Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumb is an American artist who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.
Crumb contributed to many of the seminal works of the underground comix movement in the 1960s, including being a founder of the first successful underground comix publication, Zap Comix, contributing to all 16 issues. He was additionally contributing to the East Village Other and many other publications, including a variety of one-off and anthology comics. During this time, inspired by psychedelics and cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s, he introduced a wide variety of characters that became extremely popular, including countercultural icons Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, and the images from his Keep On Truckin' strip. Sexual themes abounded in all these projects, often shading into scatological and pornographic comics. In the mid-1970s, he contributed to the Arcade anthology; following the decline of the underground, he moved towards biographical and autobiographical subjects while refining his drawing style, a heavily crosshatched pen-and-ink style inspired by late 19th- and early 20th-century cartooning. Much of his work appeared in a magazine he founded, Weirdo, which was one of the most prominent publications of the alternative comics era. As his career progressed, his comic work became more autobiographical.
In 1991 Crumb was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame, and in 1994 the Terry Zwigoff film Crumb explored his artistic career and personal life. He was married to cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, with whom he frequently collaborated. Their daughter, Sophie Crumb, has also followed a cartooning career.
Early life (1943–1966)
Robert Crumb was born August 30, 1943, in Philadelphia to Catholic parents of English and Scottish descent, spending his early years in West Philadelphia and Upper Darby. His father, Charles Vincent Crumb, authored the book Training People Effectively.His mother, Beatrice Loretta Crumb , was a housewife who reportedly abused diet pills and amphetamines. Crumb's parents' marriage was unhappy and the children were frequent witnesses to their parents' arguments. The couple had four other children: sons Charles Vincent Crumb Jr. and Maxon Crumb, both of whom suffered from mental illness, and daughters Carol and Sandra. The family often moved between Philadelphia and Charles's hometown, Albert Lea, Minnesota. In August 1950, the Crumbs moved to Ames, Iowa. For two years, Charles, a Marine Corps sergeant, was an instructor in the Naval R.O.T.C. program at Iowa State College. The family moved to Milford, Delaware, when Crumb was twelve and where he was an average student whose teachers discouraged him from cartooning.
Inspired by Walt Kelly, Fleischer Brothers animation and others, Crumb and his brothers drew their own comics. His cartooning developed as his older brother Charles pushed him and provided feedback. In 1958 the brothers self-published three issues of Foo in imitation of Harvey Kurtzman's satirical Humbug and Mad which they sold door-to-door with little success, souring the young Crumb on the comic-book business. At fifteen, Crumb collected classical jazz and blues records from the 1920s to the 1940s. At age 16 he lost his Catholic faith.
Career
Early work (1962–1966)
Crumb's father gave him $40 when he left home after high school. His first job, in 1962, was drawing novelty greeting cards for American Greetings in Cleveland, Ohio. He stayed with the company for four years, producing hundreds of cards for the company's Hi-Brow line; his superiors had him draw in a cuter style that was to leave a footprint on his work throughout his career.In Cleveland, he met a group of young bohemians such as Buzzy Linhart, Liz Johnston, and Harvey Pekar. Dissatisfied with greeting card work, he tried to sell cartoons to comic book companies, who showed little interest in his work. In 1965, cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman printed some of Crumb's work in the humor magazine he edited, Help! Crumb moved to New York, intending to work with Kurtzman, but Help! ceased publication shortly after. Crumb briefly illustrated bubblegum cards for Topps before returning to Cleveland and American Greetings.
Crumb married Dana Morgan in 1964. Nearly destitute, the couple traveled in Europe, during which Crumb continued to produce work for Kurtzman and American Greetings, and Dana stole food. The relationship was unstable as Crumb frequently went his own way, and he was not close to his son, Jesse.
In 1965 and 1966 Crumb had a number of Fritz the Cat strips published in the men's magazine Cavalier. Fritz had appeared in Crumb's work as early as the late 1950s; he was to become a hipster, scam artist, and bohemian until Crumb abandoned the character in 1969.
Crumb was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with his job and marriage when in June 1965 he began taking LSD, a psychedelic drug that was then still legal. He had both good and bad trips. One bad trip left him in a muddled state for half a year, during which for a time he left Dana; the state ended when the two took a strong dose of the drug together in April 1966. Crumb created a number of his best-known characters during his years of LSD use, including Mr. Natural, Angelfood McSpade, and the Snoid. His work in the underground comics scene coincided with the rise of Timothy Leary's acid tests and psychedelics generally which led to deals with psychedelic artists such as the Grateful Dead.
''Zap'' and (1967–1979)
In January 1967 Crumb came across two friends in a bar who were about to leave for San Francisco; Crumb was interested in the work of San Francisco-based psychedelic poster artists, and on a whim asked if he could join them. There, he contributed upbeat LSD-inspired countercultural work to underground newspapers. The work was popular, and Crumb was flooded with requests, including to illustrate a full issue of Philadelphia's Yarrowstalks.Independent publisher Don Donahue invited Crumb to make a comic book; Crumb drew up two issues of Zap Comix, and Donahue published the first in February 1968 under the publisher name Apex Novelties. Crumb had difficulty at first finding retailers who would stock it, and at first his wife took to selling the first run herself out of a baby carriage.
Crumb met cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, an art school graduate who saw himself as a rebel against middle-class American values and whose comics were violent and grotesque. Wilson's attitude inspired Crumb to give up the idea of the cartoonist-as-entertainer and to focus on comics as open, uncensored self-expression; in particular, his work soon became sexually explicit, as in the pornographic Snatch he and Wilson produced late in 1968.
The second issue of Zap appeared in June with contributions from Wilson and poster artists Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin. Artist H.Fish also contributed to Zap. In December, Donahue published the still-unreleased issue as 0 and a new third issue with Gilbert Shelton joining the roster of regulars. Zap was financially successful, and developed a market for underground comix.
Crumb was a prolific cartoonist in the late 1960s and early 1970s; at his peak output he produced 320 pages over two years. He produced much of his best-known work then, including his Keep On Truckin' strip, and strips featuring characters such as the bohemian Fritz the Cat, spiritual guru Mr. Natural, and oversexed African-American stereotype Angelfood McSpade. During this period, he launched a series of solo titles, including Despair, Uneeda, Big Ass Comics, R. Crumb's Comics and Stories, Motor City Comics, Home Grown Funnies and Hytone Comix, in addition to founding the pornographic anthologies Jiz and Snatch.
Crumb's work also appeared in Nasty Tales, a 1970s British underground comic. The publishers were acquitted in a celebrated 1972 obscenity trial at the Old Bailey in London; the first such case involving a comic. Giving evidence at the trial, one of the defendants said of Crumb: "He is the most outstanding, certainly the most interesting, artist to appear from the underground, and this is Rabelaisian satire of a very high order. He is using coarseness quite deliberately to get across a view of social hypocrisy."
''Weirdo'' (1980–1993)
While meditating in 1980, Crumb conceived of a magazine with a lowbrow aesthetic inspired by punk zines, Mad, and men's magazines of the 1940s and 1950s. From 1981 Crumb edited the first nine issues of the twenty-eight issue run of Weirdo, published by Last Gasp; his contributions and tastes determined the contents of the later issues as well, edited by Peter Bagge until 17, and Aline for the remainder of the run. The magazine featured cartoonists new and old, and had a mixed response. Crumb's fumetti was so unpopular that it has never appeared in Crumb collections.Later life (1994–present)
The Crumbs moved into a house in southern France in 1991, which is said to have been financed by the sale of six Crumb sketchbooks. The documentary Crumb, directed by Terry Zwigoff, appeared in 1994—a project on which Zwigoff had been working since 1985. The film won several major critical accolades.From 1987 to 2005 Fantagraphics Books published the seventeen-volume Complete Crumb Comics and ten volumes of sketches. Crumb contributes regularly to Mineshaft magazine, which, since 2009, has been serializing "Excerpts From R. Crumb's Dream Diary".
In 2009 Crumb produced The Book of Genesis, an unabridged illustrated graphic novel version of the biblical Book of Genesis. In 2016, the Seattle Art Museum displayed the original drawings for The Book of Genesis as part of an exhibit entitled "Graphic Masters: Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Picasso, R. Crumb".
In January 2015, Crumb was asked to submit a cartoon to the left-wing newspaper Libération as a tribute for the Charlie Hebdo shooting. He sent a drawing titled "A Cowardly Cartoonist", depicting an illustration of the backside of "Mohamid Bakhsh", a reference to Muhammad, founder of Islam, and Ralph Bakshi, who directed the film adaptation Fritz the Cat.
In 1989, in an issue of Hup magazine, Crumb had drawn a satirical comic, Point the Finger, lampooning businessman Donald Trump. This comic received more media attention in 2016, when Trump was elected U.S. President. Crumb has remained a vocal opponent of Trump and his administration, which he expressed in various interviews and comics.