Can a biographer be described as tender? If so, that certainly conveys the vibe that Dan Nadel, recently named by the Whitney Museum of American Art as the curator of drawing and prints, conjures in Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life. The artist, now a prescient, 80-something expatriate living quietly in France, gave Nadel unfettered access to his voluminous archives with the stipulation that he not hold back on his analysis of the racism and sexism in Crumb's work that have long been problematic, particularly among the pearl-clutching crowd.
Nadel more than keeps his end of the bargain, and he writes with an almost filial devotion as keen as his insightfulness. He explains the cartoonist, revered among his tight-knit group of peers, without entirely excusing him, beginning with a childhood incident that Crumb illustrated in 2002 with the hindsight and maturity of late middle-age. One panel of "Don't Tempt Fate" from Mystic Funnies depicts the 12-year-old Crumb deliberately serving as a target for rocks chucked over a wall by destructive neighborhood kids. His determination to demonstrate the unthinking harmfulness of their behavior cost him a front tooth and chipped several others.
He [Crumb] makes himself the victim to stir the conscience of another. He also could be the Christlike martyr, taking the hit so that everyone else is safe. Or, in terms of his work, he used the total freedom of underground comics, perhaps naively, to open up new avenues for artistic expression for others to build up. Something in him wants, he's said, to play the martyr, to commit a kind of aesthetic self-immolation, acting the exhibitionistic pervert as he exposes unthinkable truths about himself. The compulsions of masochism, sadism, and martyrdom are conjoined.
Now that's what I call a thesis statement! Every biographer's subject should be so lucky.
Crumb, however, was much less fortunate in his personal life, at least until he met Aline Kominsky, his larger-than-life personification of a soul mate, in 1971 not long after Zap Comix revolutionized an art form heretofore confined to "the funny pages." He emerges as a particularly lustrous pearl from a large, neurotic family, crediting his older, gay brother for showing him the way out through their joint cartooning but who remained stuck for decades in his parents' increasingly dysfunction home. Crumb married too young, mostly for the opportunity to have sex regularly with a woman who conformed to his idiosyncratic physical type, and became a reluctant father to a troubled, justifiably angry son who struggled with addiction all his life.
Like nearly every other baby boomer, I first became familiar with Crumb through Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat (whose creations he came to rue as a result of their commercial exploitation) but Art Spiegelman was more my speed, thanks to Maus, the groundbreaking graphic novel. Terry Zwigoff's bizarro documentary in 1995 clued me in to Crumb's significance but only after Françoise Mouly (Spiegelman's wife and art editor at The New Yorker during the brilliant reign of Tina Brown) published Crumb and Kominsky in the 2000s did I become a rabid fan.
Has there ever been a more complementary creative partnership than theirs? It sometimes even included, Sophie, very much her father's daughter. The family that cartoons together stays together! I loved these vivid scenes from an open marriage so much that I tore them out of the magazine and filed them away, just as I had Spiegelman's contributions. Re-reading them after finishing Nadel's biography has been a revelation. Much of the detail the biographer includes is already there, in a more delightful, accessible form: their reverence for old, well-made things, Kominsky's Long Island accent; Crumb's fetish for riding his wife piggyback; and the weirdness of the Crumb family which Sophie embraces as a birthright after attending a reunion in Minnesota where the female cousins insist that prominent Adam's apples correlate with bigger penises!
Thanks to Nadel's bio, however, I have an even deeper appreciation and respect for Crumb. My ichoate cynicism about '60s ideals turned rock solid when Jerry Rubin, a co-founder of the Yippies and a member of the Chicago Seven, went to work on Wall Street. Reading Crumb serves as a glorious reminder than not everyone sold out. In addition to his successful open marriage that allowed both partners sexual freedom, Crumb, who eventually illustrated the Book of Genesi (how's that for an about-face?), couldn't have cared less about celebrity or amassing a fortune.
When Jim Morrison, an aspiring cartoonist himself (who knew?), dropped by for a visit and drank too much, Crumb, whose distaste for classic rock was captured on film by Zwigoff despite his iconic album cover art for Big Brother & the Holding Company, blew off the Lizard King who had this to say about him:
Crumb is, I think, one of the most original and brilliant geniuses to come around in a long time. Ever since I’ve been reading Zap, I see the world as a Zap comix. I can’t help it. It’s altered my viewpoint. It’s actually a horrible surreal comic. It’s a nasty vision of existence.
Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda got the same treatment when, post-Barbarella, they approached him about making a film together. I just wish Nadel had queried Crumb about his reaction when John F. Kennedy, Jr. showed up at New York City retrospective of his work in the early Nineties dressed as a vampire on Halloween night claiming to be a fan.
Nor did Crumb fixate on money or overextend himself. He often barely had enough to survive, but that didn't stop him from bartering his work for 78 rpm recordings of the obscure music from the 20s and 30s that he loved playing as a member of R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders. When his fellow band members wanted to professionalize something that had begun as a cartoonist jam session, he eventually withdrew.
As usual despite his bond with his friends, he didn't like feeling the pull of commitment, and he was, of course, always the primary attraction. He was being forced to make a career decision--music or art. He knew he was a far better artist than he was a musciain, and that he was better off keeping the art as the moneymaking pursuit and music as a pleasure. He hated the thought that pursuing the band might ruin the enjoyment of music for him.
Surprisingly, Nadel's Crumb makes as strong a case for artistic integrity as any I've ever read. May you keep on truckin' for years to come, Robert.
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