Crumb, Robert (1943—)

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Crumb, Robert (1943—)

Robert Crumb is the most famous and well respected of all underground comic artists, and the first underground artist to be accepted into the mainstream of popular American culture. His comics are notable for explicit, detailed, and unflattering self-confessions, in which strange sexual fantasies abound. When not writing about himself, he has targeted the American consumer-culture establishment, but also anti-establishment hippies and dropouts as subjects for his satire. Crumb's art veers from gritty, grubby realism to extremes of Expressionism and psychedelia. As both an artist and a writer, Crumb is a true original. Relentlessly unrestrained and impulsive, his work reflects few influences other than the funny animal comics of Carl Barks and Walt Kelley, and the twisted, deformed monster-people of Mad artist Basil Wolverton.

The Philadelphia-born Crumb lived his childhood in many different places, including Iowa and California. Seeking refuge from an alienated childhood and adolescence, he began drawing comics with his brothers Charles and Max. As a young adult he lived in Cleveland, Chicago, and New York before moving to San Francisco in 1967, the year he began his rise to prominence. He had worked for a greeting card company until he was able to produce comic books full time, and his first strips appeared in underground newspapers such asNew York's East Village Other before the first issues of his Zap comic book were published in 1967. Zap introduced many of Crumb's most popular characters, as well as the unforgettable "Keep On Truckin"' logo, and made a tremendous impact on the underground comics scene. In 1970, particularly dazzling examples of his bizarre and imaginative art appeared—with little in the way of story—in the excellent XYZ Comics (1970).

Among Crumb's most notable characters are Mr. Natural, a sort of sham guru who lives like a hedonist and prefers to tease, and occasionally exploit, his devotees rather than enlighten them, and his occasional disciple, Flakey Foont, emblematic of the suburban nebbish fraught with doubts and hang-ups. Others include Angelfood McSpade, a simple African girl exploited by greedy and lecherous white Americans, diminutive sex-fiend Mister Snoid, and Whiteman (a big-city businessman, proudly patriotic and moralistic yet inwardly repressed and obsessed with sex). But Crumb's most famous character is Fritz the Cat, who first appeared in R. Crumb's Comics and Stories (1969). Fritz, a disillusioned college student looking for freedom, knowledge, and counterculture kicks, became popular enough to star in the 1972 animated movie Fritz The Cat, directed by Ralph Bakshi, which became the first cartoon ever to require an X-rating. While the movie proved a huge success with the youth audience, Crumb hated the film and retaliated in his next comic book by killing Fritz with an ice pick through the forehead.

By the late 1990s, Crumb's comic-book work had been seen in a host of publications over the course of three decades. In the early days he was featured in, among other publications, Yellow Dog, Home Grown Funnies, Mr. Natural, Uneeda Comix, and Big Ass. In the 1980s, he was published in Weirdo and Hup. In addition to his comic-book work, he became well known for his bright, intense cover for the Cheap Thrills album issued by Janis Joplin's Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1968. Though much of Robert Crumb's best-loved work was produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he reached a peak of widespread fame in the mid-1990s with the successful release of filmmaker Terry Zwigoff's mesmerizing documentary, Crumb (1995), which interspersed shots of Crumb's works between frank interviews with the artist and his family, and comments from media and culture critics. Crumb won the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was widely praised by critics. The film's impact is twofold: viewers are stunned by Crumb's genius, while being both moved and disturbed by the images of an unfortunate and dysfunctional family. The film is honest in acknowledging controversial aspects of the artist's work, with critics on-camera pointing out the racist caricatures, perverse lust, and, above all, the overt misogyny that runs through much of Crumb's oeuvre. Some of those images have depicted scantily clad buxom women with bird heads, animal heads, or no heads at all.

Despite the controversy, however, the 1980s and 1990s brought a multitude of high quality Crumb compilations and reprints, including coffee-table books, sketchbooks, and complete comics and stories from the 1960s to the present. Meanwhile, his continuing output has included the illustration of short stories by Kafka and a book on early blues music. Profiles of Crumb have appeared in Newsweek and People magazines, and on BBC-TV, while his art has been featured at New York's Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, as well as in numerous gallery shows in the United States, Europe, and Japan. His comic characters have appeared on mugs, T-shirts, patches, stickers, and home paraphernalia.

A fan of 1920s blues and string band music, Crumb started the Cheap Suit Serenaders band in the 1970s, with himself playing banjo, and recorded three albums. Remarkable in his personality as well as his work, the shy Crumb prefers to dress, not like a bearded longhair in the style of most male underground artists, but like a man-on-the-street from the 1950s, complete with suit, necktie, and short-brimmed hat. In 1993, he left California to settle in southern France with his wife and daughter.

—Dave Goldweber