Crumb, R. 1943–

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Crumb, R. 1943–

(Crud, Crum the Bum, Crumarums, Robert Crumb, Crumbum, Crumski, Crunk, Crustt, R. Cum, Steve Ditcum, El Crummo, Grubb, Grunge, Krumb, Krumwitz, R. Scrum, Scum, Little Bobby Scumbag)

PERSONAL: Born August 30, 1943, in Philadelphia, PA; son of a career marine; married Dana Morgan, 1964 (divorced, 1977); married Aline Kominsky (a cartoonist), 1978; children: (first marriage) Jesse; (second marriage) Sophie. Education: Attended schools in Philadelphia, PA, and Milford, DE.

ADDRESSES: Home—Sauve, Languedoc, France. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Fantagraphics Books, 7563 Lake City Way N.E., Seattle, WA 98115-4218.

CAREER: American Greeting Card Co., Cleveland, OH, colorist, 1963–67; independent comic book author and illustrator, 1967–. Creator of Zap Comix, 1967, and Weirdo magazine. Illustrator of album covers for musicians, including Janis Joplin. Musician with groups, including R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders and Les Primitifs du Futur. Exhibitions: Crumb's art has been exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; and Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA.

WRITINGS:

CARTOONS; SELF-ILLUSTRATED

R. Crumb's 'The Yum Yum Book' (cartoon novel), c. 1963, Scrimshaw Press (San Francisco, CA), 1975, 2nd edition published as Big Yum Yum Book: The Story of Oggie and the Beanstalk, introduction by Harvey Pekar, SLG Books (Berkeley, CA), 1995.

Zap, Numbers 0-7, Print Mint (Berkeley, CA), 1967–74.

(Under pseudonyms Crumarums, R. Cum, and R. Scrum; with others) Snatch, three issues, Apex Novelty Co. (New York, NY), 1968.

Head Comix, Viking Press (New York, NY), 1968, published as R. Crumb's Head Comix, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 1970.

Fritz the Cat, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 1968, published as Fritz the Cat: Three Big Stories, 1969.

Despair, Print Mint (Berkeley, CA), 1969.

(With S. Clay Wilson) Jiz Comics, Apex Novelty Co. (New York, NY), 1970.

Uneeda, Print Mint (Berkeley, CA), 1970.

Uneeda Comix: The Artistic Comic!, Frank H. Fleer, 1970.

XYZ Comics, Krupp Comic Works, 1972.

Crumbland et autres pécadilles, Kesselring (Yverdon, France), 1975.

R. Crumb's Carloads O'Comics: An Anthology of Choice Strips and Stories, 1968 to 1976—and Including a Brand-New Fourteen-Page Story, introduction by Harvey Kurtzman, Bélier Press (New York, NY), 1976.

The Complete Fritz the Cat, Bélier Press (New York, NY), 1978.

R. Crumb Sketchbook: November 1974 to January 1978, Zweitausendeins (Frankfurt, Germany), 1978.

Sketchbook 1966–67, Zweitausendeins (Frankfurt, Germany), 1978, Blue Angel Press (Charlottesville, VA), 1981.

R. Crumb Comics: The Story o' My Life People … Ya Gotta Love Em, I'm Grateful! I'm Grateful!, Gingko Press (Corte Madera, CA), 1992.

R. Crumb Draws the Blues, Fantagraphics Books (Seattle, WA), 1993.

(With David Zane Mairowitz) Kafka for Beginners, Icon Books (Cambridge, MA), published as Introducing Kafka, Kitchen Sink Press (Northampton, MA), 1994.

Crumb-ology: The Works of R. Crumb, 1981–1994, compiled by Carl Richter, Water Row Press (Sudbury, MA), 1995.

R. Crumb's America, Last Gasp (San Francisco, CA), 1995.

The Book of Mr. Natural, Fantagraphics (Seattle, WA), 1996.

The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, edited and designed by Peter Poplaski, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1997.

Odds & Ends, Bloomsbury Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Severin Heinisch) Die vielen Gesichter des Robert Crumb/Severin Heinisch, Karikaturmuseum (St. Pölten, Germany), 2002.

Also author and illustrator of Complete Crumb, Volumes 1-17, Fantagraphics Books (Seattle, WA); Crumb Family Comics, Last Gasp; and Motor City Comics. Contributor, Flock of Dreamers, edited by Sasa Rakezic and Bob Kathman, Kitchen Sink, 1997.

SELF-ILLUSTRATED VISUAL ART

R. Crumb Sketchbook, Volumes 1-9, Fantagraphics Books, c. 1992–2002

Waiting for Food, 1995.

Waiting for Food 2: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings by R. Crumb, Last Gasp (San Francisco, CA), 2000.

Waiting for Food, Number Three: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings of R. Crumb, Drawn and Quarterly (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 2003.

Gotta Have 'Em: Portraits of Women, Greybull Press (Los Angeles, CA), 2003.

Also author and illustrator of Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me: Crumb Letters, 1958–1977, Fantagraphics Books.

ILLUSTRATOR:

Charles Bukowski, There's No Business, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1984.

Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1985.

Harvey Pekar, American Splendor Presents Bob & Harv's Comics, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 1996.

Brian Robertson, editor, Little Blues Book, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 1996.

Charles Bukowski, The Captain Is out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1998.

(With Ken Crumb and R. Weaver) Texas Crude: The How-To on Talkin' Texan, Last Gasp (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

Also illustrator of Bring Me Your Love, by Charles Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press. Contributor of illustrations to Bijou Funnies No. 3, Bijou Publishing Empire, 1969; and Hydrogen Bomb and Biochemical Warfare Funnies, Rip Off Press, 1970; and Our Movie Year: American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar, Ballantine Books, 2004. Contributor to comic books, magazines, and newspapers, including Motor City Comics, Home Grown Funnies, Help!, Yarrowstalk, East Village Other, Big Ass, Cavalier, Us, Playboy, and Los Angeles Free Press, under various pseudonyms, including Crumarums, Crumbum, Crumski, Crud, Crum the Bum, Crunk, Crustt, R. Cum, Steve Ditcum, El Crummo, Grubb, Grunge, Krumb, Krumwitz, Scum, Little Bobby Scumbag, and R. Scrum.

OTHER

(With D.K. Holm) R. Crumb: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2004.

(And illustrator) The R. Crumb Handbook (autobiography), MQ Publications (London, England), 2005.

Contributor of lyrics for record albums, including R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders, Blue Goose, 1974, The Cheap Suit Serenaders Party Record, Red Goose, 1978, and Singing in the Bathtub, 1993.

ADAPTATIONS: Fritz the Cat was made into an animated film in 1972 by director-animator Ralph Bakshi and produced by Steve Krantz; The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, 1974, directed by Robert Taylor, is a sequel animated film based on Crumb's character; a theatrical production based on Crumb's work was produced at Duke University, Durham, NC, 1990.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Adapting and illustrating the Book of Genesis, publication due in 2007.

SIDELIGHTS: R. Crumb "might just be the nation's best-known cartoonist," according to Gordon Flagg in Booklist. A resolutely counter-cultural cartoonist and writer, Crumb takes a jaundiced view of America, popular trends, sexual mores, and—frequently—himself. As Steve Burgess put it on the Salon.com Web site, "Crumb cartoons are typically marked by a painful, neurotic honesty…. But Crumb's saving grace is Crumb himself. There is virtually no criticism you can make of him that he hasn't already made—his most merciless gaze is usually directed into the mirror. Having begun his career in earnest during the drug-fueled years of the late 1960s, Crumb has outlasted obscenity charges and a host of imitators to remain the founding father of underground comics."

Crumb started as a cartoonist at the age of six, drawing comic books with his older brother Charles. Since then he has produced some of the most controversial works in the history of comic-book art, either condemned as degrading or hailed as works of genius, depending upon the taste of the critic reviewing his work. Noted for ridiculing the inhibitions and priorities of middle-class America, Crumb's cartoons are often sexually explicit and graphic in their depiction of violence. In the early 1970s his Zap Comix No. 4 and his "Snatch" series were the subject of obscenity trials and were removed from circulation on both the East and West coasts. Also, some feminists thought Crumb's cartoons demeaned and objectified women, and his work also offended members of minority races with its stereotypical depictions of them; Crumb's stated intention, though, was to satirize sexism and racism, both of which he found abhorrent. According to editor Susan Goodrick in The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, "the violence and sexual fantasies in his work are not pornography; they are an attack on the 'straight' culture's dictum that sex and anger are to be kept in tight rein at all costs." Cartoonist Foolbert Sturgeon, quoted in Mark James Estren's A History of Underground Comics, expressed a view similar to Goodrick's, writing: "Crumb is important as an artist who makes current pressures and feelings expressible…. That's bound to be important—probably more important really than … the hotshot respectable novelists as an influence." New York Times Magazine contributor Thomas Maremaa remarked in R. Crumb: Conversations, "Whatever the verdict, Crumb's work has nevertheless established him as the most important underground cartoonist—and, by extension, social satirist—in America today."

Settling in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in 1966, then considered the center of the "hippie" movement in America, Crumb found publication easily in the underground newspapers flourishing in the area. His early works, including the "Zap Comix" series, published beginning in 1967, have been credited with rejuvenating "the American comic avant-garde by returning the art to its roots," according to Maremaa. "Original American comic strips … were daring and innovative, the 'head' comics of their day. In these comics, social satire and even vulgarity were accepted as givens; cartoonists reveled in the outrageous." Sparing no feelings, Crumb revived and enervated the genre, and his creations "have become recognized as archetypal American grotesques," Maremaa observed. In the process, "Crumb's work has had a revolutionary effect on the comic-book industry as a whole by inspiring 'straight' comics to become more relevant."

Although many Crumb characters, such as Angelfood McSpade, a super sex symbol who represents the hidden desires of white civilization, and Whiteman, a stereotypical uptight bourgeois businessman, are parodies of repressed middle-class thinking and hang-ups, the cartoonist's barbs in his 1960s and early 1970s work were not limited to the establishment. Crumb also targeted the absurdities of the counterculture he represented. Among Crumb's most celebrated characters are Mr. Natural, a capitalistic guru, and his bumbling disciple, Flakey Foont. Loosely based on Master Subramuniya of San Francisco's Himalayan Academy, by whom Crumb believed many of his friends were being duped, Mr. Natural is essentially a con man. "A horny old man with a bald head and long flowing whiskers," Mr. Natural, explained Arthur Asa Berger in his book The Comic-Stripped American, "is a fake and his disciple Flakey is a fool." In fact, Berger continued, "Mr. Natural seems to have contempt for Flakey and all that he stands for." And Foont is characterized as a hopelessly repressed city dweller seeking easy solutions to the world's most complex problems. Although he is repeatedly used and abused by Mr. Natural, Foont is never disillusioned.

In 1968 Crumb became the first underground cartoonist to have his work published in what the hippie counterculture referred to as the "straight" publishing world. A collection of the cartoonist's early comic strips plus an original story, "Fritz the Cat," were brought out in book form as Head Comix by the Viking Press. In publishing Head Comix Viking exercised only moderate censorship, but after contracting Crumb for a second book based on his Fritz the Cat character, the publishing company "became so uptight about some mild sex scenes in the book that they rejected it," related Estren in his A History of Underground Comics. Even so, Fritz the Cat was picked up and published by Ballantine Books. "Unfortunately, the Crumb stories for the Ballantine book weren't up to his usual work," Estren wrote, adding also that "R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat had poorer writing and much poorer art than almost anything else produced by Crumb." Nonetheless, the book, with its swinging, feline hero based on the cartoonist's childhood pets, remains one of Crumb's best-known and most popular creations.

Much of the credit for the notoriety and popularity of Crumb's "hep-cat" Fritz belongs to director-animator Ralph Bakshi and producer Steve Krantz, who brought the character to life in the movie Fritz the Cat, the first feature-length, X-rated animated cartoon in the history of motion pictures. The film, which was critically acclaimed and financially successful, was produced after Warner Brothers bought the rights to make movies based on the Crumb character. However, when the movie was completed, Crumb was not pleased with the finished product. "They put words into his [Fritz's] mouth that I never would have had him say," Crumb told Maremaa. "It was not my movie," he insisted. "I had nothing to do with it. They just used a couple of my stories. But a lot of people seem to think I was involved. That bothers me." Shortly after the film's national release in 1972, Crumb issued a statement denying any connection with the movie, and within three months he won a legal battle to have his name removed from the list of credits. "For his part," wrote Maremaa, "Bakshi was quoted as saying: 'I did it out of my love for animation, my love for Robert…. It's tough working with an idol. You touch a line of his stuff and it hurts a lot of people."

In spite of Crumb's personal disappointment with Fritz the Cat the fact that the movie was made at all was clearly an indication of the cartoonist's growing influence on the so-called "straight" media. Beginning with the earliest "Zap Comix," Crumb's work has had a pervasive impact on changing American mores. His revival, in the "Zap" series, of an old blues phrase from the 1930s, "Keep on truckin'," accompanied by a "series of screwball cartoon characters with tiny heads, funky old clothes and huge clodhoppers, strutting on down the street," observed Maremaa, "has become as ingrained in the collective American psyche as 'Kilroy was here.' Needless to say, it is more than a way of walking. For the generation that came of age in the middle sixties, it is a ritual affirmation, a slogan of goodwill." In Maremaa's words, "Crumb brought 'trash' art into the cultural mainstream and made it respectable."

Crumb's profile became lower as the 1970s went on. He seemed to rebel against his own success, ceasing to draw popular characters such as Fritz, whom he depicted as killed with an ice pick, and Mr. Natural. He also refused assignments for high-profile magazines, and from the Rolling Stones, who wanted him to design an album cover. He owed back taxes to the U.S. government, and he was involved in several legal actions as both defendant—on obscenity charges—and plaintiff, unsuccessfully seeking compensation for unauthorized reproductions of his "Keep on truckin'" image. Eventually, with help from his second wife, Aline Kominsky, he settled his income tax problems and began rebuilding his career, illustrating books, starting the magazine Weirdo, and exhibiting his artwork. As Crumb matured, so did his work. The ribald images of large-breasted women and graphic depictions of sexual acts disappeared over the years. He began concentrating more on social affairs, such as the materialism that grew during the 1970s and into the 1980s." His new characters, for instance, included the yuppie striver Mode O'Day. Nevertheless, to quote Burgess, the cartoonist continued his "commitment to brutal honesty," both about his society and about himself. Burgess found this "the most consistently admirable aspect of [Crumb's] work.

In the 1990s Crumb received new attention as the subject of the documentary film Crumb, directed by Terry Zwigoff. The film deals not only with Crumb's controversial art but with his highly dysfunctional family—Crumb describes his father as sadistic and his mother as drug-addicted. One of his brothers committed suicide shortly after the film was finished, another is a painter and sometime beggar who seeks solace by lying on a bed of nails. Filming took six years, and around the time it was completed Crumb moved with his wife and daughter to a small town in the south of France, having traded six of his sketchbooks for a home there. France, in part, inspired his Waiting for Food, collections of drawings he made on placemats in restaurants. In France, he explained in the preface to the second volume, "dinners go on for hours." The drawings, remarked David Frankel in Artforum International, encompass both "the pleasant and the paranoid," often representing other restaurant patrons, from a solitary diner who appears "slightly lonely, but serene" to an "angry-looking misfit" who claims to be "unfit for normal social life." Other Crumb works, including career-spanning compilations, have continued to appear. Of one, Odds & Ends, which showcases much of Crumb's lesser-known work, Library Journal contributor Vincent Au wrote: "This is a bizarre collection … that will offend some but delight others." The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book led Whole Earth reviewer Phil Frank to call Crumb "the best observer of our American social scene."

Crumb has certainly never courted fame or fortune, preferring to work quietly at his home in France rather than touring big cities with art exhibits. He has a collection of more than five thousand old phonograph records from the 1920s and 1930s, and he has credited these musical compositions for inspiring some of his cartoons. Concerned about how he and his family were depicted in the film Crumb, he released The R. Crumb Handbook, in which comics blend with personal observations to create an autobiography. Booklist contributor Ray Olson called the title "an ideal introduction to the influential cartoonist." According to Lucy Fisher in Time International, Crumb "seems to be running through multiple lives, as a wickedly dark commentator on America." In a Spectator review of The R. Crumb Handbook, Peter Blegvad concluded that, more than four decades after penning his first published work, Crumb is still "an engaging raconteur and prophet of doom. We're all just chopped liver!"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Beauchamp, Monte, The Life and Times of R. Crumb: Comments from Contemporaries, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1998.

Berger, Arthur Asa, The Comic-Stripped American, Walker & Company (New York, NY), 1973.

Crumb, R., The R. Crumb Handbook, MQ Publications (London, England), 2005.

Estren, Mark James, A History of Underground Comics, revised edition, Ronin (Berkeley, CA), 1987.

Fiene, Donald M., R. Crumb Checklist of Work and Criticism: With a Biographical Supplement and a Full Set of Indexes, Boatner Norton Press (Cambridge, MA), 1981.

Goodrick, Susan, and Don Donahue, editors, The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, Links Books (New York, NY), 1974.

Holm, D.K., R. Crumb: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MI), 2004.

Newsmakers 1995, Issue 4, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Artforum International, January, 2001, David Frankel, reviews of Waiting for Food and Waiting for Food 2: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings by R. Crumb, p. 131.

Booklist, January 1, 1998, Gordon Flagg, review of The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, p. 760; October 15, 2001, Gordon Flagg, review of The Complete Crumb, Volume 15: Featuring Mode O'Day and Her Pals, p. 367; August, 2002, Gordon Flagg, review of The Complete Crumb, Volume 16: The Mid-1980s, p. 1907; May 1, 2005, Ray Olson, review of The R. Crumb Handbook, p. 1558; August, 2005, Ray Olson, review of The Complete Crumb, Volume 17: The Late 1980s, p. 2011.

Commonweal, July 12, 2002, Richard Alleva, "Comic Erudition," p. 18.

Entertainment Weekly, June 2, 1995, Frank Lovece, "R. Crumb's Family Circus," p. 34; November 28, 1997, Margot Mifflin, review of The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, p. 78.

Interview, November, 2000, Neville Wakefield, "R. Crumb," p. 32.

Library Journal, May 1, 2001, Vincent Au, review of Odds & Ends, p. 78.

Nation, May 22, 1995, Stuart Klawans, review of film Crumb, p. 733.

New Statesman, March 21, 2005, Peter Poplaski, "Pen and Ink Revolutionary," p. 40.

New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1972, Thomas Maremaa, "Who Is This Crumb?"

Print, May-June, 1998, Terry LaBan, review of The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, p. 40.

Publishers Weekly, August 30, 2004, "Norton Signs R. Crumb Graphic Nonfiction," p. 10; April 4, 2005, review of The R. Crumb Handbook, p. 45; April 25, 2005, Calvin Reid and Laurel Maury, "R. Crumb Keeps on Truckin'," p. 20.

Spectator, April 9, 2005, Peter Blegvad, review of The R. Crumb Handbook, p. 39; April 16, 2005, Andrew Lambirth, "Hero of the Counter-Culture," p. 49.

Time International (Europe edition), April 11, 2005, Lucy Fisher, "Coolest Cat of Them All," p. 63.

Whole Earth, fall, 1995, Wade Fox, review of Introducing Kafka, p. 40; spring, 1998, Phil Frank, review of The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, p. 30.