Meet Robert Crumb: A Modern-Day Cartooning Enigma
Robert Crumb, or as he styles himself, “R Crumb,” is not just a towering figure in modern cartooning; he’s the Mona Lisa of oddballs. Dan Nadel’s biography is like a finely-aged wine that spills all the juicy details about this enigmatic artist, from his artistic zenith to his bizarre personal quirks. Spoiler alert: it’s highly alcoholic.
For the longest time, Crumb was mostly recognized in polite society for his art on the cover of the Big Brother and the Holding Company/Janis Joplin album Cheap Thrills. You know, the one featuring those elongated stoner figures that could make a Picasso look like a stick figure? That infamous “Keep on Truckin’” phrase was practically a dorm-room mantra and also somehow ended up on 18-wheeler mudflaps. But let’s not sugarcoat it: while he had mainstream pop culture’s attention, Crumb was the underground comic zeitgeist of the Sixties and Seventies, masterminding the quirky magic of Zap Comix.
Crumb gifted us an acid-fueled pantheon of characters that could only be described as hilariously inappropriate yet philosophically riveting. These characters, from Mr. Natural to Fritz the Cat, emerged with Crumb’s distinguished hatching style—think avant-garde meets scrawled doodles stuck under a school desk. And who can forget his magnum opus: the lanky existentialist himself, R Crumb, a character so loaded with neuroses he could probably fill a therapist’s office for years.
Having learned from the likes of Harvey Kurtzman and Carl Barks (a.k.a. “the good duck artist”), Crumb isn’t just a pedestrian in the cartooning world; he’s the architect. No Crumb, no Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, or even your uncle who sometimes doodles during family gatherings. As Spiegelman famously put it, “Every cartoonist has to pass through Crumb.” Running into Crumb is like participating in an accelerated evolution course—suddenly, you’ve unearthed your artistic voice or found yourself questioning why you even have a voice at all.
While Crumb has often been crowned a counterculture king, his style is more of a vintage throwback than a progressive march through the ages. His obsession with collecting old 78rpm records might seem quaint (or just plain weird to anyone under 30), but his art harkens back to the 19th century, showcasing a nostalgic yearning that would make your grandma nod in approval. When it comes to politics, Crumb wields an anticorporate stance, but like a funhouse mirror, his self-examination eclipses the political landscape, capturing his every fault and foible.
Born in 1943 to a family marked by melodrama and dysfunction, Crumb’s upbringing was riddled with so much chaos it could easily be a plot for the next blockbuster. His reality was not a pretty picture—anger, addiction, and maybe a touch of familial madness peppered his childhood. That he made it out relatively intact is almost miraculous. Yet, while his cartoons reflect some of the more disturbing trends of society, it’s less about him propagating it and more about his rather candid reflection of what he saw—like a critical yet amusing documentary about a calamity you can’t turn away from.
And speaking of problematic art, Crumb has his share of eyebrow-raising themes. From hyper-sexualized caricatures to the curious instance of laughing at rape in his earlier works, he has certainly pushed boundaries. His philosophy? He’s merely the mirror reflecting society’s less-than-savory habits. There’s a certain irony in that a man who might be considered “problematic” by today’s standards found significant stress relief through the act of drawing his existential crises.
Remarkably, instead of crashing into societal condemnation, Crumb actually enjoyed a wealth of sexual conquests that would make anyone’s Tinder profile gleam. After fumbling through his first marriage—and the obligatory neglecting-his-son phase—he eventually struck gold with a long-term, albeit complicated, partnership with Aline Kominsky. The mid-Seventies saw him facing an identity block—like a musician trying to find the right note in a jazz jam session, while the counterculture audience he had once wooed slowly retreated.
In a twist that only life can throw at you, the very work that once defined him started to fetch serious cash just as he decided to step back from creating it. It’s like finding out your old sock puppet collection is now a collector’s item. Surprisingly, Crumb approached money with the disinterest of a monk (minus the shaven head and vows of silence). He refused lucrative offers that could have padded his pockets—turning down a mouth-watering $20,000 for a line of Mr. Natural toys, simply because he didn’t want to sell out. If that’s not integrity, I don’t know what is.
Now, at an age when most people are enjoying their retirement with a game of bingo, Crumb resides in rural France, reportedly shrugging at any notion of a biography about himself. Nadel’s piece unfolds the tapestry of his life, a chaotic yet compelling narrative about an artist who once seemed washed up, but whose legacy continues to influence and entertain. Here’s to Crumb, the cartoonist who unabashedly carved out a place for himself in the history of modern art—one eccentric stroke at a time.
