The cartoonist who had no fear Robert Crumb walked the line between art and trash

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.

In his early work, Crumb lifted the cute look of early 20th-century cartoons from the Fleischer Brothers, honed from a job at a greetings card company, and gave them an LSD-fuelled twist. One story depicts a spate of mysterious meatball attacks that are thrown from off-camera and change the personalities of their victims. (“Respected men in high places were getting hit,” it reads. “Bertrand Russell got hit.”) It escalates into a full-on downpour as meatballs rain over Los Angeles. Another, “Joe Blow”, mimics the style of a homely Fifties sitcom until its nuclear family descends into an incestual orgy.

Yet Crumb also embraced terrible racist caricatures from the Thirties and Forties. In the 1994 documentary, the journalist Deirdre English tears apart one of Crumb’s strips, the excruciatingly titled “Ooga-Booga”, calling it “a mockery of black people, a vomiting-up of Crumb’s own racism, his own deepest hostilities and fears”. Crumb’s insistence on playing with racist imagery has lost him friends: fellow cartoonist Art Spiegelman stopped speaking to him after he drew a story called “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America”. “When it comes into my head, I think ‘Oh I gotta do it’,” Crumb said in 2019. “I’m gonna get hell for it, but I know I have to do it.”

The generous interpretation of these strips is that he is simply bringing out into the open stereotypes that are already simmering in the cultural soup. “I use the old-time comic stereotypes to reveal myself to myself,” he wrote in the introduction to one of his art books. “I don’t believe Crumb’s a racist for one second,” says Steve Marchant, learning coordinator at the Cartoon Museum in London. “You can compare the golliwog-style drawings in some of his comics to the beautiful illustrated trading cards he did about 20 years ago about blues legends of America… really nice, sensitive cartoon portraits of all of his heroes.”

Crumb was also criticised for his fetishistic depictions of sexual violence. Whether female cartoonists sided with him (Lynda Barry was one of his main supporters) or against him (Trina Robbins was outspokenly anti-Crumb), they were undeniably influenced by his autobiographical narratives. Here, again, I sense the overwhelming alienness of the Sixties: a lot of the media that was considered edgy or liberating back then would now be dismissed as sexist. Plus Crumb’s art is not without self-criticism: in 1992, he drew “The R. Crumb Dartboard”, a caricature of himself as a predatory goon for his angry female readers to cut out and assail with darts. (“Have at me, girls!”) “He’s never cast himself in a glamorous light, both in the way that he draws himself and in the things that in his stories you see him doing or thinking about doing,” says Marchant. “He’s always his own worst critic.”

“I think it is the role of cartoonists across the spectrum to lower the tone,” says political cartoonist Martin Rowson. His business is satire, to hurl rocks at the establishment. Crumb, he suggests, occupied a similar niche initially, as his subversive comics snuck into beatnik hangouts and children’s bedrooms. “We are not artists. We are something else.” He points out that the pioneering political cartoonists of the 18th century, such as James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, also drew pornography. Apart from a “really boring” and conventional comic adaptation of the Book of Genesis, Rowson says, “I can’t think of a single Crumb image I’ve seen which has bored me. It’s disturbed me, it’s amazed me, it’s delighted me, but it’s never bored me.” By contrast, he says, “an awful lot of contemporary comics are just badly drawn people standing talking to each other”.

Everywhere you look in modern comics, Crumb’s inky fingerprints are visible. Take the monochrome comics journalism of Joe Sacco, which oozes Crumb-like confessional. More recent small-press comics and graphic novels have used the biographical elements and shock tactics Crumb pioneered to talk about atrocities, trauma and sexual assault in a far more earnest, 21st-century way. “A form that is built around stereotypes… has become one of the main mediums by which the world’s most disenfranchised populations have their stories documented and recorded,” says Dominic Davies, senior lecturer at City, University of London. We’re a long way from “Ooga-Booga“. You can see why even Crumb might be tempted to start self-censoring: a New York Times interviewer in 2022 proposed that he is now “gazing less directly at a bigoted, violent world and instead examining his distance from it”.

“It’s always possible to do everything,” says Rowson; “it’s a question of whether it gets published. And even in the last five to 10 years, what can and cannot get published has shifted.” There are still plenty of weirdos making depraved small-press comics today, such as James Unsworth’s venereal ninja turtle orgies and Maia Matches’s BDSM-loving character “Bitch“. Then there is a more well-known British successor: Viz. From the Fat Slags to more up-to-date parodies (a turtleneck-wearing forager called Foodie Bollocks, a Right-wing conspiracy nut called The Male Online), the comic is “very much channelling” the spirit of Crumb, Marchant says.

Crumb’s sensibility “has now leached into the water supply, like the acid they were meant to have thrown into the reservoirs in the Sixties,” says Rowson. “It’s got there, and it’s the sea through which we swim.” His work has a dark honesty, revealing a side of human nature that tends to go unexamined in the name of good manners. And comics, with their ability to elicit shock and laughter at the same time, are the perfect medium to express it. Thirty years on from his documentary, Crumb’s story must be revisited: it is a convincing case that, now more than ever, we need mavericks who scorn civility and create without fear.

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James Riding is a senior reporter at Inside Housing

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