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R. Crumb was an icon -- or perhaps just an inexhaustible, obsessed documentarian -- of the stoned-out 1970s. Robert's sharp-edged but somehow shaggy counter-cultural comic-book art was instantly recognizable, searing in its honesty, deeply annoying and almost involuntarily liberating. You were God-awful thankful he was saying what he was saying, providing some perspective on the giddiness of the counter culture, but you wouldn't have wanted to live R. Crumb's life -- sexually hopeless, myopic, neurotic and dour -- for anything in the world.
I remember standing in a long straggling line one summer evening in front of a tiny San Francisco ice cream store with a gaggle of friends, giddily smoked out with homegrown. As we inched closer to the strawberry cones we lusted for, someone recounted an R. Crumb strip: a fellow walks into a hippie ice cream parlor and asks for a chocolate cone. "We don't have chocolate," the clerk replies. "Well then, strawberry," the fellow says. "We don't have strawberry," the clerk says. "Vanilla?" the fellow asks. "Nope." "Well, what do you have?" he asks. The hippie leans on the counter. "Turnip, fig or trout," he says. We laughed so hard and so long we had to abandon the ice cream line.
I remember a big-eyed, big-bottomed woman at the New Buffalo commune in New Mexico, where they once held a two-day orgy to cure the clap with tequila and peyote, who called herself Suzi Creamcheese, after a Crumb character.
You probably remember, whatever your age, "Keep on Truckin'". That, and the unforgettable sketch that went with it, ripped off and used everywhere, was R. Crumb.
Seattle's Fantagraphic Books has been publishing Crumb's collected works, in -- so far -- fifteen beautifully produced, award-winning, slick 9 x 12 volumes. The current volume has Crumb art from the mid-1980s, including his creations for WEIRDO comics, his bizarre comic-book adaptation of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and the gloriously uncategorizable "Where Has It Gone, All the Beautiful Music of Our Grandparents?"
The volume includes some delights: Crumb's first collaboration with sweat-and-booze poet Charles Bukowski, a chapbook; a number of striking album covers for jazz and blues albums; a cartoon bio of Mississippi Blues singer Charley Patton; comic book covers; and a number of fresh and endearing wedding invitations, birth announcements, community posters and commercial broadsides for small businesses.
Crumb's comics inevitably include massive female rumps, rubbery dicks, and slobbery humping. Dignity is rarely a central theme. One unexplained single panel has this caption: "He's so dick-fingered he can't pick his nose without puttin' his eye out." A surprising amount of Crumb's art still has an uncanny contemporary resonance: a slash at the bottom of a four-color cover asks, "IS REAGAN CRAZY OR JUST PLAIN STUPID."
Of course, any collection of R. Crumb's work includes Crumb himself. You know him instantly: the too-small fedora, coke-bottle glasses and shabby suitcoat, the irascible but somehow hangdog manner. It really is Crumb, every neurosis unflinchingly visible (the man's a walking museum of obsessions, fears and hang-ups). How can anyone so unlovable be so...lovable?
I recommend these books, whether for their graying nostalgia, if you're of that certain age, or as a glimpse, if I can mix metaphors, of the underbelly of one of the most interesting and important periods in the social history of the late 20th Century. We should value those rare periods of truthtelling in American society. Crumb tells some important truths.
-- Bill Noble
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About the Publisher:
Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2001, Fantagraphics Books is the world's
leading publisher of cutting-edge work by today's most popular alternative
comic artists, as well as collections of work by the greatest of the
underground comix artists and classic comic strips. Fantagraphics Books'
goal is to produce comics for an audience that tends to appreciate comics as
a serious means of expression on the level of film, theater, or literature.
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