the r. crumb coffee
table art book |
R. Crumb
Kitchen Sink
January 1997
256 pages
Buy the paperback at bn.com
|
Watching Deconstructing
Harry recently, I realized that Woody Allen had come as close
as anyone to putting the sensibility of R. Crumb onto the screen
-- certainly unintentionally, but the similarities are striking.
All the Crumb trademarks are there in Allen's film: the self-loathing
so extreme it crosses the line into narcissism; the obsession
with women as fetish objects; the compulsion to spew one's demons
out through one's art; the indifference to the pain this spewing
might cause others. The resemblance is even physical; with their
milquetoast features and Coke-bottle glasses, they could be brothers.
Allen's and Crumb's career arcs intersect neatly -- both men
started out with cartoonish humor and gradually got deeper and
darker -- though I don't believe that Crumb would be a Woody
fan, or vice versa. (They're too alike in the wrong ways.) But
Allen, by virtue of writing, directing, and acting in movies
(not to mention the Soon-Yi thing), is much more a household
name than Crumb, who remains a titan among comics artists and
fans but -- even after the brilliant 1995 documentary
about him -- still isn't nearly as recognized as he should be.
Many of you know Crumb even if you don't know Crumb: He's the
one who did the "Keep On Truckin" logo you saw everywhere
in the '70s, and he created Fritz the Cat, appropriated in 1972
by Ralph Bakshi for the notorious X-rated animated feature of
the same name. Both Fritz and the Truckin' logo make appearances
in The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book, a gorgeous new
250-page retrospective of the life and work of America's greatest
living cartoonist. (Not entirely accurate: born in Philadelphia,
the disenchanted Crumb moved to France in 1991.)
Packaged by Kitchen Sink (a longtime underground-comix publisher)
for Little, Brown, this collection serves as a crash course in
Crumb's work. (Only with a cartoonist as insanely prolific as
Crumb could a 250-page book be a tiny sampling.) Editor/art director
Peter Poplaski has done a respectful job, colorizing Crumb's
b&w pages in subtle hues that generally don't drown his intricate
cross-hatching. Despite its title, this is too nice a volume
(and too pricey: $40) to leave on a coffee table at the mercy
of nachos and soda-can condensation rings. The second description
fits better: it's an art book.
Aided by a sort of narration by Crumb (who contributes hand-written
pages of autobiographical anecdotes), the book flips through
40 years of Crumb's life as an artist, from his homemade comics
done with brother Charles (one of the two we met in the documentary)
to his psychedelic phase in the '60s to his France sketchbooks.
One theme remains constant: the need to escape reality, and then
to define and mirror it, through fantasy -- first cheerful and
childlike, then progressively sexual and nihilistic. He's done
wonderful pieces on popular music through the ages and biographical
strips about blues legends, but his scabrous, uncensored material
about sex and women is what's usually remembered.
Crumb has never been a friend to feminists. His attitude is quite
well summed up in this rant from a 1970 strip: "Would you
like me to stop venting my rage on paper? Is that what you'd
like me to do, all you self-righteous, indignant females? All
you poor persecuted downtrodden booshwah cunts? ... Well, listen,
you dumb-assed broads, I'm gonna draw what I fucking well please
to draw, and if you don't like it, FUCK YOU!!" This
rant shows a fine writer at work (it's almost poetic in its slow-burn
rhythm); it also shows maybe not the best human being. His art
resolves this duality -- he's an alchemist making gold out of
venom.
Even though he's been married for two decades to Aline Kominsky
(herself a cartoonist who is, if anything, even more self-loathing
than Crumb) and has a daughter with her, Crumb's ambivalence
about women is still obvious. The book highlights his infamous
Devil Girl, the character that appeared in his infamous strip
shown in Crumb (she loses her head and the "hero,"
Flakey Foont, finds her more attractive without it). We see that
strip here, plus a life-size sculpture of her, and I couldn't
help noticing her eerie resemblance to Aline.
Okay, if he's sick and sexist, why is he important? I could say
that his work offers an unblinking view of sickness and sexism
from the inside, but that would diminish it (just as it would
diminish Dostoyevsky). Crumb gives his id free rein, following
any lead, no matter how dark or repulsive, no matter how bad
it makes him look. This in itself doesn't equal art, but Crumb's
work has the added benefit of being funny -- often appallingly
funny, but still. And he has a Swiftian eye for the telling satirical
detail. He nails Joe Sixpacks as ruthlessly as he skewers upper-middle-class
intellectuals. He drags everyone down into the shit, and
he makes sure that he doesn't get away clean, either. (He's a
little better-looking than his uglified self-portraits would
indicate.)
Perhaps the best testament to Crumb's power is this: When we
got a copy of the book at our library, our custodian -- a 60-year-old
guy who usually favors only books about World War II and had
almost certainly never heard of Crumb -- sat in the break room
with his nose buried in the book for an hour. Now, explicit sexual
material only makes up about ten small panels and three full-page
illustrations in the 250-page book. So it can't just be the dirty
stuff that kept him busy for an hour. I think the sex might have
caught his eye, but he kept reading to see what other stuff this
bizarre character had done. As The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art
Book proves, Crumb has done a lot of other stuff indeed. |
