R. Crumb
Robert Crumb (who signs his work as "R. Crumb") is an artist, born on 30 August 1943. Crumb is one of the founders of and major participants in the underground comix movement that emerged in the mid-1960s. Though Crumb is among the most celebrated of comic book artists, his entire career has unfolded outside the mainstream comic book publishing industry.
In his early twenties, Crumb lived in Cleveland, Ohio with his first wife, Dana Morgan Crumb, and designed greeting cards for the American Greetings corporation. Encouraged by the reaction to some comics and drawings he had published in underground newspapers, including Philadelphia's Yarrowstalks, Crumb moved to San Francisco , the center of the psychedelic flower power movement, in 1967. Crumb published the first issue of his Zap Comix in early 1968. Crumb used an antiquated early-century cartoon style to produce satirical stories that were sexually and politically outrageous, particularly so when seen in the form of a comic book. He soon attracted a number of other artists who were excited by the possibilities of publishing countercultural comic books. Crumb shared the pages of later issues of "Zap" with such artists as Spain Rodriguez, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson and Gilbert Shelton.
In the pages of Zap and many other titles, Crumb created characters that became icons of the anti-establishment counterculture, including "Mr. Natural" and "Fritz the Cat." Crumb's work was suddenly in great demand, and Crumb himself became an anti-establishment icon, a figure who genuinely resisted "selling out. " Janis Joplin hired him to draw the artwork for the cover of her album Cheap Thrills, but Crumb turned down an offer to illustrate an album cover for the Rolling Stones because he hated the band's music. Animation director Ralph Bakshi made a feature-length animated film of Fritz the Cat (the first animated film to garner an "X" rating), and the film was a box-office hit. Crumb disliked the film so much that he killed the fictional cat in his comics by having an ostrich-woman stab him in the head with an icepick.
Crumb's comic artwork has elicited a wide range of commentary from his readers and critics. A number of respected literary figures view his art as sublime, subversive satire, comparing him to François Rabelais, while other see his drawings as merely pornographic and misogynist. Crumb has admitted that he has an abnormal "fear of women," and a great deal of his work is indeed adult-oriented. A notorious issue of Zap Comics containing an illustrated satiric story by Crumb of a household demonstrating family togetherness by engaging in incest resulted in the prosecution of at least one comic book store on charges of obscenity.
A theatrical production based on his work was produced at Duke University, in North Carolina, in the early 1990s. Directed by Johnny Simons, and starring Nicholas de Wolff and Avner Eisenberg of Avner the Eccentric fame, the development of the play was supervised by Crumb, who also served as set designer, drawing larger-than-life representations of some of his most famous characters all over the floors and walls of the set.
The 1994 documentary film Crumb which looks at Crumb's life made a younger audience aware of Crumb and his work. The film was directed by Crumb's friend Terry Zwigoff, who had started it decades before it was released, then abandoned it, only to resume filming much later.
Crumb moved with his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb (also a well-known "underground" cartoonist) and their daughter, Sophie (herself a comic artist), to the small town of Sauve, France in the mid-1990s. He plays banjo in the band Les Primitifs du Futur.
Further reading
- Robert Crumb; edited and designed by Peter Poplaski The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book; Kitchen Sink Press for Bloomsbury; ISBN 0-7475-3816-6 (softcover, 1998). "Crumb's Whole Career, from Shack to Chateau!" - Crumb tells his life story in 247 pages.
