How gleefully puerile, even by enlightened French standards, to reach the top of Paris’s grandest museum of modern art and be greeted by Big Ass Comics (“Weird Sex Fantasies with the Behind in Mind”). The Pompidou Centre is currently running an excellent exhibition on modern comics, which selects as its starting point the countercultural explosion of the Sixties. It shows how the glut of adult-oriented graphic novels available today dates back to that great decade-long loosening up, when scrappy underground artists began to tell absurd, erotic and deeply personal stories using a medium previously reserved almost exclusively for children.
The leader of this movement in the United States was Robert Crumb, a fogeyish eccentric whose explicit visions lit up hippy San Francisco. In addition to his big asses, visitors to the Pompidou will see Crumb’s early hit Zap Comix, with its cover promising “gags, jokes, kozmic trooths”, and Dirty Laundry Comics, a Seventies collaboration where Crumb and his late wife Aline depict themselves nude while a lady in the background yells “Get dressed!”.
Raised by a sadistic father and amphetamine-addicted mother, Crumb’s cartoons were both a means of escape and a vital outlet for the toxicity of his Philadelphia childhood. His elder brother, Charles, became a tormented recluse who lived with his mother and bathed once every six weeks, while his younger brother, Maxon, admitted to a history of molesting women. That Crumb transcended such horrors is a miracle.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, his sordid obsessions, Crumb became the most unlikely ladies’ man since Philip Larkin. With his big, eye-warping glasses, moustache, fedora, nasal whinge and jutting Adam’s apple, Crumb resembled at once a grandfather and a teenage boy. He prowled the epicentre of the hippy movement but preferred blues to psychedelic music, and eschewed long hair and bell-bottoms for the look of an insurance salesman. “I have a compulsion to reveal the truth about myself, for better or for worse,” he told the Louisiana Literature Festival in 2019. “Maybe it’s like a guy who exposes himself in public.”
At what point did this underground icon — described by the critic Robert Hughes as “a kind of American Hogarth” — emerge into the mainstream? Perhaps it was 2009, when Harold Bloom reviewed his graphic novel adaptation of the Book of Genesis in the New York Review of Books? Or else 2018, when a drawing of his character Fritz the Cat sold at auction for $717,000?
In fact, the cartoonist’s apotheosis came in 1994, with the release of Crumb. This remarkable documentary shows why all his lurid depravity matters: Crumb is an artist who draws utterly without fear, putting his darkest fantasies and prejudices on the page. His productions tread the line between art and porn, art and trash, from depictions of industrialisation and louche spiritual gurus to fantasies about nuns who want to chop off his penis. In today’s media landscape, when so much time is devoted to second-guessing how something will be received before it has even taken shape, it is almost impossible to imagine someone making art as provocative and uninhibited as Crumb’s. In one strip from Zap Comix titled “You may not think it’s funny, but I’ve got a morbid sense of humour”, a bespectacled artist resembling Crumb guffaws and sketches a woman as she is crushed by a bus.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe