Robert Crumb, or the less formal “R Crumb” (because why not abbreviate a name that already sounds like a cartoon character?), is an icon of modern cartooning and undoubtedly one of the quirkiest personalities you’ll encounter. Dan Nadel’s biography of him is filled with enough details to make even a family tree look simple.
Initially, Crumb became known in mainstream culture for his eye-catching artwork on the *Cheap Thrills* album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin, along with those lanky, stoned figures flaunting the famous “Keep on Truckin’” slogan that graced countless dorm-room walls and truck mudflaps. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg—he was the mastermind behind underground comics in the Sixties and Seventies and the creative force behind *Zap Comix*. Forget calling your local comic shop; to understand underground culture, you had to hang out with Crumb.
Crumb gifted the world a trippy pantheon of absurdist characters—all fueled by a hearty dose of LSD and a flair for the bizarre—complete with his signature hatching style. Characters like Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat burst forth from his imaginative mind, all somehow channeling the collectivized neuroses of a man drawn like a spaghetti noodle. Through it all, his most haunting creation remains the lanky figure of R Crumb himself, a character steeped in bitterness, insecurity, and a sunken-cheeked existential dread that would make even Kafka weep.
Crumb’s education came from the likes of Harvey Kurtzman, the cold-hearted genius of *Mad*, and Carl Barks, known for his whimsical Donald Duck cartoons that were to Crumb “the good duck artist.” For the record, nobody learned more from Crumb than the next generation of cartoonists. As Art Spiegelman, creator of *Maus*, once noted, “Every cartoonist has to pass through Crumb.” You may as well slap a metaphorical ‘bathroom pass’ on it because, like a rite of passage, you’ve got to encounter him to figure out what your own voice might be. Cheerful, isn’t it?
Though Crumb was a poster child for Sixties counterculture, his artistry leans heavily on nostalgia for a bygone era. His obsession with collecting 78 rpm shellac records almost feels like a childhood hobby, if your childhood involved rummaging through basements looking for dusty relics. While his politics might seem to lean anticorporate, his true focus remained the unrelenting exploration of his own inner world overshadowed by a complex relationship with sanity.
Born in 1943 into a family that could give Shakespeare a run for his money in terms of domestic drama, Crumb was raised in a lower-middle-class environment in Philadelphia. His parents’ marriage resembled an operatic tragedy replete with anger, addiction, and the occasional hint of incest. His older brother, a drawing buddy in their youth, succumbed to mental health issues and drug abuse—an exit that Crumb successfully dodged, crafting his complexities into the fuel for his cartooning career. Talk about a more tortured protagonist!
Let’s face it—Crumb is what today’s kids would label as #problematic. His character Angelfood McSpade is a hyper-eroticized caricature that has a sense of racially ambiguous charm, and let’s not even get started on the murky sexual politics in his early comics, where rape was often depicted for laughs, leaving everyone wondering where the comedy went wrong. Crumb and Nadel defend his creative choices by arguing that he merely held up a mirror to reflect societal issues, a perspective that sounds like a college kid justifying their 2 am decisions as “artistic exploration.”
In a world that’s grown increasingly sensitive, Crumb managed to tour the land of sexual adventures without landing himself in jail. His first marriage, which began with a high-school romance, crumbled away—much like his relationship with his son. But hey, he found a new romantic and professional partnership with Aline Kominsky, which was described as “mostly happy”—an outcome that can only be appreciated in the tumultuous realm of Crumb’s lifestyle.
Fast forward to the mid-Seventies; Crumb hit a wall, rambling through a creative block as the counterculture that once lionized him faded into the background. His “Mr. Natural” character underwent a gruesome demise after a punk fanzine labeled it a “has-been”—a statement that sent him spiraling into an identity crisis straight out of a melodrama.
Now, as Crumb lounges in rural France, his iconic works fetch surprisingly high bids on the market, though at this point, the money might as well be Monopoly money. Nadel’s meticulous biography reveals a monk-like integrity in an artist so un-monk-like, which is as ironic as it gets, reminding us all that even in an era obsessed with capitalism, true artistry often comes wrapped in eccentricity and a refusal to conform to the norm.
