Bay Area cartoonist's biography a real trip

Winnipeg Free Press

07-06-2025

If you're acquainted with Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat or the Keep on Truckin' crew, you'll need no introduction to the subject of this lengthy, detailed, sometimes revelatory, sometimes welcomingly familiar and intimate biography.
R. Crumb (Robert Dennis Crumb, to be precise) is the far-out cartoonist/chronicler of the 1960s and '70s counterculture whose drugs, sexual freedom and music (to a lesser extent) he embraced on the streets and in the parks of San Francisco.
Crumb, born into a highly dysfunctional family rife with mental illness and abuse, and by nature a skeptical outsider, wasn't a natural candidate to capture the spirit of the hippie movement in its Haight-Ashbury home in 1968 when the 25-year-old arrived from the American northeast.
Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life
Yet, he captured the look and feel of the LSD trips as he as enthusiastically chronicled the racial and sexual violence his generation was trying to overcome. Crumb 'satirized the hippies, well-meaning liberals, and most of all himself,'' Nadel writes.
If that urgent message hadn't found its moment, the modern bestselling graphic novels would be impossible, Nadel adds.
Crumb had long wanted to be a successful cartoonist — he and his brother Charles were relentless comic book makers as kids — and the discovery of Mad magazine in the mid-'50s altered his brain chemistry as surely as the LSD would a decade later. The magazine's subversion freed Crumb from the need for social acceptance, as Mad cover boy Alfred. E. Neuman intoned his catchphrase 'What, me worry?''
Even though Crumb lived in San Francisco during the birth of psychedelic music, he had a lifetime love of 1920s-era dance music, collected countless 78s and performed in a couple of bands with like-minded syncopators.
He met Janis Joplin in San Francisco, and while he liked her well enough, her music not so much, although he illustrated the Cheap Thrills album cover for her and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Nadel recounts the first Crumb-Joplin meeting, where she told him he should grow his hair longer and stop dressing like a character from the depression novel The Grapes of Wrath.
Crumb was on the leading edge of underground comics with his Zap
Comix and many other titles such as Weirdo, Introducing Kafka and The Book of Genesis and others, and his work was rife with sexual themes, often shading into the scatological and pornographic.
He was often short of cash and moved about the country often, and was prone to taking off to visit friends without notice, even when married. He was hitched twice, and in each case he and his partner had regular affairs, sometimes lasting for years. He didn't have much of a relationship with his two children. In later years, he became a vaccine skeptic.
In other words, like many a genius, he at times countered his artistic success with a less salubrious general lifestyle.
Crumb agreed to work with Nadel on this book, but it is a warts-and-all biography. The cartoonist imposed just one condition, Nadel says: 'That I be honest about his faults, look closely at his compulsions, and examine the racially and sexually charged aspects of his work. He would rather risk honesty and see if anyone could understand than co-operate with a hagiography.'
Nadel, the curator-at-large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and author of other books including Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries, 1900-1969, weaves Crumb's present-day remembrances throughout the biography in a way that helps explain the madcap early life that made his name, shaped the underground comic oeuvre and helped develop many other cartoonists along the way.
Nadel says Crumb is fond of saying 'No one understands… But of course, how could they.' It is a statement with many undercurrents, but in this biography Nadel helps readers understand Crumb himself and the effect his life and work had on North American society and a generation that was going to change the world.
At 81, Crumb has slowed down, of course, but at whatever pace he can he still keeps on truckin'.
Chris Smith is a Winnipeg writer.