Robert Crumb’s life is an open comic book. With Zap Comix (1968), he launched the underground comics movement promoting uninhibited self-expression. This was exemplified by his satirical exposés of the hypocrisies of American culture and his riven personality, which contains multitudes. His surreal, frequently scatological tales combine the intricate cross-hatching of nineteenth century political cartoonists such as Thomas Nast with the goofy simplicity of Disney’s “funny animal” comics. In his infamous “Joe Blow” (Zap #4, 1969), he illustrated in unsparing detail the ideal American family united through incest (the issue became the first comic book to be declared obscene in the US); his last major work is a painstaking rendering of the book of Genesis (George Lucas purchased the original artwork in 2015 for $2.9 million).
Crumb chose Dan Nadel, a museum curator and expert on comics, to be his authorized biographer, granting him access to the extensive family archives. Nadel had final say over the content; Crumb’s sole condition was that the book contend with controversies inspired by his work and life. Crumb convincingly situates the artist as a significant figure in twentieth-century American culture who attained his teenage ambition to “express reality to its fullest in the comic[s]”. For Nadel, the underground movement that Crumb initiated freed American comics from their focus on juvenile escapism and “dragged the medium into adulthood”.
Nadel’s stylish narrative is at once nuanced and propulsive, based as it is on a life fuelled by sex, drugs, some rock n’ roll (Crumb did the iconic cover of Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills album) and much early jazz (Crumb’s passion). Crumb establishes its judicious approach with a sympathetic account of the artist’s parents, usually depicted as monsters. Crumb’s father, Charles “Chuck” Crumb, projected the middle-class ideal of hard work, sobriety and respectability. He joined the Marines and returned from the Second World War with a Purple Heart. In 1940, he met Beatrice Hall, a vivacious but unstable woman from an abusive working-class family. By 1946, the couple had five children: Robert, the third, was born in 1943.
Chuck and Bea were outwardly model citizens, but behind closed doors they fought frequently, sometimes bloodily. Bea’s mental health deteriorated in the early 1950s; Chuck, tolerant of his obedient daughters, berated his three unruly sons for being unmanly and disrespectful. He struck five-year-old Robert, causing him to fall and break his collarbone, and repeatedly beat Robert’s elder brother, Charles, whom he may have guessed was homosexual. (Nadel suggests this may have been true for Chuck as well.) Monsters, yes: yet Nadel humanizes both parents by excavating their difficult lives and failed dreams.
Like the Brontës, the Crumb children survived their American gothic childhood by withdrawing into co-created imaginary worlds. Charles marshalled his three younger siblings into producing numerous comics through the 1950s and was Crumb’s acknowledged mentor, teaching him to draw fluently and rapidly. The brothers were ardent Catholics as children, but lost their faith during their teens: comics fandom replaced religion.
Crumb also lost his naïve faith in the American Dream as a teenager, having discovered Mad magazine and the literature of the Beats. He was ostracized in high school and embittered by being rejected by women, adopting a lifelong stance of the disillusioned outsider disgusted by the falsehoods of American society and culture. His misanthropy was counterbalanced by a restless search for sources of transcendence. His outlook is shaped by global spiritual traditions, literatures and philosophies no less than by pre-Second World War, “authentic” American popular culture. His character “Mr. Natural”, a cynical eastern-type guru who enjoys bilking consumers of the postwar spiritual marketplace, is sometimes the real deal, spouting koans of genuine insight.
After high school, Crumb hoped to become a cartoonist. Instead, he found work illustrating greetings cards. He married in 1964 and was typically ambivalent about the decision (as he was about the birth of his son). Thereafter, he often abandoned the family, lighting out whenever the spirit, or another woman, moved him. In 1965, he took LSD for the first time. As evinced in his sketchbooks, his work became more improvisatory and intuitive, sloughing off the cute house style of the cards (and of Fritz the Cat, which he created in 1959) for a more surreal approach. He submitted his new drawings to the underground press, which had emerged as part of the growing counterculture and actively sought “adult” cartoons. His work was praised for its originality and technical virtuosity. In 1967, while Crumb was living in San Francisco, an underground editor suggested that the artist create an entire comic book that could be distributed in shops catering to the counterculture. There had been adult-orientated comics earlier in the decade, of course, but they were closer in format to small poetry magazines. With Zap, Crumb pioneered the first underground comic book, its cover stamp (“For Adult Intellectuals Only!”) a declaration of its ambition and legal caution about its salacious content.
The first issue featured a satirical narrative, “Whiteman”, targeting the middle-class racism that defined Crumb’s upbringing. He illustrated this and related tales with offensive racial images, the better to expose them. According to Nadel, the stories were uncontroversial at the time; today, they can be seen as perpetuating the stereotypes they purport to criticize. Crumb later toned down the imagery, but not the frontal attacks on prejudice. In 1993, he published two paired stories, “When the Niggers Take Over America!” and “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!”, explaining: “I just had to expose all the myths people have of blacks and Jews in the rawest way possible to tilt the scale toward truth”.
Zap set the template for underground comics, with more than 1,000 titles appearing between 1968 and 1973. Crumb was the public face of the movement as well as its “Johnny Appleseed”, encouraging new artists and contributing to fledgling publications. He opened Zap to other collaborators, including S. Clay Wilson, whose obscene stories inspired Crumb to unleash his own fantasies of dominating women with strong thighs and bulging buttocks.
Much of the imagery from this period is misogynist: Crumb gradually came to that conclusion himself. The early underground comprised young men who supported sexual liberation insofar as it helped them to get laid. But it also inspired women such as Trina Robbins and Aline Kominsky to create their own comics, extending the movement’s appeal and influence. (Aline would become Crumb’s second wife after a messy divorce in 1977.)
The underground lost its impetus after 1973, hobbled by new censorship laws and the decline of the counterculture. Burnt out after years of overwork, Crumb quit drugs, played more jazz and rethought his approach. The underground excelled at autobiographical narratives, so he began to pay closer attention to his life, changing from “door-busting visionary to contemplative chronicler of the everyday”. This was evident in Weirdo, a magazine for “adult intellectuals” that he launched in 1981. In addition to searching, self-deprecatory stories of his conflicted life, he illustrated the lives and works of artists he admired or identified with, including James Boswell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Philip K. Dick.
Crumb, Aline and their young daughter Sophie emigrated to France in 1991, troubled by the increasing puritanism within American culture. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb appeared in 2009, continuing his exploration of the sacred and the profane. His representation of God comes from a dream in which he claimed to have glimpsed the Lord’s countenance: “It was painful to look at this face, it was so severe and yet so anguished”. Might this have been the face of Crumb’s father, or perhaps that of Crumb himself during his sixth decade? Dan Nadel’s excavation of his multifaceted life allows us to entertain such questions and is itself a book of revelation.
Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis
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