Robert Crumb

From Philosopedia

Robert Dennis Crumb (30 August 1943 - )

Crumb, the artist usually referred to as R.Crumb, was born to Marine Corps officer Charles and housewife Beatrice Crumb in Philadelphia. He and his siblings - Charles (a suicide in 1995), Maxon (an ascetic), Sandra, and Carol - were witness to their parents' unhappy marriage, and Crumb in the mid-1960s left home for Cleveland, Ohio, obtaining a job with American Greetings Corporation. He lived like a bohemian, married his first wife Dana Morgan (in 1964, divorced in 1977 or 1978; their son Jesse was born in 1968) and was a friend of Harvey Pekar. In 1978 he married Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and their daughter Sophie was born in 1981.

A user of a popular drug of the time, LSD, he was described by Victor Mosques, when seeing his Life Among the Constipated,

• I couldn't tell if it was an old man drawing young, or a young man drawing old. Just like the old-time comics on acid, Crumb was very enamored of the archaic comics, the early comics, and early newspaper strips, just like he was with early music. I was already familiar with his work, but what really got me was the format. Color cover, newsprint inside. Not only that, black and white.

He has been described as an underground artist:

Crumb made his fame underground in the 1960s, with "Fritz the Cat" and, inspired by LSD, "Mr. Natural". He moved to San Francisco in 1967, and became a recognized celebrity in hippie-occupied sections of the city. He says he never much liked hippies, though. Zap Comix pictured a strutting goofball with big feet and the caption "Keep on truckin'". It became a worldwide catchphrase, ubiquitous on T-shirts and bumper stickers, yet a judge later ruled that since Crumb hadn't filed the right paperwork, nobody owed him any royalties for "Keep on truckin'".

When an issue of Zap dealt with incest, several comic book shops selling it were raided by police. In 1972, Ralph Bakshi made Fritz the Cat into an X-rated feature-length cartoon without gaining Crumb's permission; on finding out, Crumb had Fritz the Cat killed off by a jilted lover. In 1977, the IRS demanded $30,000 Crumb didn't have, so he moved to France, returning a year later, after the matter had been settled to the feds' satisfaction. In the 1980s his fame came to the mainstream, with exhibits in famous museums, a documentary, and glowing profiles in Time and on the BBC. Another documentary, Crumb, was a big hit in 1994.

By then, though, he'd had enough of America's increasingly conservative culture. Like most artists, Crumb had old sketchbooks lying around, but unlike most artists he was able to buy a house in France with the proceeds from selling a few of those sketchbooks.

Crumb appeared as himself in two films: Crumb (10 September 1994) and Comic Book Confidential (10 September 1988).

In October 2009, Crumb released a book his publisher calls "scandalous satire" but religionists are shocked that it includes graphic illustrations of Bible character having sexual intercourse along with scenes depicting naked men and women as well as "gratuitous depictions of violence."

David Hajdu, reviewing The Book of Genesis in The New York Times, wrote

. . . Crumb’s God appears, alongside the opening words of Genesis, spinning substance from a void that resembles a cosmic basketball in his enormous, hairy, veiny hands. He is a profoundly — almost grotesquely — human-looking deity, very much the sort of being in whose image vulgar humankind could realistically come forth. His nose has the elongation of age (and an implied proto-Jewishness), and it is dotted with deep pores. His brow is furrowed in a permanent scowl, unchanged throughout the book. (In one of the chapters about Noah, Crumb has God scowling even as he pets a goat.) He wears a long white robe and, over it, a longer white robe of billowing, gentle tresses that flow from his scalp and his face to what would presumably be his feet. However much Crumb may think of his God as a retired ex-Marine, this man-God, in his haggard grandeur, brings to mind the work of two other artists relevant both to Genesis and to Crumb: the self-portrait sketches of Leonardo, who also depicted the Creation; and the early illustrations of St. Nicholas, the God-man of the modern era, as he was conceived by the 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose hatch-work drawing style and piercing insolence have been major influences on Crumb. . . .

Crumb’s is a Genesis for adults — indeed, for adults only, as one might and should expect from an artist whose importance is rooted in his ability to give vivid form to taboos of the imagination with unapologetic bluntness and extravagant explicitness. The prospect of Crumb’s doing the Bible might seem at first a stunt, an all-too-obvious mash-up of the most sacred and the most profane. When I heard about it, I thought immediately of Norman Mailer’s “Gospel According to the Son,” a fictive memoir by Jesus — and an agent’s pitch passing for a novel. Crumb’s book is serious and, for Crumb, restrained. He resists the temptation to go all-out Crumb on us and exaggerate the sordidness, the primitivism and the outright strangeness (by contemporary standards) of parts of the text. What is Genesis about, after all, but resisting temptation?

Crumb luxuriates in the carnality of Genesis without playing it for gratuitous shock or comic effect. Adam and Eve frolic about in the nude, naturally, but in playful, duly innocent, ecstasy. When Lot’s two daughters get him drunk and have sex with him — in duty to the system of primogeniture that dominates Genesis — the images are shocking, yes, but not gratuitously so; the shock is in the act, not in the portrayal. At points, Crumb withholds exactly the kind of graphic details he built a career on revealing: In an image of circumcision, he shows us two splatters of blood, rather than the actual penis being cut. Onan practices coitus interruptus turned away from us. This book, I believe, is the first thing by Crumb ever published without a single image of flying sperm or a sharp blade approaching male genitalia.

(See Harold Bloom's review of Crumb's Book of Genesis.)

Although sometimes said to be a Catholic, he is not so described in his official website nor in his Who's Who in America entry. In fact, as shown by his 2009 book, he satirizes Catholicism to the fullest.