Robert Crumb

For 40 years, through a steady stream of underground Comix publications and more recently drawings, Robert Crumb has been an epic raconteur of everyday life in the United States. With a universe of characters that range from gurus to seekers, from randy talking cats to sad sack comic artists trying to get some action, Crumb himself has never given up his relentless questioning of the human character. Taken together, Crumb's stories are telling portraits of human weakness, cruelty, and stupidity, indictments of human indifference, superstition, fear, paranoia, and narrow-mindedness. Over the years, Crumb has been criticized for illustrating so vividly and with such relish a lexicon of the basest impulses of the human psyche at its most sexually violent, racially ignorant, and virulently misanthropic. A keen social observer, Crumb is devastatingly critical but also deeply empathic. He has never shied away from the most important social issues of the past 50 years, and a summary collection of his best-known strips creates an unblinking chronicle of his generation's fruitless search for spiritual enlightenment, social justice, and psychic peace.

Selected Bibliography:

The Complete Crumb: Volumes 1–16. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1987–2002.

Groth, Gary, and Robert Crumb. "R. Crumb Bares All." Comics Journal, no. 121 (April 1998): 48–123.

–––. "Robert Crumb: On Racism, Mysogyny, Love, and Himself." Comics Journal, no. 180 (September 1995): 116–38.

Richter, Carl. ed. Crumb-ology: The Works of R. Crumb, 1981–1994. Sudbury, Mass.: Water Row Press, 1995. Supplements published in 1995 (Sudbury, Mass.: Water Row Press) and 2002 (Babylon, N.Y.: Babylonia Press, 2002).

Robert Crumb. Exhibition catalogue. Cologne: Museum Ludwig, 2004.

Links:

Paul Morris Gallery

Fantagraphics