Robert Crumb (or R. Crumb, the moniker in which he signs the lion’s share of his work) is the most celebrated contributor to the often undervalued movement of American underground comic books. His work blends hallucinatory penciling with quirky storytelling and cutting satire, but Crumb’s capacity to permit his id to tip out unfettered on the page is what largely separates him from the bulk of antiestablishment illustrators—an unaffected trait that has garnered him notoriety for being the group’s most contentious affiliate. Crumb doesn’t give much forethought to the “themes” in his work; he favors an intuitive approach to cartooning, farming his imagination for outrageous scenarios that don’t reveal much meaning to him until long after he’s committed them to paper. It’s precisely that devil-may-care approach to the content of his work that winds up thrilling some readers, but infuriating others.

Born circa 1943 in Philadelphia, Robert spent untold hours in his formative years cranking out homegrown comic books, at first under pressure from his elder brother Charles, a once exceptionally able cartoonist in his own right. “Charles forced me to draw comics,” Robert recalled in The R. Crumb Coffee Table Book (Back Bay Books, 1997). “If I didn’t draw comic books, I was a worthless human being. It was tedious labor, so I worked fast to get over with it.” Sadly, an unstable family life headed by a “sadistic bully” of a father and an amphetamine-addicted mother eventually drove Charles off the deep end. But Robert continued with his cartooning, inspired largely by the work of MAD Magazine’s Harvey Kurtz. As Crumb reminisced in a 1989 strip dedicated to his idol, “I was truly in love.”

In 1962, Crumb landed a job in Cleveland for the card company American Greetings, working as an illustrator under the supervision of future Ziggy creator Tom Wilson. Alas, Crumb’s kooky, crosshatched style was softened to fall in step with the company’s family-friendly image, and it took Crumb several years to blue-pencil the consequential “cuteness” from his work. He was soon liberated from the grind of turning out holiday wishes when his longtime idol Kurtz took a shine to one of Crumb’s submissions, and immediately hired him to draw for Help Magazine. One of Crumb’s most infamous creations, Fritz the Cat, first appeared in the magazine’s pages. (Crumb had the character rubbed out in a 1972 strip after Ralph Bakshi gave the promiscuous feline an unforgivably rotten big screen treatment.)

In 1965, a key turning point in Crumb’s career arrived when he first experimented with LSD, causing both his drawing manner and thematic preoccupations to take a distinctly bizarre turn. “It was the road to Damascus for me,” Crumb wrote. “It completely knocked me off my horse and altered the way I drew. I stopped drawing from life.” It was during this period that Crumb came up with the bulk of his most famous characters, i.e. Mr. Natural, Hippie Joe and Flakey Foont.

Crumb’s first solo project, Zap Comix, was peddled on the bohemian-heavy street corners of San Francisco in 1967 by the author himself. Though it proved popular with the counter-culture, Crumb actually deplored the hippie movement and their philosophy, living to regret the popularity of the “Keep on Truckin’” strip that wound up appearing on truck mud flaps all across the country. The cover of Zap Comix #0 is emblematic of Crumb’s newfound penchant for the bizarre, and incorporates a cool color scheme that differs markedly from the rainbow of ink that typifies his work with American Greetings. Touting a conversely warm color scheme, the artwork for a cover of Creem features a loony assemblage of characters that bear the pronounced, exaggerated limbs that would become increasingly prevalent in Crumb’s cartooning.

In a more popular Crumb greeting card, a blonde chickie featured on an analogous-colored cover boasts the artist’s fetishistic penchant for large legs, but the female form would become even more grotesquely exaggerated and highly sexualized in his post-LSD phase. Crumb would continue to draw men with little regard for how they looked, but the fuss he poured into depicting women’s bodies increased. The escalating preoccupation with busty dames was often at the expense of their heads, which he placed little importance in, and finally elected to lop off all together in one particularly disturbing “Mr. Natural” cartoon. The psychedelic influences resulted in a myriad of other key refinements in Crumb’s work, but as outlandish as his drawings became, his sense of humor (which became decidedly black) was rarely forfeited. (This is all covered with tremendous candor—and humor—in Terry Zwigoff’s great 1994 documentary, Crumb.)

In 1969, Crumb teamed up with six other artists to form the Zap Collective, publishing copies of the magazine intermittently for the next twenty years, as well as several other wacky publications on the order of Weirdo, Big Ass Comics and Plunge into the Depths of Despair. The first edition of the latter featured a strip that goofed mercilessly on the hippie scene as Merciful Perciful and Seymour “Sy” Klopps bounce about the nabes in a drug-induced fog trying to secure some of the “free love” action that pervaded the movement. Big Ass Comics was rich in Crumb’s trademark obsession with big women, and it’s precisely that gross rendering of the opposite sex that continues to alienate many readers, albeit not as much as his use of racial stereotypes. “It’s boiling over out of my brain,” he wrote. “I just have to draw it! Pour it on as thick as I can and not leave any of the paranoia out.” That variety of unabashed honesty has become a rarity amongst artists in this age of political correctness, but Crumb continues to refrain from self-censorship. Truth be told, it’s the usual knee-jerk criticism of his work that sheds an unflattering light on the embedded hypocrisy and sexual and racial hang-ups of those boorish finger-waggers who feign offense when leafing through the artist’s volumes.

Mind, I’ve always been a reader of comic books, but the masked heroics and intense day-glow colors of the popular DC and Marvel fare began to frustrate me around age nine. There was something mechanical and impersonal about the illustrations; they had an assembly-line look, and one illustrator was virtually indistinguishable from the next. The art in those graphic novels was also too polished, but the comparably crude and amateurish doodling in the rival underground comics offered me a welcome alternative to DC and Marvel’s blandness. There was something more accessible about the less refined cartooning in Bat Comix or Raw as they were generally written and illustrated by one oddball artist—not a team of overly-trained art school graduates. The storylines of the alternative books also had a deliciously impertinent and off-the-wall quality, dispensing with the conventional narratives that distinguished the obvious and formulaic tripe that littered most newsstands. I don’t necessarily find R. Crumb to be the finest of our underground comic book artists, but he remains the most divisive, and his stream-of-consciousness storytelling helped to reshape the tedious A to Z plotting of the comic book scene. His drawing is so brutally honest and unashamedly revealing that you feel the artist’s presence in every panel, and his incapacity to compromise or bowdlerize his work is often what turns many budding readers away. R. Crumb has been likened to Goya and Breughel, but I think that’s reaching; Crumb marches to the beat of his own drum, and his refusal to sell-out is what has kept him at the forefront in the field of antiestablishment comics. You can’t help but feel sorry for the poor schleps slaving away at DC to conjure up new adventures for the Green Lantern.

© Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.