“I like your comics, kid. They’re very good. Just stay away from cocktail parties.”
Charles Bukowski delivered this evergreen piece of advice in the 1960s to the King of Underground Comics, Robert Crumb. Crumb indeed did his best to steer clear of the US bourgeois jet-setting class that he and Bukowski had then pinpointed as the veritable enemy.
Crumb once warned that the collective unconscious of the US “was/is the product of a commercial, industrialized, capitalist society drenched in low-grade, dishonest popular entertainment populated with human stereotypes of all kinds.” So he went underground, creating countercultural comics of the sort Robert Hughes once described, not unreasonably, as Hieronymus Bosch for the twentieth century. They capture the deathly shitting-fucking-buying mentality of the US modern landscape, and they do it better than the polite, tasteful provocations fond in any gallery or museum of his time. Dan Nadel’s excellent, comprehensive biography of the legendary comic artist—Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life—shows how he did it.
If you know nothing about Crumb, you might want to first see Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff’s captivating documentary portrait of the man. Watching it, you realize that not even Franz Kafka in the throes of his most girl-haunted nightmares could have made up an original like Crumb. You get a good sense of the outré drawings, the anti-“good”-taste sensibility, and the tragicomic Ibsen-like family that created Crumb. Now, the classic 1994 film and the 2025 biography exist in a productive dialectical relationship to each other. Nadel’s deep, careful research contextualizes Zwigoff’s 1994 classic, helping us better understand Crumb’s complicated family roots. And through the remarkable intimacy Nadel achieves with his subject, we get pages of Crumb’s unvarnished considerations on art, relationships, and politics. Here is Crumb, on the outsized influence of his brother Charles: “I always liked to draw, but [Charles] made me draw comics. I just had to draw. If I didn’t… he said I was worthless.” Charles’s shame was powerful: “Once he got me on it, there was no getting off it. I was set on that track like a trolley car. Other than drawing I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even tie my shoes.”
A june 1963 doodle sheet by R. Crumb.
Courtesy R. Crumb
Nadel is great at situating both Crumb’s achievement and the nature of his rebellion. Crumb became famous for drawing many characters—Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, as well as his pasty-skinned, long-legged grotesques with buck teeth and pinheads, with captions like HEY HEY HEY…KEEP ON TRUCKIN’….TRUCKIN’ ON DOWN…DOWN THE LINE. Crumb later called these string-cheese-legged creatures “psychotic manifestations of some grimy part of America’s collective unconscious.”
So naturally, Baby Boomer fans and entrepreneurs infringed upon Crumb’s copyright, bootlegging his drawings endlessly, plastering them on posters and bumper stickers, declaring it theirs in perpetuity. Eventually, Crumb had to file a cease-and-desist lawsuit against any merchandisers looking to make a cheap dollar on his labor.
He was ripped off regularly, even for his most iconic commissions.Infamously, Nadel tells us, Columbia Records only paid Crumb $600—or $5,500 today—for drawing the iconic art cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s landmark 1968 record Cheap Thrills. It was the breakthrough of Janis Joplin’s career, though compulsive-78-record-collector Crumb, who hates most American rock and pop after the 1930s, preferred Joplin’s earlier music, “when she sang old time country music and blues in small clubs.”
Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills.
Courtesy R. Crumb.
For our purposes, Nadel raises good questions about Crumb’s confused status in the wide world of art. One feels that his big-assed dominating girls, his weak-willed and knock-kneed boys all begging to be stepped on, his grotesque stereotypes of Black and white alike, and his generally sinister and bleak vision of American modernity all emerge from a particular popular lexicon now lost in the rush to monetize every excreted aspect of our lives. For Crumb, the early 1920s “race” records of bluesmen and “hillbilly” country singles, as well as the earliest generation of postwar comics, are at dramatic odds with later industry-produced “art of the people”: Hollywood, Motown, DC and Marvel Comics. Toward this difference, Crumb was outright contemptuous. But: this anti-capitalist talent still must, like the artists working during the age of the Medicis, eat. So he played ball with the tastemakers, galleries, museums, and money-men—to varying degrees of success.
Recall how little Crumb was paid for drawing one of the most memorable album covers ever. By the 1990s, though, he was able to sell six sketchbooks to a collector in Paris for about $100,000. He used the money to buy a new home for his family in Sauve, a small medieval village in the South of France filled with privacy-obsessed expats and May ’68 leftists fleeing the militarized Paris. Crumb’s struggle to adapt nimbly to the disastrous mandates of the unipolar, Americanized world, a world that tried and tries to tether him to a 1960s counterculture whose values he never fully identified with, is part of Nadel’s expertly detailed narrative.
In 1967, Crumb held his first museum show in the heart of Midwest USA, at the now defunct Lakeview Center for the Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois. It was a cinematic disaster by all accounts, and a prescient clash of high and low tastes. The show, “The American Scene,”was, in Crumb’s words, “my personal attack on the absurd, sick, ridiculous world that we live in,” serving up to Peorians images of girls with heads smashed into television screens (Boobtube, 1966) and of plastic women smiling so hard their faces melt from the strain (Untitled, 1966).
A page from R. Crumb’s The Yum Yum Book, 1963.
Courtesy R. Crumb.
It was Crumb’s first time producing artwork solely for exhibition. But the innovative show generated no reviews, and he only sold a single drawing for $25. Reportedly, a middle-aged woman in a fur stole walked up to Crumb at the reception and asked him, “Why do you hate us?” He giggled, glancing nervously down at his shoes.
Coastal, urban tastes were perhaps more receptive to Crumb’s apocalyptic vision—yet to what end? The city-slick aim was to more easily commodify him. While the low-brows mined his drawings for unauthorized tees, the high-brows spun the man as an Artiste, a producer of luxury cultural goods that showed the American Nightmare like it really Is.In 1970, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented his drawings in the exhibition “Human Concern/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art”alongside Bruce Conner, Nancy Grossman, Peter Saul. It was a landmark amalgamation of film, comics, painting, and sculpture. As noted by Nadel, himself the curator-at-large of the soon-to-open Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, “Art history and contexts would have to expand to accommodate [Crumb’s] achievement.”
In the later post-Whitney years, Crumb began to draw to more “highbrow” tastes: his lovely book on Kafka in 1993 (next to Cheap Thrills, this was my own introduction to Crumb and Kafka as a lad of 14), a series of comics on Art and Beauty, and a fully illustrated Book of Genesis. The culmination of Crumb’s respectability, undoubtedly, came in 2006, when he signed on to be represented by David Zwirner. As Crumb notes, “Zwirner is interesting. It’s scary. You go there, they’re all nice people, just wide-eyed art idealists… And yet, what is the whole thing founded on? Money and power. So, where’s your allegiances to the working classes now, jerky? It’s hypocritical.”
Crumb “remains baffled” by the doors opened as a result of his Zwirner signing: the luxuries, the nouveau riche customs, the canonizations. He has settled into a late style that prizes the drawing of the line of a thing, rather than the thing itself. “Happens to musicians,” Crumb tells Nadel. “A lot of the jazz musicians I admire became technically better later. But in their early stuff, though they’re not as technically proficient, it has the bright enthusiasm of youth… Later they withdraw into their technical challenges.” In 2019, he drew a meticulous, topical portrait of Stormy Daniels, noting simply that he found her interesting to draw.
Though thoroughly politicized, Crumb claims he’s never been capital-P “Political.” During the 1960s, as he tells Nadel, Crumb “wasn’t involved in that [decade’s] collective political passion. I’d go to those events or any kind of political event and just wind up looking at the girls.” Nadel rephrases it: Crumb “was busy in his mind, developing elaborate idiosyncratic masturbation fantasies.” What do we make of these distractions now, as technocrats get richer, the citizens of Altadena still feel their city go up in flames, the distance between Peoria and Palestine shrinks, and we still feel conveniently helpless? Ultimately, the lesson of the great Crumb, for me, is that life blooms when one begins to see beyond the stifling confines of the horny id, even if the id will not abandon us anytime soon.