Crumb's earliest comics work was done in a super cartoony, big-foot style. His work never lost that expressive cartooniness, but in Weirdo it is allied with more realistically observed and rendered details - his figures, especially, look like they've been drawn from life. Some of his pieces are inked with thick, heavy brushwork; others by an elaborate network of fine hatching and cross-hatching which creates a wide gradation of tone and texture.
My favourite cover is probably the one for issue 4, a modern-day variation of "Christ Carrying the Cross" by Hieronymous Bosch. Christ, holding a copy of Weirdo, is surrounded by a crowd full of scruffiness and corruption; conniving corporate leaders, politicians, a cop, a big-haired preacher pushing genuine prayer cloths, and in one corner a beatific young woman with golden hair wearing St. Veronica's vile bearing the sacred image as a t-shirt.Bosch is an apt choice since Crumb shares the Flemish painter's jaundiced view of a weak and foolish humanity, although they obviously differ on lust as a deadly sin. The border illustration is a cross between a medieval Last Judgement and an old MAD cover.
My second favourite cover is from issue 14, subtitled "America wallows in its own filth", which portrays a typically voluptuous Crumb girl with muddy legs and a Madonna top on her bra-less bosom, riding a hog and singing "Sally in the Garden"as an army of Kilroys crowds the pig-pen. In both pieces the penwork is excruciatingly lovely. Crumb also takes particular care in playing with the flat colours of the printing process to achieve depth and subtlety.
Crumb is never brainless or shrill. Even his most bile-filled rantings are done with wit and intelligence and self-deprecation. His essay "Where Has It Gone, The Beautiful Music of Our Grandparents - It Died With Them... That's Where It Went" begins with Crumb being driven crazy by obnoxious pop music in a restaurant. After assaulting a rock star and his agent, Crumb launches into a fascinating history of music, contrasting the overly-refined classical "masterpieces" created for the aristocracy with the low-down folk music of peasants who would jump and dance with such abandon that their noses bled. He bemoans the destruction of folk traditions around the globe - a young man with a blaring boom box being the envy of his village.
Crumb's ability to use comics as a medium for serious work is fully evident in one of his most interesting pieces, "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick", which chronicles the last years of the highly-regarded science fiction writer who experience an intense vision of the apocalypse and believed that he was possessed by the spirit of Elijah. The dark, heavy style of the artwork perfectly reflects the mood of the story. Dick re-experienced the brutal parroting of John the Baptist and even his everyday life was coloured by flashbacks to times of persecution. Paradoxically, Dick functioned much better in the real world while "possessed" than he had before. In the end the question lingers: was he experiencing the onset of schizophrenia or a "mystic revelation"?
Drawn in a similar style is "Footsy". With remarkable recall Crumb vividly paints a bitter and funny picture of his high school world, where his social ineptitude with girls forced him to deal with his desires furtively via this "sneaky little game". Crumb never spares himself the rod in his work.
"I Remember The Sixties" relates how LSD transformed his life. It dissects the Summer of Love which was soon destroyed by "wolves" and rampant paranoia. crumb's own LSD visions ranged from the hellish to states of "ecstatic grace". The piece ends on a strange note with a dream of Paradise Lost as Crumb encounters some young centaurs who only see him as a funny, bent old man.
Another great piece is an excerpt from "Boswell's London Journal, 1762-63", which relates the plump, pleasure-loving Sir James' social and amorous exploits. He will be discussing philosophy in one breath and tartly commentating upon a whore whose "avarice was as large as her ass."
It is ironic and indicative of the state of culture in this country, that the work of one of its truest artists has appeared primarily in obscure, underground, always-on-the-edge-of-going-under rags like Weirdo.
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