Robert Crumb laughs a lot. In virtually every scene of Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s absorbing film
portrait, the infamous comics artist lets loose with a chuckle or snort or, most often, a kind of brittle snigger. At first, Crumb’s
laughter seems in character and perfectly natural (not to be confused with
his character Mr. Natural); after all, finding humor in things,
making fun, provoking laughs, is what R. Crumb (his professional monicker)
does. It’s his gift, his trade, the source of his fame.
But the more you hear it, the more Crumb’s laughter seems to carry more than
just the sound of his own amusement. Also embedded in it is a sliver of pain,
and there’s a nervous quality, too: the dull ring of a defense mechanism, a
shield that goes up when the subject gets too close to home, a buffer between
Crumb’s social being and some primal impulses surging within him. Crack the
thin surface of this man’s comic response and you’ll find some very deep,
sometimes very dark waters swirling below.
But what could be more apt for this pioneer of underground comix? His work is
known for its broad, bawdy humor, but his gags mostly play on social and sexual
anxieties deep in the souls of modern guys and gals. It may not be apparent in
what is arguably Crumb’s most famous image – the loose-limbed, large-footed
happy traveler of “Keep on Truckin’,” who’s adorned everything from pocket
patches to mud flaps in the 25 years since he debuted – but it is in virtually
all the rest of his scratchy ink visions: in the squawling babe and Jemima
mammy and blues-roaring women of his oft-copied 1968 album cover for Cheap
Thrills by Big Brother and the Holding Co.; in sly, smooth-talking Fritz
the Cat, ever on the sexual prowl; in the Amazon-figured, Sambo-headed
Angelfood McSpade; in the constipated Whiteman, rigid in his gray flannel suit;
the rapacious Devil Girl, flicking her foot-long tongue; in every woman with an
outsized posterior and every man with a swollen crotch; even in the bald-pated,
snowy-bearded con man-cum-guru Mr. Natural. Crumb’s characters are the
cartoon clowns of an earlier era schlepping through today’s urban landscape,
their appetites set free to eat, drink, smoke, toke, shoot up, get down, sneak
around, steal, lie, con, shout, shit, piss, screw, and engage in any base human
activity to riotous excess. Beyond their farcical entanglements and
protracted pratfalls, they are our egos, superegos, and ids responding to the
modern world – to issues of sex and race, conformity and authority, poverty and
violence, commercialism and vegetarianism – on our most primal – and often most
honest – level.
It is the combination of his total command of the comics medium and his total
honesty that made Crumb the breakthrough artist of underground comix. As Austin
artist Jack Jackson (aka Jaxon) notes (see sidebar), the underground
books had been around, tweaking the Establishment’s nose, for three or four
years when Crumb’s first issue of Zap appeared in 1968. But the audience
for these books was still tiny, the small percentage of the public who were
conscious of the counterculture by the mid-Sixties. With Crumb’s arrival,
though, underground comix gained a voice that could be heard by the mainstream.
His characters were the funny animals and sunny spokesmen of the Hollywood
cartoons and Madison Avenue ads of the Forties and Fifties. We recognized them;
hell, on some level, we were them. And seeing these symbols of a
straighter era get liberated, to be open and unrestrained and outrageous even,
meant that we might be freed in some way, too. In the uninhibitedness and
sassiness of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, the country found new role
models.
Of course, Crumb’s success was not without its prices. The cartoonist’s
best-known images became sources of pain for him. “Keep on Truckin'” was
reproduced widely without Crumb’s authority; a judge ruled that the artist did
not own the image; and the IRS socked him with a big bill for royalties that
took him years to pay off. Fritz became the star of an animated film by Ralph
Bakshi, and Crumb was so disgusted by the result that he killed the character
with an ice pick through the head. Perhaps the most difficult for Crumb in the
long run was the way the public began to perceive him as a person. The more
“honest” he was on the page – exploring his ideas and fantasies through not
just cartoon characters but autobiographical strips – the more he came to be
viewed as a weirdo. His relationships with women, his sexual neuroses, his
social and political attitudes were all squiggled into panels and set down in
sequences of little boxes. While readers enjoyed seeing Crumb’s life rendered
in print and identified with many of his feelings and experiences, they were
ultimately unnerved by his openness about so many intimate areas of his life.
He was labeled a misfit, misogynist, misanthrope, bigot, oddball, crank. To
some extent, Crumb fed – and feeds – the fire of this attitude, maintaining a
very private existence and frequently portraying himself in his own comics as
Crumb the crank. But the public’s perception of him is nonetheless troubling to
the artist.
Terry Zwigoff’s film covers all this ground in the way a competent documentary
should and adds the background biographical material that provides context in
which to enhance our understanding of Crumb’s style and significance as an
artist. We get accounts of his development of Zap, the onset of fame and
Crumb’s difficult struggle with it, the controversies over his material, and
Crumb’s own reflections on his life and work. And the film is satisfying – even
entertaining – in its presentation of this material. It includes substantial
amounts of footage of the artist’s work, as well as plenty of wry commentary by
Crumb himself, imbuing the piece with the same tart, twisted comic sensibility
of the Crumb comics.
But in the same way that Crumb’s material yields deeper levels of complexity
upon closer reading, Zwigoff’s documentary goes well beyond a surface
examination of its subject’s personality and work. Resonating throughout
Crumb are multiple questions about the nature of the artist’s
relationship to his life and his art: how much of his experience should be
fodder for his work, what relationships are free to be translated into one more
page of material, whether art is a force that may serve to channel the energy
of one’s life or may consume it. Because so much of Crumb’s work is
autobiographical in nature, these are ongoing concerns for the cartoonist.
Zwigoff is able to get Crumb to ruminate on camera about his feelings on the
subject, but just as importantly, he is able to get such figures as Aline
Kominsky (Crumb’s wife) and Dana Crumb (the artist’s first wife), as well as a
couple of Crumb’s former girlfriends, to comment on their feelings about being
served to the public in R. Crumb’s comics. Given Crumb’s obsessions with women,
the female voices included here are particularly provocative and
illuminating.
Much more troubling are the voices of Crumb’s two brothers, Charles and Max.
Both are men with artistic talent of a quality similar to Robert’s, perhaps
even equal to it, yet neither of them utilized their talent to the degree that
Robert did. Charles, the elder brother, is shown in the film as a middle-aged
man living in his mother’s house, reading and re-reading tattered paperbacks to
pass the time. He is articulate, even witty, but his world is closed. Max, the
younger brother, lives a hermetic existence in a San Francisco flophouse,
occasionally painting surreal portraits but more frequently meditating on a bed
of nails. These are men of troubled minds, who admit to compulsive behavior and
suicidal dreams. But growing up, they shared with Robert an interest in comics
that led them to draw and write their own books. Zwigoff displays some of these
works, and the talent of Robert Crumb’s siblings is evident. What happened to
them? Zwigoff has no pat answer, but his film’s intense focus on the
relationship of the brothers at least reveals what a powerful force art can be
in a life. The filmmaker himself says, “What interested me was not the family
itself, but the artwork of the family. It’s sort of a gift for that whole
family. There’s so much talent or energy in those brothers. But it’s sort of a
risky business. You have to know how to channel it or it becomes very
dangerous.”
Part of what makes the film resonate on so many levels is the personal quality
with which Zwigoff has imbued it. Crumb operates on a level of intimacy
that reflects the filmmaker’s 25-year friendship with the subject. He is never
afraid to move the camera close, whether to focus on the face of the artist or
on his work. He values the details and wants to make sure we can see them
full-blown. What’s more, he lingers on them. When Crumb makes a reference to a
particularly outrageous story he did, Zwigoff allows us to see the whole piece,
panel by panel, page by page. In sharing Crumb’s passion for old blues music,
Zwigoff plays “Last Kind Word Blues” in its entirety. These are decisions that
appear to fly in the face of commercial filmmaking, but they reflect the kind
of sensitivity Zwigoff had for his subject that makes Crumb not only a
superlative documentary but one that is true in spirit. Crumb is funny and dark
and amazing, and this film about him is precisely the same.
Which makes the subject’s chilly reaction to the film about him every bit as
ironic as those lightning-bolt-up-the-ass last panels he puts in his comics. R.
Crumb is upset by the film, not because it’s poorly done or fabricates facts
but because it reveals too much about him! He said as much in a two-page strip
published in The New Yorker in late April. In the strip, Crumb and his
wife Aline (who co-wrote and co-drew the piece) discuss having seen the
documentary and how strange they feel about how much of their lives it depicts.
This from a man who has built a career on sharing all his thoughts and
experiences – especially his private ones – in print. Needless to say, Zwigoff
was a bit taken aback by his friend’s response. “His reaction really puzzled
me. I said to him, `You know, this comic strip, I can tell you’re kidding in
parts of it, but you seem really serious, too.’ I thought he was being this
hypocrite. So I told him, `But you describe great art as this peek through this
keyhole at the life of the artist. I don’t see how you can say that and then
act like the film is such a surprise.’ And he said, `In the movie there’s no
way that I can control it. In the comics, I can. It’s just too painful.’ So I
said, `Well, I guess I always bought your story.’ He professes this profound
honesty with his readers, and he doesn’t really feel it. I could perfectly
understand not sharing this stuff but I don’t go around saying that I think
everything in my life is open for my art.”
While the film has created some friction between Crumb and Zwigoff,
it has not sundered their friendship or dimmed the filmmaker’s fascination with
his subject. Zwigoff spent six years shooting footage of Robert Crumb and his
life and says he might have continued for years more if he hadn’t made himself
stop and begin shaping what he had into a film. Even now, as the completed
Crumb is slotted into theatres and film festivals across the country,
Zwigoff speaks eagerly of being able to add to his portrait of R. Crumb: via a
proposed laserdisc edition which would include outtakes and additional footage.
And there is a story that he thinks would bring the story full circle, a link
between the past and the future.
“I’ve only just now come up the perfect ending,” Zwigoff says. “It’s this
thing Robert told me about his daughter Sophie. She’s always kept up with her
drawing and drawn in her own way until just recently. He said that his daughter
found the old comics that Charles made as a kid, when he was drawing in that
style that was all lines and wrinkles. For the last couple of months now, she
always draws in that style.” n
Crumbbegins an exclusive Austin engagement at the Dobie Theatre on
Friday, June 30.
This article appears in June 30 • 1995 and June 30 • 1995 (Cover).