R. Crumb: The Weirdo Years


Confession by Other Means: R. Crumb and the Weirdo Years
Modesty and arrogance probably do battle in the soul of the true comics artist. On the one hand, said artist believes he has a unique vision of the world and thinks that his creations merit the attention of thousands — of millions — of people. At the same time, he may be rattled by fits of self-doubt, distracted by fears of public humiliation, or humbled by the frequent realization that this particular sentence or that sweated-over panel just doesn't work — undermining his faith in all that he has done before and all he hopes to achieve. At such times, even the averagely talented artist must have a glimmer of perception at how difficult it is to make great art.
It's risky to put thoughts into the minds of biographical subjects, but the above line of reasoning may very well have occurred to Robert Crumb in 1979. Living in Winters, California, in a rented house with his wife Aline Kominsky, Crumb's output had decreased dramatically since 1973. In '73, he was associated with 11 publications that he either drew entirely or contributed to. That was about the average number of publications he'd worked on since the peak year of 1969 — when he appeared in at least 35 newspapers, magazines or comic books. But in the late '70s, Crumb drew fewer comics of his own, contributing mostly to American Splendor and CoEvolution Quarterly. In 1979, he began contributing to Winds of Change, a newspaper published in Winters that covered events in Yolo County, California.
In various interviews, Crumb has alluded, somewhat nervously, to a nervous breakdown that he experienced in the '70s. Crumb didn't take to fame easily; he was emotionally unprepared for the invasiveness and distractions of fame — a response one sees in celebrities as diverse as novelist Thomas Pynchon and director Steven Soderbergh. [1] Crumb's crash doesn't seem to have been of clinical proportions, however. He appears to have worked it out privately — mainly by withdrawing from society and more or less staying in seclusion in a series of homes in northern California.
But Crumb's wrestling with his demons continued throughout the decade: Peter Bagge tells a story of Crumb in a Parisian hotel room fighting the urge to commit suicide by throwing himself out the window. This dark night of the soul happened long before his brother Charles, Jr., committed suicide, and also before the release of Zwigoff's film Crumb, which increased Crumb's fame quotient a thousand-fold — the bookend in the twilight of his career to the sudden onrush of fame that marked its beginning. [2]
The '70s were almost over, and the Reagan '80s about to begin. Until then, Crumb had enjoyed a reasonably comfortable career for a professional cartoonist working outside the mainstream. But now, after the glorious explosion of his talent in the '60s and the emotional, financial, and physical hangover of the '70s, Crumb may have started to feel himself re-emerging — refreshed, replenished, and regrouped.
But in preparation for what? As Bagge writes in his introduction to volume 15 of the Complete Crumb Comics, Crumb's work at that time "seemed like a more labored, less funny version of his old style." Crumb had grown "weary of the trippy-dippy big-footed 'Keep on Truckin' art style that had made him famous, and was now eager to move away from it." [3] Crumb himself wrote, in the R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, that in the early '70s, "Once I got popular with Zap comix, a lot of other publishers wanted work from me. I really tried to keep them all happy in the early seventies, and my drawing fell into a stylistic rut." [4]
A few months later, Crumb found a vehicle for his questing creativity. As he described it in the introduction to the Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 14, one day in the fall of 1980, Crumb was performing his daily meditation exercise when the concept of Weirdo "came to me in a flash." He saw a "vision of this kooky, screwball magazine" that would recreate the spirit of Mad, Help!, Panic, and Humbug and other such publications that he'd loved as a kid. "My vision was somewhere between the ideal of cartoons as serious, personal self-expression and the crude, catch-all proletarian 'joke-book,' a loose, wise-ass mood, not too high-falutin' serious … A tricky balance of elements to pull off." [5]
Weirdo would feature his own explorations of comic-book stories as confessions and social criticism, but also play host to other independent artists — some popular and some unknown — as well as to photo-funnies in which Crumb indulged some of his sexual fantasies in the tradition of a popular format once found in girlie magazines (but also revived occasionally in publications such as Help!).
Crumb went to Ron Turner, publisher of Last Gasp, and pitched his idea of a quarterly anthology of comics, art, photo funnies, columns, and letters. Turner agreed, and in spring of 1981 Last Gasp published the first issue of Weirdo — with its ornate blue border and its image of the Crumb character Etoain Shrdlu posing like Killroy over a graffiti-covered fence, a bleak, dense and typically Crumbian urban landscape in the background. [6] Issue two followed in the summer of 1981, but as Bagge writes, eventually "Crumb took little joy in editing Weirdo." He receded to the background, in 1983 stepping down to become only a contributor after asking Bagge to take over editorship. Bagge did nine issues, and then Aline Kominsky-Crumb took over, editing the final nine issues. [7] Weirdo officially ceased publication with its final issue in 1993, but issue No. 28 had appeared after a long hiatus — Weirdo really stopped in 1990.
Weirdo's run of publication tracked the Reagan '80s. It even resembled a full-fledged commercial magazine — with editorials, letters from readers, and a hodge-podge of Crumb comics, art by others, short stories, fake ads, and other nonsense. An ornate cover distinguished by a meticulously detailed border topped each issue. Crumb wrote in Vol. 14 of the Complete Crumb Comics that, "My favorite part of doing Weirdo was making the covers. I was so deeply inspired by the early Mad and Humbug covers, with those detailed borders and creative title logos. I always thought covers was the most important part of any magazine, in making each issue a powerful artifact in its own right, as well as bring part of a strong series." [8] Crumb told interviewer Jean-Pierre Mercier, "My Weirdo covers actually looked like imitations of those early Mad magazines." [9]

In the letters section, Crumb ran missives from some of his nuttier readers. Crumb had been a fan of letters sections since at least the '50s. In a letter to his childhood friend Marty Pahls, dated October 23, 1959 (and reprinted in Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me), Crumb wrote, "The letter column of any fanzine is always good … and sometimes the best part of a mag." [10]
Ten years later, it's easier to see that Weirdo had more cultural influence than its no doubt low circulation might suggest. Weirdo introduced numerous new artists, including Bruce Duncan, Julie Doucet, the late Dori Seda, Joe Matt, and to a certain extent Bagge himself — all given credibility by Crumb's imprimatur, which was one of his goals as an editor, mimicking the influence that Harvey Kurtzman had on him in the early '60s. But the magazine also revealed a breathtaking change in Crumb's own style and subject matter.
At the time, Weirdo appeared to some to be a self-indulgence by an aging artist whom the times were passing by. The magazine was poised shakily between Art Spiegelman's Raw, on the one hand, and the burgeoning 'zine movement on the other. Neither is imaginable without Crumb's pioneering efforts at self-publishing and windmill tilting in the late '60s. Raw, with its ever-changing dimensions and endorsement by a major publisher, made comic-book art suddenly prestigious, worthy of discussion at Manhattan cocktail parties.
"'Zines," as they came to be known in the '80s, have offered a parallel (if humbler) avenue of self-expression for hundreds of young writers and cartoonists — ranging from Jim Goad (Answer Me!) and Sean Tetjarachi (Crap Hound) to Paul Lukas (Beer Frame) and Lisa Carver (Rollerderby). 'Zines were descendants of the truly amateur magazines that Crumb had been raised on in the '50s — mimeographed newsletters usually dedicated to fan discussions of science fiction novels or comic books. As they evolved, these newsletters became less a celebration of popular culture and more an alternative to it. Yet stuck between these two pillars, Weirdo came across to many as old-fashioned, amateurish, and cranky.
Meanwhile, other cartoonists who may very well have been influenced by Crumb's acerbic wit and extravagant truth-telling were finding unexpected success. In placing Crumb in his cultural context through the '80s, it is informative to contrast him with Matt Groening — surely the most successful beneficiary of the underground comics revolution. Groening eventually became the millionaire creator of The Simpsons, but he began as the sole struggling author of the comic strip Life in Hell, which made its debut in the L. A. Reader in 1977. In the late '70s, Groening, born in 1954, was in his mid-20s, while Crumb was in his mid-30s. Groening was at the start of his career, Crumb in a form of hiatus ("I'm a has-been," he told interviewer Keith Green in 1974). Crumb more or less self-published his first comics, and Groening did his own amateur publishing of Life in Hell, which he sold out of the Licorice Pizza record store on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, where he happened to work at the time. Publication of the comic led to a job at the Reader. By the time he was fired by the Reader in 1986, Life in Hell was syndicated in some 50 "alternative" newspapers. Groening's The Simpsons first appeared as a periodic animated cartoon on Fox's The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987; Fox unleashed it as its own series in 1989 — and today The Simpsons is the longest-running animated series in television history. The show made Groening rich, and he became a brand, not unlike his idol, Charles Schulz. Yet The Simpsons and Life in Hell are unimaginable without the pioneering spirit of Crumb and the other underground cartoonists. Groening's success is a measure of the undergrounders' real impact.
During this same time period in the '80s, Crumb worked on Weirdo, contributed to Winds of Change and American Splendor, and did the occasional full length comic book, including the early issues of Hup and Id. Also in the '80s, a theater troupe in Fort Worth mounted a revue based on Crumb's comics. A German publisher started to issue reprints of his famous sketchbooks. In 1987, Fantagraphics began publishing its ongoing Complete Crumb project. Meanwhile, profiles of Crumb appeared in magazines such as People — hinting at a certain "mainstreaming" of the cartoonist — and The New Yorker started to run his work, if only occasionally. [11] Crumb worked on a film about himself for the BBC, and Terry Zwigoff began shooting Crumb. These indices of Crumb's mounting prestige (along with various gallery showings), however, were not reflected in any popular embrace or understanding of his actual achievements during the '80s.
Though in part Weirdo was inspired by the jumbled novelty humor magazines of his teens, in the end Weirdo didn't really resemble them. Crumb told Mercier, "I never lost the compulsion to put out comics and magazines. I really wanted to try to get something put out on a regular basis. I always had that ideal and it was hard to do. I'd been doing these one shot titles for almost ten years." Fellow artists who took too long to complete their stories, he says, had bogged down Zap, the underground comic with which he was most associated. "I thought the only way I could really get any magazine or comic book out on a regular basis would be to not have it be all comics but to throw all other sorts of stuff in. My initial attitude was, keep it light, keep it causal and don't get too precious about it … When I started, part of the motivation was that I wanted to do those Mad style covers and that kind of Mad style approach in the editorials and all that. I maintained that idea all through my Weirdo years. I would often get out my Mad and Humbug collection and look at them to get inspiration." [12]
But what was Crumb personally getting out of the Weirdo experience? From Crumb's interviews and various introductions, as well as the comments by others, it's easy to see that, for Crumb, the stories in Weirdo were an opportunity to hone his writing skills, explore new and once-frightening drawing techniques, and reveal facets of his changing personality — but do so under the guise of creating objective accounts of other artists. In other words, he sought confessionalism by other means.
Crumb had always been wresting with getting "reality" into comics. In a letter to his friend Marty Pahls, dated September 29, 1961: "Sometimes I think it's impossible to portray reality in a comic-strip." [13] A month later (November 5th, 1961): "I'm trying to put into my work the everyday human realities that I've never found in a comic strip yet." [14]
Careers may ebb and flow, but often the man remains the same. As the '80s began, Crumb was still the irascible man that he was at the height of his fame, in 1970. He was a loner contemptuous of modern popular culture, and still bitter about formative experiences from his past, including Catholic school and the harsh and implacable social hierarchies of American high schools of the '50s.
But there were uncertainties. For most of his childhood Crumb had drawn funny animals. With the advent of the underground comic-book movement, he began to draw people for public consumption, but occasionally admitted to a lack of confidence about it. Now, as the '80s were gearing up, he appears to have had another crisis of confidence. In response, he changed not only the way he drew, but also what he drew. He would adapt passages from some of his favorite books and do them in a mature, darker style. Crumb told Mercier, "I think at a certain point I had enough skill available to take those things on. I wouldn't have dared take them on when I was young. I was challenged by the idea of this kind of realistic style, using a brush and with that sort of dark film-noir style that was popular in comics around 1950. I was very attracted to that and was studying a lot of those comics. There are certain books that I always found inspiring, like Krafft-Ebing, or the Jelly Roll Morton biography by Alan Lomax, that lent them very well to some sort of comic book rendition. The idea was to do classic comics like the old American 'Classic Comics' that were out in the '50s when I was a kid." [15]
For years, Crumb had been working with straightforward drawing pens, such as the Rapidograph. From the mid-'60s to the late '60s his line became thicker and he began doing the dark cross-hatching that added to his characteristic, somewhat old-fashioned look — a cross between Segar's Popeye and Herriman's Krazy Kat (with a little Carl Barks and Marge's Little Lulu thrown in). But Crumb admitted to an uncertainty about doing brushwork and washes. Still, he wanted to try something new, and the use of brushes in his literary comic book stories in Weirdo give them a gravity that the material required. Crumb wrote in his Coffee Table book that, "I didn't use pens and ink until I was 20. At American Greetings we used Rapidograph pens to do the inking on those stupid greeting cards. I got to know this young woman artist named Liz Johnston. She encouraged me to use the Rapidograph to go out and draw from life. She took me out with her. I started doing contour drawings from life without any penciling at all. It was really good practice and taught me a lot, because you have to look hard and perceive all the technical details of something before you put down the lines to make sure you get it right. It's infinitely challenging to draw from life. The Rapidograph is a slow drawing tool. The line has the look of an engraving. I always used the Rapidograph because it was portable." [16]
Like the best artists, Crumb is always a student — always eager to learn, to improve his rendering. In a way, Crumb was learning how to draw again. He was using a lot of real-life models for his literary adaptations (though, of course, working from photographs and other drawings in the case of people such as Boswell and Sartre) and trying to recreate accurately real objects and settings, such as a French cafe or London in the 1700s. As the content of his stories changed, so did the style — radically.
The stylistic shift had been brewing for a while. In "Uncle Bob's Mid-Life Crisis," you see a sketchier drawing style that is also a lot lighter in tone. In fact, it harks back to the early Crumb style seen in the first Fritz the Cat cartoons and earlier, in Help! magazine. (The thinner line in some stories from this period may also reflect the influence of Aline Kominsky, whose line also tends to be thin.) And in the series of literary adaptations Crumb did from Boswell, Philip K. Dick, Sartre, Krafft-Ebbing, and Alan Lomax, Crumb uses a thicker line and sometimes a brush.
Crumb may also have been experimenting with new material in order to become a better writer. In his letters from the '50s and '60s Crumb talks about American prose styles quite a bit, and one of the characteristics of Crumb's comics over the years is that not only are they well and amusingly drawn, but also they are also well-written — in a style that parodies various forms of American discourse, such as evangelical business talk and advertising copy. It's an important point about Crumb's work that bears repeating: A successful comic book or cartoon story can't rely solely on draftsmanship — and Crumb writes in a clear, plain American prose style in the tradition of Mark Twain and other American and Canadian humorists he admires. He also has a perfect sense of comic timing, obviously necessary for a comic book artist, but not as easy to achieve as it seems: The skill requires years of immersion in comic books. His sense of rhythm — matching words to panels in succession — is impeccable, and Crumb's work is arguably more cinematic than the average comic-book story. "Whiteman meets Big Foot," for example, is movie-like in its structure (and indeed, in the '90s Crumb and Terry Zwigoff attempted to mount a film version of the story), and the satire "It's Really Too Bad," from Despair, is a story obviously influenced by industrial and educational shorts of the '50s.
Again, this is pure speculation, but Crumb may have felt despair and frustration with the kind of writing he was seeing in comics — and in the writing that he himself was doing. Sometimes, when you're immersed in a subject, the surfeited mind suddenly steps back, and you see that subject as if for the first time, and find yourself wondering how it really works (not unlike the Self-Taught Man scene in Sartre's Nausea). By going back to the past and to other writers he admired, Crumb was replenishing his resources — but also learning how to do comics again.
It no coincidence, then, that almost all the subjects of his Weirdo "Klassic Komics" pieces are writers.
The first Crumb story to show the change was "Excerpts from Boswell's London Journal, 1762 - 1763," under the superhead, "A Klassic Komic." The story appeared in Weirdo No. 3 in the fall of 1981. [17] "Klassic Komics" is, of course, an allusion to the series Classics Illustrated, which were published from 1941 (beginning with an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers) to 1962, ceasing with an adaptation of Faust. Classics Illustrated were an early, arch effort at elevating the comic-book form from the depths of vulgarity to the heights of social responsibility — a project doomed to failure, since the art of comics is in found in the vulgarity, or at least in the tension between the "vulgarity" of the content and the formulaic structure of the form.

Boswell's extensive and frank diaries were discovered in the '20s, and since the '50s have enjoyed slow publication through Yale University Press. Crumb's "Boswell" recreates 12 entries from James Boswell's licentious and literary diaries. The excerpts begin on Tuesday, December 14, 1762, and proceed through Thursday, July 28, 1763. In the first entry, Boswell laments that he has not partaken fully of London's sexual offerings. By the second excerpt, dated Friday, December 17, 1762, Boswell has attempted to seduce an actress whom he calls Louisa, after which he has dinner with a churlish Thomas Sheridan and his wife. On Tuesday, December 21, 1762, Boswell is found sitting next to Louisa on a couch, when he suddenly flings himself on her, only to be rebuffed. On Saturday, December 25, 1762, Boswell makes the rounds of various notables, including the actor and bookseller Thomas Davies and a simian-looking Oliver Goldsmith; Boswell beams as he listens to them debate the merits of the poet Thomas Gray. Finally, on Wednesday, January 12, 1763, Boswell conquers Louisa, having sex with her five times in one night, by his count (Boswell was 22 at the time). Skipping ahead, on Thursday, January 20, 1763, Boswell has a sleepless night, thanks to guilt feelings over Louisa and an eruption of gonorrhea. On Thursday, March 30, 1763, Boswell has sex with a whore in a park, and then on Tuesday, April 12, Boswell passes on a large-rumped whore who demands too much money. On Thursday, May 19, 1763, Boswell takes two whores to an inn, and then on Friday, May 20th, Boswell makes the rounds with some of his intellectual friends. On Wednesday, July 20th, Boswell dines with Dr. Johnson, who expounds on the subject of goodness. Finally, on Thursday, July 28, Johnson and Boswell are shown walking down the street, when a hooker, whom the more puritanical Johnson shoos away, approaches them, after which Johnson philosophizes about her lot in life.
In his text-heavy adaptation, Crumb easily contrasts the vast difference between Boswell's idealistic and even fanish adulation of various writing gods and the gross indecencies he pursued in private. One of Crumb's corollary tasks is to evoke 18th-century London and its various objects, such as canes, beer steins, pipes, draped beds, carriages, and cravats, as well as to render the likenesses of his subjects as accurately as possible while still having the Crumb "flavor." Yet it is also amusing to see how much this degraded and packed world resembles the modern one that Crumb usually draws. In the last panel, a broad-backed Johnson is helped down the narrow street on the arm of Boswell, the buildings crushing in on them as if in a badly drawn stage set. Crumb is in fact still in his element, pondering street life and the secret byways of lust. "There are a lot of things going on in Boswell's diaries but there are a couple of contractions that I wanted to bring out," Crumb told Mercier.
Despite its modesty and subservience to its subject matter, "Boswell" announces a major change in Crumb's work. It is also remarkably of a piece with Crumb's other work — showing a character in the throes alternately of self-doubt and lust. The story also features one of Crumb's famous "couch" scenes, a recurrent setting in Crumb's universe for attacks of lust, such in the story "The Adventures of George 'Murky' Murkoid" from around the same time, as well as in the autobiographical story, "Memories Are Made of This," from Weirdo No. 22. [18] In this period of his life, Crumb started to revel in nostalgia and drew several stories in which he reminisced about women he was associated with, stories such as Weirdo No. 25's "I'm Grateful, I'm Grateful." [19]
The second "Klassic Komic" was "Psychopathia Sexualis" from Weirdo, No. 13, published in the summer of 1985 (a note to the reader dates the story March 1985). [20] "Psychopathia Sexualis" summarizes 16 cases from the 238 recounted in Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing's notorious psychoanalytic medical study (Crumb tells the reader that the excerpts are culled from the 12th German edition of Krafft-Ebing's book, published in 1906). Baron Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840 - 1902) was born in Mannheim, Germany, and was a professor of psychiatry at Strasbourg from the age of 32. His magnum opus was published in 1886. Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey succeeded Krafft-Ebing as catalogers of sexual aberrations, but Krafft-Ebing was the pioneer. His findings were so shocking that the frank portions of his cases were printed in Latin. Though he was associated with Freud, Krafft-Ebing seems to have believed that sexual aberrations were organic, or associated with syphilis rather than unresolved childhood fixations or failures to mature.

In Crumb's story, a cartoon Krafft-Ebing addresses the reader, noting, "Few people are conscious of the deep influence exerted by sexual life upon the sentiment, thought and action of man in his social relations to others." The cases follow: case number two (senile dementia in an 80-year-old man with homosexual leanings), case number nine (absence of sexual feeling in a young man), case number 11 (hypersexuality in a married man), case number 31 (onanism and vampirism), case number 35 (defilement of women by soiling them in public), case number 48 (sadism in women, i. e., a wife who must suck the blood from a cut on her husband's arm for sexual satisfaction), case number 59 (a married man who likes to be walked on by prostitutes), case number 75 (a married man with a fetish for nails in the soles of women's shoes), case number 97 (self-cannibalism), case number 98 (hair fetish), case number 110 (ladies' handkerchief fetish), case number 114 (shoe fetish), case number 152 (androgyny), case number 165 (lesbianism), case number 220 (male sadism), and case number 231 (compulsive bestiality). On the cover of Weirdo No. 13, Crumb alludes to other cases that he doesn't illustrate, numbers 78, 88 (an eye fetish), 142, 160, 170, 180, and 229. It's a parade of characters that in sheer volume is unlike anything previously shown in Crumb. Also on the cover, Crumb calls Psychopathia Sexualis the "dirtiest book ever written" (illustrated by "America's dirtiest cartoonist!!").
It's a catalog of mostly male sexual perversions. The women here are, for the most part frigid wives, prostitutes paid to don shoes and walk on a client, or victims of the men's bizarre predilections. The one exception is case number 165: "Congenital Sexual Inversion in Women (Viraginity)," which is a 38-year-old woman who wore male attire and pursued women. After her death, an autopsy revealed "dura adherent to vault of cranium. No atrophied brain. Convolutions broad, not numerous, regularly arranged."
Crumb mentions frequently in interviews that he's more interested in the past and its – to him – unadulterated culture than he is in the present. Like "Boswell," "Psychopathia" traces both the differences from and the continuity between past societies and the present. His theme is the discrepancies between people's public and private lives. There are a number of recurring ideas reiterated here: One is Crumb's view of man as relentlessly obsessive about sex, which occupies all his waking hours; the implicit message is that quashing these impulses does no good. Science is shown to fail in its attempts to treat or even explain these obsessions. An exception is Case 114, the victim of a shoe fetish. He finally attains full heterosexual potency when his physician, Dr. Hammond, "advised him to hang a shoe up over his bed, and look at it fixedly during coitus, at the same time imagining his wife to be a shoe" — a rare happy ending in these tales.
Crumb heavily crosshatches throughout this story, but stylistically it is also similar to "Uncle Bob's Mid-Life Crisis" with its thinner line. The setting's top hats and canes, its ankle boots and full skirts provide the cartoonist with rich, atypical fodder for his pen. For the most part, the case histories are presented in medium-shot. Case 75 features a classic Crumb character — a shoe-fetishist with sweat beads popping off his head and dark, clouded eyes focused not on the outside world but on something interior. In "Psychopathia," Crumb is drawing upon an important figure in history who also peered into the darkest recesses of human behavior. We see a lurid interest in the oddities of the mind, yet also there is compassion in Crumb's account of Krafft-Ebing's patients.
Next came "Patton," published in Zap No. 11 in 1985. Just before that, however, was the story "Jesus People U.S.A. Interviews R. Crumb," an imaginary story in which the cartoonist shows off his superior knowledge of the Bible to some activist Jesus freaks (Crumb was raised a Catholic and went to Catholic schools in his early years). [21] This short, two-page story shows the most radical emendation of Crumb's style. In fact, it doesn't even look like a Crumb story — with its thick and solid lines, lack of cross-hatching and almost Archie-style version of hair that rests on heads like puffy clouds of a gummy solidity.

"Patton" itself is adapted from Robert Palmer's book Deep Blues to tell, in 12 pages, the story of blues guitarist Charley Patton, who died in 1934. [22] The darkness of the brushwork in this story is staggering. The black washes match perfectly the dark life of the musician, who felt menaced by the Devil. But Crumb also shows a masterly use of white, resulting in a pleasing tone shifts in the world he is creating, or recreating. Individual characters in the story are rendered in the spirit of the series of "trading cards" that Crumb was doing around this time, the characters often posed rather than caught in action.
Crumb followed "Patton" with "Jelly Roll Morton's Voodoo Curse," which first appeared in Raw No. 7, in 1985. [23] Though not "officially" a "Klassic Komic," "Jelly Roll," adapted from a biography of the musician by the late Alan Lomax, is another tale of a haunted black blues player. In a matter of a mere six pages, Crumb traces Morton's succumbing to a curse placed upon him by a disgruntled West Indian employee in Morton's music-publishing business. Again, Crumb uses thick brush lines and little if any cross-hatching.
The experiment in brushwork continued in "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick," first published in Weirdo No. 17. [24] Adapted from a lengthy interview with the science-fiction writer conducted in 1981 by Gregg Rickman, the story recounts how Dick, after a dental operation, felt himself to be possessed by the spirit of another, called Elijah, a Roman-era Christian. Under the influence of this spirit, Dick saves the life of one of his children, but also begins to see conspiracies all around him. Crumb explained to Mercier that, "In all those literary things that I did, I saw something comic in the characters that were probably not intended to be there in the original. The same thing with Philip K. Dick and his religious experiences: There's something absurd and comical about his paranoia and his religious visions and how he interpreted them. Boswell, also, with his pretensions to being a cultured gentleman whilst he was compulsively going out and looking for prostitutes in the park every night."
The experiments in adaptation and biography more or less ended with "Mother Hulda," from Weirdo No. 19, published in 1987, [25] and Crumb's adaptation of an excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, which appeared in Hup No. 3 in 1989. An adaptation of a Grimm fairy tale, "Mother Hilda" recounts the contrasting fortunes, or reaction to good fortune, of a woman's good step-daughter and her own ugly daughter, and is drawn in the airier, lighter thin-lined yet highly cross-hatched style of "Uncle Bob's Mid-Life Crisis." "Nausea" is an "abridged excerpt" from Sartre's novel in which the narrator has lunch with the so-called Self-Taught Man. Here, Crumb revives his cross-hatching style, but in a sense it is more refined cross-hatching — creating subtler, darker, and more precise textual effects. Crumb also lays out the story with jagged, off-balance panels that skew and crowd the perspective like a funhouse, mirroring the despair and uncertainty of the narrator as he asks himself life's "big questions" about life, death, meaning, love. [26]
In the end, the weight of editing Weirdo, even in its "spirit in all its tacky, low-life, dumb-ass essence," as Crumb described it, appears to have been too much — and once again, repeating a continuing theme of his life, Crumb left it to others to complete and then abandoned it altogether. A theme of Crumb's life is that he is always leaving things; he can't sit still. It's as if he escaped his childhood family with such vigor that the force of his departure carried through to all the subsequent professional and domestic arrangements in his life. [27]
Crumb described the process of making the Weirdo literary adaptations to Mercier: "It's hard to pare the text down to something that you can squeeze into comic book panels and keep it succinct enough to fit into a ten-page format. It's hard to make the choice of what to put in and what to leave out. In any really good piece of writing all the details are rich and interesting, so obviously there's a loss when you leave something out. Those things needed very careful planning. With my own stories, I could just make the up as I went along, that's what I generally do, but with those things you had to plan it out so that you knew what every panel from beginning to end was going to be. Otherwise you could really get yourself in a fix." [28]
Even in these seemingly impersonal tales of Boswell and others, Crumb's personal obsessions and scrutiny of himself come through. Crumb was still being confessional and exploring himself, but through the disguise of surrogate individuals. Philip K. Dick represents Crumb's mystical side; Crumb wrote in his Coffee Table Art Book that, "I believe in everything … UFOs, Bigfoot, channeling, ESP … I believe it all!," [29] and told Mercier, "Mysticism, I have a very strong interest in that, and it gets strong as I get older. I had a big mystic phase in the sixties, when I was taking LSD, a very strong interest in spiritual stuff." [30] Boswell, on the other hand, represents Crumb's persona as the urban rake seducing women, Krafft-Ebbing symbolizes Crumb the Perv, and the subtext of the story may well be that of Crumb, the self-revealed sex obsessive, feeling a certain kinship with this lineup of sexual renegades whose minds are preoccupied with their fantasies.
This immersion in the more traditional work of making a comic-book story was salutary for Crumb, however. His style improved. His drawing became richer, and the changes in subject matter reflected a deepening of his vision. The aftermath of his efforts in Weirdo and his "Klassic Komics" were felt in new titles such as Mystic Funnies — for example, in the back-cover story to issue No. 3," Cradle to Grave," an achingly sad and funny summary of what life feels like (it is, quite simply, one of the most brilliant comic stories ever). [31] And then there is "Bad Karma" in issue No. 2. [32] "Karma"'s main character, The Moron, is introduced walking through life on the heads of millions of others, their writhing bodies crowded below him. Though the theme of overcrowding had appeared in Crumb before, such as in the story "People … Ya Gotta Love 'em", from Weirdo No. 26, [33] and elsewhere, "Bad Karma" offers a brilliant metaphor for contingency — that notion about our inescapable connection to others first proffered by the existentialists, such as Sartre, whose story Crumb adapted. When The Moron begins cutting his way through ever-tightening thorn bushes, the reader is reminded of a remark Crumb (who often seems to anticipate future stories in his interviews) made to Mercier about the walks he talks in the woods near the French village where he lives: "It's very rugged and hard to get around in. I make my own path a lot of times, cut my way through the thorn vines." It's a metaphor that serves as an emblem for his own life. [34]
1. For an example of director Steven Soderbergh's ill reaction to fame, see Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Movies, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2004, page 81.
2. Peter Bagge tells this fascinating story near the end of his introduction to The Complete Crumb Comics, Volume 15: Mode O'Day and Her Pals, Fantagraphics, Seattle, 2001, page ix.
3. Bagge, ibid., page viii. By the way, in this passage Bagge cites Crumb's story "The Adventures of Onion Head" as an indice of a change in Crumb's style, but as far as I can tell the story is not reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 14 as he indicates.
4. The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1997, page 137.
5. The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 14: The Early '80s and Weirdo Magazine, Fantagraphics, Seattle, 2000, page vii.
6. Dan Nadel, in a introductory essay that appears in Raw, Boiled and Cooked: Comics on the Verge, the catalog for a comic art show at the Maryland Institute College of Art, makes a clever comparison between the first issue covers of RAW and Weirdo as embodying the divergent concerns of the two publications (Last Gasp/Maryland Institute College of Art, San Francisco and Baltimore, 2004, pages 6-7).
7. Bagge offers this history in his introduction to the The Complete Crumb Comics, Volume 15: Mode O'Day and Her Pals, Fantagraphics, Seattle, 2001, page ix.
8. Ibid., Complete Crumb Comics Volume 14, page vii.
9. Jean-Pierre Mercier, Qui a peur de Robert Crumb?, Musee de la Bande Dessinee, 2000, reprinted in Robert Crumb: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi, 2004, page 201.
10. Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me, Fantagraphics, Seattle, 1998, page 66.
11. The People profile appeared in the magazine's June 24, 1984, issue, page 75.
12. Mercier, Conversations, pages 199-200.
13. Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me, page 159.
14. Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me, page 175.
15. Mercier, Conversations, pages 206-207.
16. The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, page 77.
17. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 14: The Early '80s and Weirdo Magazine, Fantagraphics, Seattle, 2000, page 38.
18. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 14, page 75.
19. Weirdo No. 25, Summer, 1989, unpaginated, but the story begins on page 33.
20. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 15, page 74.
21. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 15, page 102.
22. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 15, page 104.
23. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 16: The Mid-1980s, More Years of Valiant Struggle, page 1.
24. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 16: Struggle, page 19.
25. Reprinted in The Complete Crumb Comics Volume 16, page 38.
26. In 1994, as perhaps another farewell to his Klassic Komics, Crumb also illustrated Introducing Kafka, David Zane Mairowitz, Totem Books, Cambridge.
27. During this same time, Crumb continued doing his autobiographical comic stories, but also introduced a new character, Mode O'Day, a vain and silly yuppie, and her friend, the disreputable Doggo. Doggo is a descendant of Dirty Dog, the horny and lonely urban pooch who finds solace in pornography in an early Zap story that is also one of the most concise defenses of smut ever put forth. Though based on his contemporary loathing of acquisitive '80s yuppie culture, the five or six Mode O'Day stories also showed Crumb returning to his roots. In terms of social anomie, Crumb's characters such as Doggo (and before him Flakey Foont and Dirty Dog, among scores of others) fall in the Russian tradition of the “superfluous man” found in the novels of Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Nabokov, among others (this character type also appears in Kafka, and Crumb would later illustrate a guidebook to the Czech writer). The superfluous man is a put-upon figure — ignored, spurned by women, and abused by bureaucrats. The central character in most Crumb comics is an urban male who spends a lot of time on the street grumbling to himself about the injustices visited upon him. His thoughts can also tend toward universal concerns about the nature of life itself. Usually this figure comes in miniature dimensions and is something of a sex hound, opportunistic and selfish about his proclivities yet only to be wracked later by guilt and despair. Crumb returns to this figure again and again throughout his career. Mode O'Day, on the other hand, is a much more vicious portrait of womanhood than anything found in the more explicit sexual fantasies that Crumb is fond of putting into print and which feminists usually revile. She's one of the "horrific women" who pop up in Crumb's comics occasionally. Like their beaming, shiny-toothed, and waxen-haired male equivalents, these women are extreme, exaggerations of American femaleness; O'Day is a vicious skewing of fatuous womanhood and faddism in its appalling ordinariness. Crumb had the good luck, and then the misfortune, to come of age at a time when freedom of expression was a political cause and a tangible achievement. Under the inspiration of drugs and some of his progressive colleagues, Crumb unleashed his imagination, and many of his comic-book stories from the late '60s dabble in violence, racial tension, and sexual extremism. But the very freedom of expression and the progressive political climate that allowed Crumb to indulge his sexual and other fantasies also allowed those who found them sexist and racist to vocalize their disgust with the way they were treated — or appeared to be treated — in the underground comics of Crumb and others. By giving a new voice to women and minorities, the progressive movement also allowed its members to turn on it. Since he started down the path of confessional and fantasy-filled material, Crumb has always maintained that he can't not let loose his inner and his outer life onto the page. To his credit, Crumb never changed — despite the sometime virulent criticism directed at him, even by some family members, and despite the advent of "political correctness" as a critical tool. Indeed, Crumb's bashing of the Mode O'Day persona didn't end with the Mode O'Day series: He returned to this form of womanhood briefly in "R. Crumb, 'The Old Outsider,' Goes To The ... Academy Awards" — a story commissioned by Premiere for its April 1991 issue, in which Crumb attends the 1990 Academy Award ceremony. In 22 brilliantly crafted panels across four pages, Crumb immerses us into the (to him) hateful world of Hollywood, while also speculating about its attraction to the public. "Why do they care so much ... What's in it for them?" In the penultimate frame, he quotes Thomas Merton, who advises avoiding places where "they gather to cheat and insult one another." Crumb's horror of the "classic" high-fashion American woman is captured in panel 15, which portrays four over-dressed and over-made up Medusas staring maliciously. "And the women — Oh lord save me — The women were truly terrifying, with all their 'glamour,' their predatory eyes, their cruel, lipsticked mouths ... EEK!" No story better captures in miniature form the artist's puzzlement and despair over American behavior. The country's obsession with fame, stars, and show business and the horrific women who populate its landscape look bleakly pathetic in the hands of the dyspeptic artist. But "Academy Awards" was only a culmination of Crumb's distaste for the Oscar ceremony. In April of 1962, Crumb wrote to Pahls, "The Oscar award show is on television right now. What a farce. All those greedy, prestige-mad, fame-maniacs sitting there in the audience waiting and hoping to get their seating palms around one of those precious little statues. This is what they've worked so hard for, licked so many asses for, stepped on so many faces for, given up everything for, including their humanity." It took him 30 years, but he was finally able to share these sentiments with thousands of other readers.
28. Mercier, Conversations, pages 206-207.
29. The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, page 179.
30. Mercier, Conversations, pages 217-218.
31. Mystic Funnies No. 3, Fantagraphics, Seattle, 2002, back cover.
32. Mystic Funnies No. 2, Fantagraphics, Seattle, 1999, beginning on the inside front cover.
33. Weirdo No. 26, fall, 1989, page 6.
34. Mercier, Conversations, page 222.



Posted: Tue - February 1, 2005 at 03:21 PM          

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