Comic strips and comic books are quintessential creations of America’s 20th-century culture industry. They are also perhaps its lowliest products. Yet this trash medium, with its presumed audience of subliterates and kids, has produced its own geniuses, not all of whom were Disney prodigies of brand creation and marketing. Chester Gould, the hard-boiled newsman responsible for the harsh dynamism of the long-running detective strip Dick Tracy, is one. George Herriman, inventor of the sweet, enigmatic Krazy Kat, a strip that refined a single situation for more than thirty years, is another. And then there is Robert Crumb, better known as R. Crumb, the originator of so-called ‘underground comix’.
Now 82, Crumb is America’s greatest cartoonist. Inimitable and inventive as Herriman and Gould were, neither had his range, nor his independence. Crumb, who developed a rounded, cuddly style reminiscent of Depression-era cartoons, is also a great draughtsman, with a capacity to render fastidiously detailed naturalistic drawings. Technique alone cannot account for his eminence, however. Crumb is both an observant satirist and a self-aware student of his own drives. His grasp of American vernacular and his sardonic humour suggest a comparison with Mark Twain as well as with Twain’s admirer, the proudly prejudiced social critic H.L. Mencken. Rambunctious and often offensive, Crumb draws freely on pre-existing racial and gender stereotypes, and always draws in the first person – typically representing himself as a scrawny, misanthropic loner, obsessed with sexually dominating (or being dominated by) Amazonian women. Unlike any previous comic-strip artist (but not unlike a stand-up comedian), Crumb is his own flawed persona. ‘The Many Faces of R. Crumb’, a two-page spread produced at the height of his powers in 1972, begins with a ridiculous image of the artist masturbating to one of his own comics and ejaculating out of his studio window, then goes on to depict him as a penitent saint, a fascist creep, a self-centred SOB, a sentimental slob, a rugged individualist and a guilt-ridden crybaby.
Before Crumb, no artist had so openly used comics as a means of personal expression. After Crumb, the deluge, starting with the underground cartoonists who followed in the wake of his Zap Comix (1968), a 24-page pamphlet that – according to one of his drawings – Crumb and his first wife, Dana Morgan, sold for a quarter out of a baby buggy on the streets of Haight-Ashbury. The cover was designed to shock, depicting a self-electrocuting naked man, plugged into a light socket and launched into the air in a foetal position. Addressing itself to ‘flipped out flower kids’, Zap proselytised for marijuana and introduced Crumb’s irascible Old Testament guru, Mr Natural. News stands and bookshops were afraid to carry it, but subsequent issues soon appeared in head shops across America.