Showing posts with label Robert Crumb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Crumb. Show all posts

24 October 2021

"Arcade: Too Avant-Garde For The Mafia?" by Alan Moore

Arcade #1-7 (1975-1976)
edited by Art Spiegelman & Bill Griffith
Arcade #1 cover art by Robert Crumb 


INTRODUCTION:

Alan, 
Thanks for the entertaining letter. Seeing as it was of such a high intellectual calibre, we'll most likely print it in our next issue... You almost found us too late. No 7 is just out and No 8 (out in 6-10 months) will be our last as a magazine. After that we go annual, in paperback form. I'm afraid we're a bit too avant-garde for the Mafia. 
Tally ho, 
Griffy

I received the above letter in the late September of 1976 after coming across a handful of issues of Arcade at the comic shop Dark They Were & Golden Eyed. I'd originally picked the magazine up on impulse after being attracted by a cover line that promised the unlikely combination of William S Burroughs and S Clay Wilson, apparently to be found within. What I discovered was a collection of comic material that swiftly elevated Arcade: The Comics Revue to the Olympian reaches of my Three Favourite Comics Ever In The History Of The Universe. As is usually the way when I encounter something I'm really fond of, my condition escalated rapidly from good natured boyish enthusiasm to an embarrassing display of slobbering hysteria. I wrote a long and love-struck letter to the magazine swearing that in order to ensure the continued publication of this Pulp Paragon I would be prepared to have sexual intercourse with a Komodo dragon or kill my family with a blunt butter-knife (or words to that effect). A few weeks latter I received the above rely from Bill Griffiths. I reprint it here partly because I really like the bit about my high intellectual calibre, and partly because of its historical interest: The last issue of Arcade was issue 7. There was no annual paperback. The Mafia obviously got them after all.

During its brief lifespan Arcade published some of the only truly worthwhile material produced during the 1970s, and for a short time seemed almost capable of revitalising the near extinct genus of the Underground Comic. This dream was truncated suddenly when Bill Griffiths woke up one morning to find Zippy The Pinhead's pointed, severed head in bed with him, or whatever way it was that those ruthless pinstripes Sicilians put the frighteners on him. The fact that Arcade folded is a shame; the fact that it has been pointedly ignored ever since is a tragedy... at least on the effete scale with which we aesthetes evaluate tragedies.

In an effort to address the balance a little I'd like to attempt a brief and necessarily inconclusive rundown on the magazine. To understand Arcade you first have to understand a little of its historical context, so I hope you'll bear with me as I do my best to lubricate the dry facts.

Arcade #2
Cover art by Robert Crumb

LUBRICATION:
Arcade #1 was published in the spring of 1975 as a quarterly black and white magazine of around fifty pages, sporting beautiful full colour covers, many by Robert Crumb, printed on card. It appeared at a time when the Underground comic had started to cough up blood after several years of looking pale and ill. The initial wave of energy provided by ZAP Comix had reached its high water mark, broken, and fallen back. The busts and court cases had taken their toll, and the only undergrounds that seemed to be breaking even were those that tended towards sex and horror: Skull, Slow Death and lesser titles seemed to appear with some regularity while the more adventurous and experimental books fell by the wayside. One gets the impression in retrospect that the underground market was slimming itself down and getting rid of its social conscience in preparation for its metamorphosis into the Heavy Metal audience of some years later. Whatever the situation, things looked bleak for the underground.

In 1975 then, Arcade served as a rallying point for those cartoonists who were more concerned with their art than their bank balances. In the process it brought more concentrated intelligence to bear upon the comix strip medium than has been experienced since the balmy heyday of the Great American Newspaper Strip. So what was it all about?

As a package it was delightful: Nice printing on white paper and card covers aside, it had a sort of garish pulp charm that latterday descendants such as RAW can't really hope to capture. Arcade wasn't hard edged and intimidatingly intellectual. It was approachable, and everything from the style of the mast head lettering to the gallery of self-portraits on the contents page reflected this somehow. Entertaining as the package might have been however, it didn't hold a candle to the contents.

The contents of Arcade had a pleasing regularity, considering how diverse the actual material was. Most of the early issues opened with a full page illustrated text feature by Jim Osborne on the inside front cover, similar to the Loathsome Lore features that the late Roy Krenkel did for Warren's early run of Creepy. These were historical items centring upon some famous real-life monster from history, such as baby-butchering Caterina Sforza or Peter Kurten the Düsseldorf vampire. Lovingly illustrated in Osborne's delicate stippling, these catalogues of genuine atrocities became so numbingly terrible as to be almost funny, leading the reader in to the uneasy no-mans land between the disturbing and the amusing that was to almost a trade mark for a number of the most prominent Arcade artists, and the nearest that the magazine ever got to a distinctive House Style.

Arcade #3
Cover art by Robert Crumb

After an imaginatively designed contents and editorial page, the main contents unrolled. As the issues passed, some of these emerged as Arcade's equivalent to continuing features.

SPAIN RODRIGUEZ:
As an example, there seemed to be a sort of unofficial biography spot, in which one of Arcade's regulars would produce a comic strip biography of the character of his choice. These included George Kuchar's darkly comic piece on H.P. Lovecraft and a brilliant study of the life of Henri Rousseau by Bill Griffiths but the very best was a portrait of Stalin by Spain Rodriguez (Arcade #4). Within a limited number of pages, Spain created a convincing picture of the brooding and psychopathic 'Red Monarch' and the strange abstracted landscape in which he lived. The use of heavy block shadows and Rodriguez' powerful sense of composition give a real atmosphere and weight to the story, with an abrupt and brutal pace to the storytelling that matches the chilling nature of the subject matter quite adequately. A scene in which Stalin's wife is reported a 'Suicide' (whatever that meant in Stalinist Russia) is portrayed as a severe downshot, looking straight down from near the ceiling of an elegant bathroom at the woman sprawled upon the floor like a stringless puppet, hard lines of black ink radiating from her slashed wrists and trickling off across the white tiles. And the final images are perfect: The narrative caption boxes relate how, during his final years, Stalin would travel by car along highways built for his solitary personal use across Russia. Wherever he stopped along the way there would be a room waiting for him specially constructed so as to be an exact duplicate of his room in the Kremlin, right down to the book lying open on the bedside table. While this is sinking in, we see three pictures, showing a simple side elevation of a sparsely furnished, neat-looking bedroom. Each picture is identical to the others except that they get progressively smaller. In effect, we get the impression of an endless series of identical rooms stretching away into the empty distance, proving an unnerving glimpse into the mind of someone who once controlled half of the world.

JUSTIN GREEN:
Another high-point of Arcade was Justin Green's Classics Crucified series, in which Green, the undisputed Nabob of Neuroticism and creator of the remarkable Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary, took the concept behind Classics Illustrated to its logical and bloody extreme. Whereas Classics Illustrated somehow managed to maintain an air of false dignity all the time it was sawing Captain Ahab's other leg off in an attempt to fit Moby Dick into a comic-book, Green pulled out all the stops and deliberately vulgarised works of classic literature with all the delicacy of a PCP-crazed dog-sodomist. The best example is probably his three page reworking of Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment in issue 3 of Arcade. I won't go into detail, but the final panel should adequately describe the reverence with which this greatest of Russian novelists has been approached. After tortured protagonist Raskolnikov has reached the point of self-revelation that has eluded him throughout this massive novel ("Oh God! I just realised... I'm a shitty murderer and a terrible person!") his persecutor, Inspector Porfiry Petrovich, strikes up a relationship with Raskolnikov's loved one, Sonia. In the last panel, Green summarises Dostoevsky's notion that the torture of one individual is somehow redeemed in the elevation of others to loving harmony, most adequately as Inspector Petrovich poignantly remarks, "Just think... if those two bimbos wasn't knocked off, I never woulda met Sonia!" Sonia gazes at him adoringly and says, "He is my Sugar-Father." End of strip. For my part I thought it was better than the original.

KIM DEITCH:
Then there was Kim Deitch's recountings of the stories upon his own pet theme: Famous Frauds. Filtered through Deitch's Fleischer-esque sensibilities, the stories of such notable tricksters as Don Carlos Balmo-I, who was actually a woman, and the chess-playing robot Ajeeb took on a new and surreal dimension. Ajeeb was particularly interesting: a huge and hollow ‘automaton' concealing a small human operative, Ajeeb outlasted several operators – one of whom turned to drink and went mad after spending his entire working life sitting in the cramped interior of the stuffy and lightless pseudo-robot – before finally suffering the humiliation of defeat at the hands of an 11 year old boy. The boy won a box of cigars, and that was Bobby Fischer's very first chess prize. The stories are simply told and fascinating, and therein lies a lot of the appeal, both of Deitch's work in particular and of Arcade in general: the stuff was well written and well constructed. It hung together well and it had a point. Would that there were four books like that around today.

Arcade #4
Cover art by Robert Crumb

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS:
Most issues had a text feature written by some contemporary notable and illustrated by one of the Arcade crew. The idea worked well, the three page text features broke up the otherwise acres of comic strip and set off the work to its best effect by contrast. The better pieces in this category included two inspiring pairings: Charles Bukowski and Robert Crumb; and S. Clay Wilson and William Burroughs. Crumb's rubbery Terrytoon lines perfectly evoked the seamy nostalgia of Bukowski's prose, while in Burroughs S. Clay Wilson seemed to have found a match for his own abnormally horrid imagination.

Jim Hoberman also contributed a text column, Space Age Confidential by name. Variously illustrated by Deitch, Robert Williams and Art Spiegelman, Space Age Confidential talked enthrallingly about such American icons as Coca-Cola, Disneyworld and President Calvin Coolidge. In doing so it underlined another prominent strand running through Arcade, a sort of determination to expose the dark and bizarre side of contemporary pop culture, starting with the comic strip and working outwards.

Despite the heavy whiff of Dadaism in the material, Arcade displayed nothing but the greatest respect for the medium it was working within. Great moments in the medium's past were recalled and re-examined in a feature called Arcade Archives. While at the moment we have an exemplary publication like Nemo to help us find out about strips of the past, in 1975 Arcade Archive's four or five pages a quarter were the best thing on offer. It was here that I first discovered such glittering geniuses as Harrison Cady, and became convinced that a familiar name like H.M. Bateman might be worth a deeper examination.

This concern for the past of the medium was matched with a concern for its future that was best reflected in a feature known as Arcade Sideshow, which rounded out the magazine. Sideshow consisted of numerous half-page strips by new artists, or occasionally by an older hand who simply wanted to experiment with the interesting restrictions of the half-page format. Aline Kominsky, Mark Beyer, Sally Cruikshank, Rory Hayes - I encountered them all for the first time in the sawdust and popcorn atmosphere of the Sideshow. The title seemed especially adequate in light of the freakishness of some of the art-styles on display. It was my first exposure to the idea of primitivism in comic art, and after my initial conditioned repulsion had worn off – about three months – I found myself approaching the work of people like the late Rory Hayes with a real and almost inexplicable pleasure. This is the edge of the underground that most comic fans balk at. When confronted by the painful amateurishness of an Aline Kominsky, the mind conditioned to Neal Adams and Mike Golden will probably recoil in stark terror and vomit mauve bile. The root of the argument seems to be, "But she can't draw." In terms of standard comic art, this is perfectly true. John Byrne can draw and Aline Kominsky can't. What you have to realise however, is that the drawing ability of the artist is not what art is about. Not all the time. And I for one would love to see Aline Kominsky do an issue of the Fantastic Four.

All of the above is an attempt to list just the continuing features of Arcade,  and even so it is incomplete. I haven't mentioned Art Spiegelman's Real Dream spot, where readers were invited to send in dreams for Spiegelman to illustrate, or Yippie monument Paul Krassner's expose upon Timothy Leary and the grim facts behind the Lenny Bruce industry. This is largely because the most significant of Arcade's contributions to the medium were one-off pieces rather than continuing features. However astonishing the material listed above might actually be it was really only the setting for the various pieces de resistance that Arcade was to present over its seven issue lifespan.

There were so many good pieces, even in such a drastically curtailed run, that I can only hope to list a few in passing before tackling a couple of personal favourites in depth. There was Jay Kinney's wordless and ominous Midnight, executed entirely upon scaper-board; the late Willy Murphy's excellent Arnold Peck adventures, Diane Noomin's Sultana of schlock Didi Glitz in a series of vacuous vignettes, the stunning colour work adorning the back covers by Spiegelman, Moscoso, McMillan, Robert Williams, Kliban and others, and so on and so on in an endless shopping list of extraordinary talent gathered in one place at one time. Quite genuinely, this was the most perfectly conceived and executed comic publication since Harvey Kurtzman's MAD, and there has been nothing like it since.

Arcade #5
Cover art by Jay Lynch

I think that without a doubt the three most consistent creators working at Arcade were the magazines editors; Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman; and that cranky old misogynist Robert Crumb himself.

ROBERT CRUMB:
Crumb's Arcade work, although it has perhaps been surpassed by some of the material he's contributed to Weirdo, was his best to date at that point. Apart from surprisingly lyrical covers, he contributed a healthy number of strips to the magazine's interior, including a two-page dissertation upon buttocks, a selection of unpublished drawings from his sketchbook that proved every bit a meticulous and fascinating as his comic work, and a stunning and bleak look at like in This Here Modern America that oozed despair. Indeed, after looking at the best two pieces that Crumb contributed to Arcade one might be forgiven for assuming that the Mid-Seventies were not a particularly happy time for the artist.

In Arcade #6, Crumb contributed something that looked very much like the last word in funny animal anthropomorphism at the time, and still does to a certain extent. Entitled Ain't It Nice and starring Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies, the strip portrayed a vision of inner urban life and love every bit as flatly and methodically as something like Last Exit To Brooklyn could achieve in the literary field. It was seven pages long, and each page had a grid containing twenty individual panels. The strip minutely chronicles a day in the life of two working class inner urban bears, Jippo and Boopsy, as they go through their day. Some moments are ugly, some are surprisingly touching, but by the end of the strip you feel a sort of pang of recognition, along with a sensation of having learned something. Crumb has used funny animals in the classic sense: By showing human foibles portrayed by animals an artist can sidestep all the obscuring preconceptions that people have about human behaviour and enable them to look at themselves dispassionately as if they were observing another species. The beauty of Crumb's concept here is that he has made the human behaviour being portrayed a lot more disturbingly naturalistic and near the knuckle than most of his predecessors. In doing so he also shows us how much of the animal there is in human behaviour by way of the rough physical preliminaries that the two-lovers go through before finally arriving at a sloppy and drunken sexual bout. There's a sort of inversion of the principals of anthropomorphism there that hasn't been attempted since Kurtzman/Elder Mickey Rodent strip in MAD.

Crumb's best piece, however, concerned real people. Appearing in Arcade #3 under the title That's Life, it chronicled the brief and unspectacular rise and fall of a black backwoods singer called Tommy Grady who cut one 78rpm record before being shot dead in 1931. The first three pages take us through Tommy Grady's last year of life. He fights with his wife and hits the road taking only a knapsack and a guitar. Picked up by friends on their way to Memphis to cut a record, he is persuaded to cut a tune himself as part of the then-current boom in Ethnic Music. Blowing his first pay-check on drink he picks up a woman and gets shot dead in a senseless argument with her boyfriend. The next two pages carry us through the depression of the thirties, when many of the small record labels went out of business and a large number of records deleted, Tommy Grady's amongst them. The final page brings us up to the seventies, where an avaricious blues collector looking suspiciously like Crumb himself, buys a solitary surviving copy of Tommy Grady's only record from an old black woman as part of a job lot. He takes it to his blues aficionado friends in L.A. who give it a public airing over their expensive hi-fi units. The last panel shows a crowd of rich white-American blues scholars smiling blissfully as Tommy Grady's voice drifts around the elegant apartment: "Po-o boy, lo-ong way f'um home... Po-o boy lo-ong way f'um home..." A lone caption reminds us of the title: "...And that's life!" Crumb at his manic-depressive zenith.

Arcade #6
Cover art by Robert Crumb

BILL GRIFFITH:
The fact that the two editors of Arcade, Griffith and Spiegelman, contributed so many of the most wilfully experimental pieces (as well as the best in many instances) leads me to suspect that they saw the experimental angle as one of Arcade's major reasons for existence, and individually they followed their convictions with a vengeance. Griffith contributed a number of truly memorable pieces including a number of half-page Griffiths Observatory strips for the Sideshow feature. The Rousseau piece mentioned earlier figured highly amongst the rest of his works, as do the Commedia Dell Zippy and the disturbing The Toad & The Madman in which Mr Toad and Alfred Jarry discourse upon the unspeakable truth. Also the strictly paced piece of film noir entitled Doll Boy should be given a mention if only for its style and control.

Griffith's best piece, at least in my mind, remains A Fools Paradise Revisited in Arcade #3. In this ten page strip, Griffith followed the passage of the ubiquitous Zippy The Pinhead through a lavish and classical Stately home. Each page is divided into four wide horizontal panels, stacked one on top of the other, creating a cinemascope effect (or Zippyscope, as the artist would have it). After a number a splendid sequences made more evocative by the panoramic nature of the visuals, we get a single deviation from this rigid page structure. One strip on the last page is broken into seven smaller panels, showing Zippy The Pinhead's progress as he drifts out to sea upon a chunk of ice-berg. Zippy's comment at this juncture, delivered with one word in each panel as the pitiful Pinhead drifts away towards the distant horizon, is revealing: "I Hate Everything That's Modern. Everything. That's. Modern. I Hate. It..." It's not until you've read it a few times that you realise that the sun is slowly rising in the background as night gives way to daytime, and that the magnificent microcephile has managed to string one sentence out over some three or four hours. Like Jarry's Pere Ubu, Zippy perpetrates a sort of comedy of the unconscious, stumbling through a half-understood landscape shattering time, logic and preconception as he goes. The bits that you laugh at loudest are always the bits that you least understand consciously, and at times the Zippy mystique manifests itself eerily beneath the veneer of slapstick – and nowhere more effectively than here.

ART SPIEGELMAN:
Griffith's co-editor, Art Spiegelman, is the last artist under discussion here. Of all the contributors to Arcade, Spiegelman remains the most creatively self-conscious in his use of the medium, and in consequence achieves many of the more penetrating insights. For the most part Spiegelman's work is as much about the comic-strip medium as whatever story he happens to be telling. While this is true to a lesser extent even of such recent work as Maus, the trend for self-examination was most apparent during Spiegelman's stint on Arcade.

In the first issue, Spiegelman contributed a piece entitled Cracking Jokes which manages to provide an accurate and scholarly dissertation upon humour while being in itself funny. By taking a simple four frame gag and examining it over and over again from every conceivable standpoint for three pages, Spiegelman actually manages to say something about humour itself at the same time as expanding one's notions of what the comic medium is capable of.

Other notable strips include Ace Hole Midget Detective, in which Spiegelman manages to weave a detective story in together with a few observations on Picasso and the relationship between comics and modern art; and As The Mind Reels, in which he successfully intercuts between a mundane soap-opera, a pasta advertisement, a bored housewife's telephone conversation and his own working notes for the strip, creating a sort of collage of everyday life punctuated by televisual inanity, contrasting the real-life of soap operas with the real-life of the everyday world.

My favourite Spiegelman piece, however, is a two page exercise included in Arcade #6, entitled The Malpractice Suite. What Spiegelman has done is to take panels from the Rex Morgan newspaper strip by Bradley and Edgington - head and shoulders shots for the most part – and then extend the lines of the image beyond the panel borders to form them into new shapes and contexts. As an example, we see a standard Rex Morgan panel with a woman up close in the foreground, turning away from us in a head and shoulders shot. She is starting to glance towards a man in a raincoat who has just come to the door, his feet invisible below the bottom panel borders, however we see that what Spiegelman has added to the original design has placed it into a disturbingly different and surreal context. The woman whose face we see in the foreground is given a crude and stumpy body beyond the frame borders, the blouse open to reveal naked and sagging breasts. The man in the background, it transpires is not in the background at all. He's about eight inches high and he's in the foreground. The bare-breasted woman is holding him up in one hand like a popsicle. The sudden change in he way that reality is perceived is disturbing, and suggests all of the subliminal tensions and currents that exist just beyond the panel borders of everyday life.

Arcade #7
Cover art by M.K. Brown

LEGACY:
Of course the most bewildering thing is exactly how they managed to fit all of the good material mentioned at wearying length above as well as all the worthy stuff I didn't mention – into a mere seven issues, although I for one am glad that they did. To me Arcade was an almost perfect culmination of the whole idea of Underground Comix. Granted, there have been worthy individual efforts by the various Arcade contributors since then, but somehow without the same flair. RAW is a splendid magazine, but it's intimidating. I can't bring myself to criticise anything that is that well printed and I find myself approaching RAW in almost the same way as I approach gallery art - coldly and from a polite distance. Crumb's Weirdo is similarly excellent, but I think that at least in terms of a magazine he needed someone to balance his consuming taste for artistic deviance with slightly less iconoclastic sensibilities.

Balance is what Arcade achieved, in a nutshell. It balanced Griffiths' metaphysical slapstick against Spiegelman's thirst for self-reverential comic material and ground their more explosive experiments with a solid anchor of Robert Crumb's simple and unadorned storytelling. It pushed the medium in all sorts of new directions, the vast majority of which still remain to be properly explored almost ten years later. Anyone seriously interested in seeing what directions comics might go in the future could do a lot worse than checking out just how far they've been in the not too distant past.

If the Mafia were really responsible for Arcade's demise then perhaps Joe Valachi was right to squeal on the bastards after all.

Alan Moore

This article is reprinted with the kind permission of the author. It originally appeared in the British fanzine Infinity #7-8 in 1984. Infinity resurfaced between 2012 and 2014 as a free-digital magazine and is well worth checking out.





09 September 2021

The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb (No. 19)

The Sketchbooks of Robert Crumb 
(1964 to present)

REVIEW BY GARY GROTH:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Robert Crumb has maintained sketchbooks, which he has written and drawn continually, from the early '60s to present. Seven large, hardcover volumes have appeared from the German publisher 2001 printing sketches datings from 1967, with the most recent one (published November 1998) running up to 1996, representing 29 years and nearly 3,000 pages of facsimile reproduction. Fantagraphics Books (conflict of interest alert!) has published six R. Crumb Sketchbooks to date, which begin three years earlier than [publisher] 2001's (1964) and include more pages from the artist's sketchbooks in the years that 2001 has published. The US editions of the sketchbooks from 1964 to 2000 will comprise over 4,000 pages.

The very conception of a single, unified, organic (and ongoing) life's work, as this is, like Crumb's individual stories and his work generally, sui generis: it is not merely inconceivable that no other artist has felt the inner need to consistently draw in a sketchbook for over 35 years (and counting), but an immutable fact. Not only has no cartoonist done so but I am aware of no artist who ever has (Frida Kahlo's drawn diaries come the closest, but not very); in fact, these sketchbooks are, as a body of work, incomparable in their magnitude, scope and intensity, and there in lies their uniqueness and, in part, their value. (We may assume that other, invariably lesser, artists will follow Crumb's example in the future, of course).

Crumb then, has created an entirely new "genre", but how does one describe it? It is not autobiography in any recognisable or understood sense; it is not a systematic or linear iteration of important professional and personal details, there is none of the "objectivity" we associate with biography such as the customary citation of names, dates, places and so forth. It is, therefore, not so much a chronicle of a life than a chronicle of a life of perceptions, which is of considerably greater aesthetic interest.

What differentiates the sketchbooks from Crumb's finished comics work is that the wedding of perception and technique achieves a degree of purity that the considered and necessarily cohering choices of tonality, style, structure, etc, tend to dilute. It is, among other things, a raw insight into process: how are ideas formed, how are connections made, how is technique and craft honed, how is the ability to truly see cultivated? Art is always mediated by artifice and every artist, no matter how self-revealing or self-lacerating, wears a mask that separates himself from his work. The cumulative effect of these sketchbooks is to narrow the gap between the artist and his art, or, put another way, to create such an intimacy as to render the profound connection between art and humanity palpable.

It also stands as a monumental existential document. Crumb repeatedly expresses, through a variety of penetrating and coruscating visual metaphor, the central existential struggle: to live in the full light of consciousness with all the risk, pain, and suffering that entails.

One can practically become lost in the onrush of caricatures, impeccably rendered portraits, formal practice (such as when Crumb was learning to use a brush in the early '80s), intense self-scrutiny, excerpts from various authors, screeds, comic strips, roughs for strips that never appeared, a visual playfulness that one rarely sees in his comics after 1970, stunning displays of virtuoso draftsmanship, the occasional abstract or surreal vista, diary-like entries (such as one agonising over his relationship with his son Jessie), heart-breaking depictions of his daughter Sophie, worshipful drawings of his wife Aline, his sensual supple line and mastery of form, humour, seriousness, empathy, misanthropy, goofing off and self-flagellating anguish - in short, the full panoply of a life of perceptions rendered with consulate artistry.


ALAN MOORE:
(from an article in The Life & Times Of Robert Crumb)
Crumb's earliest work shows a youthful sense of delight and exuberance, a sense of glee to be working in the comic medium with access to all its varied icons and delights. The characters in the early pieces, however weird or macabre or ridiculous, seem to be purposefully two-dimensional comic characters... His grotesque pranks are told in the same way that any animated character's more innocuous japes would be presented, right down to the sense of a winking camaraderie with the reader in the final panels. In Crumb's piece, though, turning it into something dark and different, raising all sorts of new and unsettling questions about the nature of the form itself... But there was a gradual sense, at least as I saw it, of Crumb becoming impatient or weary with simply subverting the cartoon icons of his youth. It looked as if he felt the need to grow and was looking around for territory to grow into... In his work for Arcade, we see Crumb confidently striking out for new pastures with an assurance that shows in every line... I'd scarcely recovered from the hard, no-nonsense pessimism of Crumb's look at life in This Here Modern America when along came his powerful and affecting portrait of an early backwoods man, That's Life. This piece, which manages to chart the rise and fall of a whole section of the music industry while telling a powerful human story is, I think, one of the best things that Crumb has ever done. A sad and bitter indictment, it is nevertheless accomplished with a real human warmth... Take a look at his sketchbooks and see just how much he's capable of caring about a stack of firewood or the light on his wife's forehead or a corner of his backyard, and if that doesn't make you feel better about the world we live in, then get a friend to try holding a mirror under your nose.


FURTHER READING:



06 September 2021

American Splendor #1-10 by Harvey Pekar & Others (No. 61)

American Splendor #1-10
by Harvey Pekar & Others

REVIEW BY JIM OTTAVIANI:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
There are almost no comics from the mid-1970s worth reading again out of any motivation other than nostalgia... and mighty few of those. In fact, many consider this period one of the medium's nadirs. Mainstream (ie superhero) comics were as bland a corporate hash as you can imagine. House styles dominated the art, and the stories were even more stale than the storytelling. By this time underground comics had passed their peak as well, and were as formulaic as the men-in-tights books. For the most part, they simply replaced obligatory fight scenes with obligatory sex and dope gags. As Lee Mars put it in Comic Book Rebels: "What a lot of the mainstream talent did when they were 'unleashed' was to do the same stories they had done before - only the girls didn't have clothes on. Wow - what a breakthrough!"

Enter Harvey Pekar with a real breakthrough. In 1976, his American Splendor brought unflinching realism into comics. He billed his book as coming "from off the streets of Cleveland" and that's the kind of stories readers got - no bombast in either tagline or narrative, no romancing of either sex or violence. Pekar combined the underground's do-it-yourself ethic with a slightly more mainstream approach in that he acknowledged he couldn't do it all. His strength is in dialogue and observation, not in art. So he employed some of comics' best talent (most notably R. Crumb) and led a move towards realism in comics storytelling that continues today.

His narrative range is broad; from the introspective and static in "The Harvey Pekar Name Story", "An Everyday Horror Story" and "I'll Be Forty-Three on Friday (How I'm Living Now)" to aggressive and manic in "American Splendor Assaults The Media" and "Violence". These stories typify the early issues of American Splendor and still ring true. Reading them once and then returning to them after a long absence, you'll realise how many small details have remained etched in memory and continue to resonate. Pekar's first ten issues are exceptional comics, and for good reason. They're honest, well rendered (both in words and pictures), and seminal.


ALAN MOORE:
(from the Fast Company Interview, 2011)
I’ve always considered Harvey a dear man and a great friend, as well as an amazing influence on me, and a whole generation of autobiographical graphic artists. He’s a pillar of the comics medium. Without him, the comics landscape would be an impoverished field... What I really admired about Harvey was, he was a resolutely blue collar artist, and one of only working class voices that I’d come across in comics with a level of political commitment, especially a left-wing one. I mean, this man had a spectacular meltdown on the Letterman show about a strike going on at the network that it was not publicizing. He never tried to rise above that class.


ROBERT CRUMB:
(from the introduction to American Splendor: Bob & Harv's Comics)
Hardly anything actually happens... Mostly it's just people talking, or Harvey by himself, panel after panel, haranguing the hapless reader. There's not much in the way of heroic struggle, the triumph of good over evil, resolution of conflict, people over coming great odds, stuff like that. It's kinda sorta more like real life... real life in late twentieth century Cleveland as it lurches along from one day to the next... And Harvey Pekar is their witness. He is one of them. He reports the truth of life in Cleveland as he sees it, hears it, feels it in his manic-depressive nervous system.


FURTHER READING:
TCJ Interview: Previously Unpublished Interview With Harvey Pekar (2019)
TCJ Blood & Thunder: Pekar vs Fiore (1990)
TCJ Review: Harvey Pekar's Cleveland (2012)




11 August 2021

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by Justin Green (No. 9)

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972)
by Justin Green

REVIEW BY CHARLES HATFIELD:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Binky Brown is the longest, and most profound, piece of sustained narrative to emerge from underground comix. A shocking, riotous, and absurdly moving memoir of Catholic guilt, Binky offers both harrowing psychological insight (into the condition since labeled Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) and stunning graphics, the latter courtesy of Green's eclectic vocabulary and dead-on parodic instincts. Rife with pointed symbolism, the pages of Binky riff deliriously on Durer, Crumb, Chester Gould, Superman comics, and scores of other sources, with a superb technique that at times approaches engraving-like texture. The story begins lucidly enough, clearly dividing fantasy from reality, but eventually its finely observed realism collides and merges with antic, dreamlike symbolism. Green's restless, protean style demonstrates that realistic, personal comics need not be tethered to any literal-minded notion of illustrative realism - a lesson not lost on the many cartoonists who have been influenced by Binky's blend of autobiography and graphic fantasy.

Since being published by Last Gasp in 1972, Binky has inspired seminal first-person comics by such cartoonists as Crumb, Kaminsky-Crumb and Spiegelman. On its own terms, it remains an extraordinary achievement: a surreal, bleakly humourous mixture of anti-Catholic polemic and scourging confession. Over its 40 pages, Green uncorks his psyche, examining in harrowing detail the intersection of Catholic doctrine and his own neurotic, guilt-driven personality. Religious fervour and psychological obsession feed into each other, turning "Binky" (Green) into a fretfulzealot whose life is all but consumed by radical self-doubt. Binky is devoted to (and exhausted by) constant checking, double-checking, and triple-checking to make sure no sins are committed - or at least none left unatoned.

Binky's obsession involves imaginary rays of light emanating from his penis, his limbs, and even the material objects around him. These rays must be prevented at all costs from sticking representations (visual or verbal) of the Catholic Church, and in particular the Virgin Mary. This is of course an artist's conceit: the rays threaten to converge on the Virgin in much the same way that, in classical perspective, imaginary lines connect parallel objects to a common vanishing point. The world of Binky is one of grid-like precision, a landscape crisscrossed by invisible vectors of sin. Green's artwork both reflects and resists this linearity, with a riot of mixed forms: rigid and angular versus rounded and fleshy. Indeed, his carefully  worked pages enact a struggle between hard-edged asceticism (in his words, "order, uniformity, rigidity, and obedience") and indulgent sensuality. Binky crackles with this tension.

What makes Binky so bold and effective is the extravagance of Green's visual metaphors. While he faithfully captures the cultural landscape of his formative years, Green also deploys a series of bizarre symbols that capture young Binky's inner landscape just as precisely. At first such conceits are confined to young Binky's dreams and fantasies, but they gradually assert themselves through passages of Green's anti-Catholic argument (eg parochial school students are brainwashed and turned into marionettes, replete with strings). Eventually, elements of fantasy begin to intrude on Binky's everyday life: visual metaphors multiply as Binky becomes increasingly dominated by his obsessive guilt. As Binky's world becomes more and more pinched and cloistral, Green's artwork breaks free, employing a huge arsenal of design conceits, graphic devices and rendering styles. Shifting layouts, labels, signboards and mock-scholarly annotations run rampant, while open, white panels contrast with zip-a-tone grays and densely cross-hatched backgrounds. Those expecting a documentary realism, to authenticate Green's polemic, will be perplexed by his anarchic visual imagination.

Reflexive playfulness characterises Binky from beginning to end. For example, the penultimate panel finds the hero, having spurned Catholicism, eyeing an overdue stack of library books: First Catechism, Perspective and Fun With a Pencil. This single image underscores not only Green's relationship to the Church, but also his grasp of classical art and his dedication to drawing. Even more: in the background, a cartoon by R. Crumb hints at another source of inspiration. Metonymically, Crumb (himself a lapsed Catholic) stands in for the underground comix, then in their heyday, which liberated Green artistically, inspiring him to set forth his own story in comics form.

Of course, the "pencil" in the third title, Fun With a Pencil, also substitutes metamorphic ally for the feared penis, the original source of the rays which have so monopolised Binky's imagination.  Green employs this metaphoric likeness from the outset: the frontispiece is a grimly hilarious image of the naked artist, hands bound behind his back, a pen gripped in his mouth, with a long scythe-like blade poised dangerously close to his groin. Both artist's tool and endangered phallus are impious and inadmissible (Green dips his pen in God's blood; his very word balloon bears a crown of thorns). Here Green, in a confession to his readers, admits that Binky represents an effort to "purge" himself of a "compulsive neurosis." Begging indulgence for focusing on "the petty conflict in [his] crotch", the cartoonist suggests that portraying his neurosis in "easy-to-understand comic-book format" may actually help others similarly afflicted, and thus intervene in a larger social problemm: "If all the neurotics were tied together we would entwine the globe many times over in a vast chain of human suffering."

With this, Green hits on one of the great virtues of autobiography: its ability to expose private trauma as a public issue, and to focus our attention on the relationship between self and society. It is this social dimension which lifts Binky above mere calculated outrage and makes it insightful, provocative, and, finally, wonderfully moving.


REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
It' s no small thing to invent a genre. I readily confess that without his work there could have been no Maus.


REVIEW BY ROBERT CRUMB:
Justin Green - he's out of his mind. I love every stroke of his nervous pen, every tortured scratch he ever scrawled. He was among the top storytelling artists of the first wave of “underground” comics, a darkly humorous social commentator, and the FIRST, absolutely the FIRST EVER cartoonist to draw highly personal autobiographical comics. Binky Brown started many other cartoonists along the same path, myself included. Few have come close to him in revealing themselves in this medium. For me, there’s nothing more enjoyable than the confessions of a tortured soul, if the story is well-told, entertaining, honest, and then funny on top of it. If that’s what you’re looking for, and if you like it in comic book form, Justin Green is the first and the best!


REVIEW BY CHRIS WARE:
Thank God that it’s getting harder to imagine a time when comics were a lowly commercial hack-job for illustrators who couldn’t find work anywhere else. It’s even harder to imagine the effect of a comic book in such a cultural climate by an artist who tore himself to pieces right on the page, trying to get at the core of something that was literally consuming him, but this is what Justin Green did. With Binky Brown, comics went practically overnight from being an artform that saw from the outside in to one that sees from the inside out. His internal struggle can practically be felt in the drawings themselves, the style sometimes changing from panel to panel - sometimes even within the panels themselves - all in an effort to simply arrive at The Truth. Comics wouldn’t be what they are today without this book, and this new edition places it in its proper place in the comics literary canon. Thank God for Binky Brown. And thank God for Justin Green.


FURTHER READING:
TCJ: The ABCs of Autobiography Comics by Patrick Rosenkranz (2011)



30 July 2021

The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez (No. 89)

The Autobiographical Comics of Spain Rodriguez (1974-2012)

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Spain's early autobiographical comics were macho blustery tales of his motorcycle gang, the Road Vultures. The subject matter alone strongly differentiated Spain from his wimpier colleagues, but what really stood out was Spain's approach to autobiography. While people like Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky and Justin Green were doing cathartic, confessional autobiographical comics, Spain was hardly present in his own stories. Spain's Road Vulture stories, most of which are collected in the book My True Story, are composite portraits of a social group. Comics are particularly well-suited to this somewhat radical form of storytelling. In one panel, you can depict a dozen different things happening at once. And Spain is famous for his incredibly dense panels showing the brawls, dances and games of the Road Vultures - dozens of figures are crammed into these remarkable group shots.

Spain continued his collective biography form in the story Chicago 1968, but over time, he became willing to narrow the focus. In an ongoing series of stories in Blab!, Spain examines his life in the '50s when his two best friends were Fred Toote and Tex. The three are collectively known as the "North Fillmore Intelligentsia". They'e all bored young men out to have fun, each with a burden of sorts - Tex's growth was stunted by a deformed back, Toote is on the verge of completely losing it at any moment, and Spain - Spain's got a vulnerable heart.

Spain's easily wounded romantic nature is shown in his finest story Down at the Kitty Kat. Here Spain perfectly balances the group portrait approach of his earlier stories with the more personal approach seen in the other North Fillmore Intelligentsia stories. The Kitty Kat is where "the pimps, the fags, the whores, the curious, the alcoholic... the blues lovers, Canadian bikers, thrill seekers, junkies, insomniacs, [and] hepcats" would congregate. The North Fillmore Intelligentsia is there and Spain is nursing a broken heart. But the story doesn't linger on that - there are a lot of other interesting things happening at the Kitty Kat, and Spain the author is as interested in them as he is in dwelling on his younger self's dejection.

Spain is able to pull off these group portraits because even when showing a crowd, he shows individuals. Each character, no matter how minor, has a distinctive face, and Spain's ear for dialect helps even further to differentiate the various characters. But for an artist with such a reputation as a tough guy, Spain's greatest achievement is his moving, even tender depictions of the North Fillmore Intelligentsia.


ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from 'Spain Rodriguez: Tributes' at TCJ.com, 2012)
Looking through decades of his work over the last few days, I realized that I’d sometimes get lost following the storylines of his comics as well, tho the cadence of the drawings kept me with him, and he sure got the storytelling consistently under control over recent decades in the lifelong and relentless pursuit of his craft. His drawing always reminded me of rock-solid carpentry built out of rough-hewn lumber. Despite his serious chops and his testosterone charged adventure comics influences, his art was just too quirky and filled with too much conviction to veer into the glibness that could’ve found him a comfortable home at a “mainstream” comic company. It’s what made him an underground comix star.


ROBERT CRUMB:
(from 'Spain Rodriguez: Tributes' at TCJ.com, 2012)
I first met Spain in New York in the fall of 1968. He was living with Kim Deitch and doing a one-page strip for a weekly “underground” paper called The East Village Other. Kim was also doing a weekly strip for this paper. Spain had left Buffalo for good, left the world of outlaw bikers behind and embraced the East Village hippie scene, though there was a lot about the hippies that Spain didn’t like. “I ain’t no hippie,” he used to say. His allegiance to radical left-wing politics and his proletarian class identity were stronger and clearer than most of the youths in the hippie subculture, the “counter-culture,” as it was called. His politics were driven by genuine, authentic class anger, class hatred. I liked that about him. It was always clarifying, bracing, to discuss politics, social and cultural issues with him. Plus, he had a sharp sense of humor which leavened that anger. He was not your typical “humor-impaired” leftist, nor was he a dogmatic Marxist, spouting slogans or left-wing terminology. I appreciated those discussions with him, as he helped clarify certain things for me, politics, economics, history. He was well-read, self-educated in these areas.


FURTHER READING:



10 July 2021

09 July 2021

Zap by Various (No. 80)

Zap #0-16 (1967-2016)
by Crumb, Griffin, Mavrides, Moscoso, Shelton, Spain, Williams & Wilson

REVIEW BY TOM SPURGEON:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
It is well known in comics circles that Zap was neither the first underground comic (Jack Jackson published God Nose in 1963) nor even the first appearance by Crumb or many of the eventual contributors, who had enjoyed exposure through their appearances in the underground newspaper movement. But for the world at large, Zap in underground comix, and the buzz and excitement that greets the most recent issue is a sign that Zap struck at the collective consciousness of our culture in a way few comics ever have.

Zap has reinvented itself at least three times. The first two issues are all R. Crumb, and one can see the heavy Harvey Kurtzman influence, particularly in their presentation. But whereas with Kurtzman's magazine the medium was a big part of the message, Crumb's comics were more playful and his satire was more intensely personal. The anything-goes quality of his work continued into various extremes when the magazine made its first transition into an anthology. From a vantage point 30 years later, one is struck by how extreme the violence and sexual elements are in works from Wilson and Spain, and how elegant the art in cartoons from Moscoso and Williams. Strangely, Crumb and Shelton become almost straight men in this company, although it is Crumb's famous incest comic in issue #4 that ran afoul of New York obscenity  law. Even Zap's famous jam illustrations have a subtext of subverting standard creative practices in favour of sheer graphic splendour.

Somewhere along the way, Zap added a reflective element. For instance, the Crumb and Shelton strips in Zap #13 were both in more serious, accomplished styles, and both involved taking stock of the time Zap was created. Even the still shocking Wilson's work is viewed differently in the context of his having done so many years of Checkered Demon comics. Zap's time is past in terms of the accomplishments of the artists - all of whom remain interesting and worth reading - but because fewer and fewer artists are starting comics using similar approaches. What remains is less the movement than the comics, and for visual energy no-one will ever outstrip the creators behind Zap.


ROBERT CRUMB:
(from an interview with The Chicago Tribune, 2014)
In the 1940s, a lot of comics were done for servicemen (his own father had been an illustrator for the Marine Corps), but as culture, it was a very low form of popular entertainment. If you had pretensions to being cultured, you looked down on comics. So, to answer your question, the biggest change I have seen is comics going from being mainstream entertainment for children to something an adult can pick up. Specifically Zap said that this low form of culture could be a form of personal expression, and I think that, for the past 50 years, is our biggest legacy, that sense of comics as a form of personal expression. And maybe if comics are still seen that way, if comics have stayed honest, it's because you don't get rich doing them. The rewards are small. Because of that, (expletive) gets weeded out. You can't put across a good comic without thought. There is not enough reward for the sweat, and I think maybe, now that Zap is finished, that's what we said: If you don't love what you're doing, you're definitely not doing this.


CHRIS WARE:
Without Zap there would be no such thing as alternative / literary / artistic / self-expressive comics and graphic novels. Zap started it all.


FURTHER READING:



28 June 2021

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book by Harvey Kurtzman (No. 26)

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book (1959)
by Harvey Kurtzman 

REVIEW BY KIM THOMPSON:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
In the four decades between 1952, when he drew his last Frontline Combat story, and his death in 1993, Harvey Kurtzman produced only one substantial narrative piece of work as an illustrator: Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book.

Coming off the cancellation of the Playboy-backed Trump and subsequent failure of the self-published Humbug, Kurtzman picked up his drawing tools again at the request of publisher Ian Ballantine, who hoped to duplicate the success of the Mad paperbacks with original paperback cartoon books.

Kurtzman's concept was a quatrain of extended satirical strips: "Thelonius Violence", a Peter Gunn parody narrated in bebop jive, complete with musical soundtrack effects; "Organisation Man in the Grey Flannel Executive Suite", a sardonic look at the corporate world, in which Kurtzman got in his digs at the magazine industry; "Compulsion on the Range", a witty fusion of in-vogue Freudian pop psychology into the TV series Gunsmoke; and "Decadence Degenerated", a funny but deeply serious story of a small-town lynching, build around Kurtzman'z own appalled recollections of a stay in the Deep South.

At 140 brilliant pages, the Jungle Book is certainly Kurtzman's most substantial graphic achievement. The vigour and immediacy of the brushwork, the bold use of tones, the hypnotic pattern of sustained and broken visual rhythms from panel to panel and page to page, make it one of the most formally inventive comic books ever published. And Kurtzman's mordant wit, freed from the constraints of shorter magazine pieces, would never again display as pitiless a bite.

That last Frontline Combat story, a meditation on fate, was called "The Big If". Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book provides the biggest "if" in comics history: What if it had been a success? What if Kurtzman instead of being forced to leapfrog from more failed anthologies to the compromised Little Annie Fanny to teaching and illustration jobs, had been able to recreate himself as a one-man satirical storyteller - writing and drawing for magazines and books? What if he had succeeded in caving a niche in the mainstream publishing world, into which the whole next generation of cartoonists could have poured - short story writers, essayists, and novelists who just happened to work in the comics form?

Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book remains one of the art form's most stunning successes, and one of the fields most heartbreaking failures.


REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
Like most of the other copies of Jungle Book I’ve seen, mine is like a murkily printed newsprint portfolio. The glue binding is just a memory. I keep all the loose yellowed pages in a plastic bag. I’ve handled these pages with all the care due a sacred text, but it just won’t hold up under many more re-readings...  Nowhere else is there such a large body of Kurtzman’s drawings, and Jungle Book was an important step toward making comics Adult Entertainment.


REVIEW BY ROBERT CRUMB:
He is as good as any cartoonist in history that I know of. Some of his greatest stuff was done in a little Ballantine Book called Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book published around 1959. Kurtzman did all the drawing as well as the writing. I hope somebody will reprint it someday in its entirety on good paper, as I'd like to own a copy.


FURTHER READING:



12 June 2021

Covering The New Yorker: Robert Crumb

Thanksgiving Special
The New Yorker, 29 November 2004
art by Robert Crumb

Elvis Tilley
The New Yorker, 21 February 1994
art by Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb reimagines Rea Irvin's Eustace Tilley on the magazine's 69th anniversary.

Gay Marriage
A rejected New Yorker cover, 2009
art by Robert Crumb

ROBERT CRUMB:
(from The Gayest Story Ever Told, Vice, November 2011)
It was suggested to me by the cover editor of the New Yorker that I make a cover for an issue to come out in June 2009. As it was a hot issue at the time, it was suggested that perhaps I could do a cover about gay marriage, which I then proceeded to do. Later, the cover editor explained to me that the chief editor, David Remnick, went back and forth, first accepting my cover design, then rejecting it, then accepting it, then rejecting it. This went on for many months. I heard nothing for a long time. Finally, the artwork was returned to me without explanation, nor was an explanation ever forthcoming. Remnick would not give the reason for rejecting the cover, either to the cover editor, or to me. For this reason I refuse to do any more work for the New Yorker. I felt insulted, not so much by the rejection as for the lack of any reason given. I can’t work for a publication that won’t give you any guidelines or criterion for accepting or rejecting a work submitted. Does the editor want to keep you guessing or what? I think part of the problem is the enormous power vested in the position of chief editor of the New Yorker. He has been ‘spoiled’ by the power that he wields. So many artists are so eager to do covers for the New Yorker that they are devalued in the eyes of David Remnick. They are mere pawns. He is not compelled to take pains to show them any respect. Any artist is easily replaced by another. Fortunately for me, I do not feel that I need the New Yorker badly enough to put up with such brusque treatment at the hands of its editor-in-chief. The heck with him!



26 May 2021

The Weirdo Short Stories by Robert Crumb (No. 10)


The Weirdo Short Stories (1981-1993)
by Robert Crumb

REVIEW BY GREG CWIKLIK:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
Robert Crumb has always treated the comic strip as a genuine art form fully suitable for essays, cartoons, biography, stories, even fairy tales, and his Weirdo work is done in an amazing variety of formats and styles. To be sure, there are a handful of throwaway cartoons and dumb fumetti (corny photo-stories starring Crumb and buxom women) but most of the material shows great range and depth in its writing and artwork.

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.


READ THIS COMIC:
Weirdo was a magazine-sized comics anthology created by Robert Crumb in 1981 - published by Last Gasp Press - which ran for 28 issues until 1993. Individual issues can still be found, but Crumb's Weirdo contributions were collected in R. Crumb: The Weirdo Years 1981-1993 published by Last Gasp in 2018.


FURTHER READING: