowed lawns to make the money and had to ride my bicycle to another town which had a head shop to buy this. Thanks for all the laughs.” He looked up, somewhat startled, and said: “Most people just talk about the artwork, few people mention the humor.” He actually smiled and signed “R. Crumb ’91” on the cover. As I thanked him I said, “And ‘Cheap Thrills’ is one of my favorite album covers. Take care, man.” He smiled again and the next customer stepped up.
Incest of Lot ,bestiality with Fritz, child porn with Mr Natural ::
yes very
radical leftist underground freedom !!
I loved Crumb and read everything I could find, along with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Wonder Warthog. I always assumed they were satire, I knew nothing of the controversy swirling around him. But living in Farnborough in the 80s I suppose I wouldn’t. If I did muse on the possible offence it might cause, I always assumed that the offended had suffered a sense of humour faliure. Or were just a bit dim. Looking around at the current state of social discourse, I’ve not substantially changed my opinion. But I’m just a grumpy old Gen Xer, so what do I know?