He changed the way a generation saw things, taught it to look at seediness and depression as a source of humor and even beauty. Crumb got famous, and the people who remembered him for 25 years have a hard time imagining that other people haven't. Kids today, what do they know? And how soon they forget. I'd hate my friends to know you used to read stuff like that." Your kid gets into your old comics collection in the attic. Nowadays, it's the kids who don't understand, and the parents who can't explain. It wasn't just Crumb's bizarre sex and drugs, but the assaultive nerd pointlessness, the willful stupidity of children's humor, like the "Har Har Page," which begins with a fat guy asking, "If I pick my nose, what do I do with th' snot, huh?" Underground comics appealed to an older crowd, but it was impossible to imagine parents understanding Crumb any more than they'd understood horror comics. Under pressure from right-thinking Americans, the publishers agreed in 1956 to censor the horror and crime comics. They were sexy too - the postures, the Wonderbra attitude toward anatomy. "Good Lord! (Choke!)" as EC characters were always saying at the latest flaying or dismemberment. Comics back then, particularly EC horror comics, were viewed by upright types as marching orders for armies of what were called "juvenile delinquents." Frederic Wertham, author of "Seduction of the Innocents," told a congressional committee in 1954. This comic book is part of that plan."Ĭomic books lend themselves to subversion, as one Dr. The truth is, I'm one of the world's last great medieval thinkers! You might say I'm a mad scientist for my plans have been worked out quite methodically, logically. The true protagonist is always Crumb as either artist of character.Ī panel in Zap Comics, called "Definitely a Case of Derangement," begins with Crumb's wife cowering naked in a corner while he storms around ranting: "From the bedroom closet I operate a huge network of radios, sending out incantations, curses, voodoo hoodoo! I've been called an evil genius. "It is?" asks Flakey, always the seeker and sucker. Natural grabs Flakey Foont's shoulder and says: "I'll let ya in on a secret! The whole universe is COMPLETELY INSANE!"
Natural, who was a lascivious, freeloading, prankster satire on the notion that some guru, master or roshi had The Answer.
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Fritz ended up in an animated movie that Crumb hated, just as he hated all the T-shirts, vans, hats, posters and so on that ripped off "Keep on Truckin'." Another Crumb classic was the robed and bearded Mr. If you apprenticed the craft of hipness back then, you might remember the opportunistic Fritz the Cat spouting Aquarian Age cliches to get girls. If Peter Max was the suave culture hero artist then, with his drawings that looked like crib decorations, Robert Crumb was the nerd antihero, with his rounded, foodlike bouncy-baby characters lusting, despairing, hating and winking with huge irony at it all.Ī 1972 Crumb character named Fuzzy the Bunny asks about "The Mary Tyler Moore Show": "They sing in the theme song about love' being all around' her but what about all the hate? What about all the hate around Mary Tyler Moore?" It must have meant something or a two-hour documentary film called "Crumb" wouldn't have opened here on Friday.
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What did it mean? Put more glide in your stride, more zip in your trip, hang in there but don't get hung up, dig the Kerouacian quirks of the mad sidewalks of America. Once he was a celebrity among students, communards, acid heads, runaways, guru-groupies and other members of that mind-tribe known as "the '60s." He was an outsider, a slouching nerd with a mustache that looked as though he were still trying to grow it, but he was also the comic-book laureate, the creator of the "Keep on Truckin' " panel showing stoned urban characters with huge shoes and little heads trucking down the street, leaning back and strewing their feet before them in a hipster cakewalk against a lurking city skyline that hints at Apocalypse. You could talk to a lot of high school kids, even college kids or art school kids before you'd find anybody who'd heard of R.
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