← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Howard Campbell, Jr.
Thread ID: 19151 | Posts: 21 | Started: 2005-07-14
2005-07-14 23:22 | User Profile
The [I]Keep on Truckin'[/I] guy's least semitically-correct cartoon:
[url]http://www.tightrope.cc/rcrumbjew.htm[/url]
2005-07-14 23:34 | User Profile
Howard!
Good to see you again.
2005-07-14 23:40 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]Howard!
Good to see you again.[/QUOTE]
Thanks, Sert! Just watched the "Crumb" biopic which railed against R.'s misanthropy. Sad, sad family life.
2005-07-15 06:27 | User Profile
This series of cartoons has been making the rounds on WN sites for years now. They usually leave out the one where right-wing whites take over, though.
They were meant ironically, as expressions of his near-total alienation from modern life and all-purpose loathing for pretty much everyone. Don't take it for anything more than that. He's been long married to Aline Kominsky (Jewish) and is a long-time fan of delta-blues who's been drawing biographies of the original Mississippi bluesmen for decades now ("Heroes of the Blues", "Charley Patton", etc), so don't buy him a NA membership in absentia just yet.
Anybody convinced Crumb is some sort of white racialist ought to get a load of "Whiteman Meets Bigfoot", one of his best-known stories. It's pornographically hilarious but would make a decidedly-odd supplement to the [I]Aryan Alternative[/I].
2005-07-15 09:47 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Howard Campbell, Jr.]Thanks, Sert! Just watched the "Crumb" biopic which railed against R.'s misanthropy. Sad, sad family life.[/QUOTE]
That really was an extraordinarily interesting film.
His older brother really tore my heart out. What a waste.
I remember Crumb shows the comic book series he and his older brother co-wrote as teenagers. It was based on the Disney film "Treasure Island." Each would do a page, and then the other had to build on it. This went on for years, apparently - there were piles of these things. And what beautiful work.
But his older brother started going mad when he turned about 19. Those last pages that he wrote, as his raving text slowly grew and grew and crowded out the pictures - which were weirdly still drawn to scale - has to be one of the strangest things I've ever seen.
I think the final page was something like a pair of eyes peering out from a page of scrawled text.
In the film we see him as an aging recluse living with his elderly widowed mother, never leaving his room for years on end. He was a voracious reader, an expert on the Victorian writers.
Then he killed himself by swallowing Drano.
Very sad.
Crumb's younger brother was a total flake. Really dangerously nuts. He tells a story of how he gets aroused by a Jewess in front of him in a checkout line at a supermarket and he just loses it and pulls down her pants in front of everybody. I didn't have much empathy for him.
I really felt for his older brother, though.
Good film. Hardly a WN classic, but worth a look for Crumb fans.
2005-07-15 10:40 | User Profile
Crumb once did a strip about his older brother Charlie. Pretty heartbreaking. He was regularly set upon - beaten up and publicly humiliated - by the 'hood' clique in his high school (all whites, by the way). It did something to him; broke him. I knew he'd become a recluse but didn't know he'd committed suicide, however. Sad but maybe inevitable. The other brother, Max, was some sort of street-crazy in San Francisco, who'd occasionally contribute artwork to Crumb's now-defunct WEIRDO magazine. Let's just say draftsmanship wasn't his long suit (or maybe it was once, but life on the street kiboshed it).
I've come to have great empathy for recluses and oddballs these past few years. Hard to fathom how one doesn't grow alienated from the scheisskultur, particularly as one grows older. Modernity holds few charms once you're no longer a self-obsessed adolescent, unless you find something of particular fascination in the repetitious grind of [I]garbage-in, garbage-out[/I].
What saved Crumb from the same fate was his fame. His [I]enfant-terrible of underground comics[/I] status, occurring during the late 60s to boot, and the perks of that fame - groupies, acclaim, free dope, art-gallery phonies gushing over your every jot and tittle - gave him the confidence to keep improving (Crumb's 80s-90s work is far, far superior to his celebrated 60s & 70s strips, though much less well known), and the freedom to put anything he chose to on paper. Had anyone else drawn WHEN THE JEWS TAKE OVER, or ANGELFOOD McSPADE, they'd've been pilloried and shouted down off Olympus regardless of 'ironic intent', but 60s heroes get comped through such storms and strife. It's safe to say that Robert Crumb knows that, there but for ZAP COMIX goes a Xerox of Max - or Charlie - Crumb.
2005-07-15 15:04 | User Profile
I've come to have great empathy for recluses and oddballs these past few years.
Indeed.
Hard to fathom how one doesn't grow alienated from the scheisskultur, particularly as one grows older.
Coping with the scheisskultur through chemistry is my bet. Someone has to be eating all that Prozac, Luvox and Paxil. Well, what's left after the school-age kiddies get their daily dose rammed down their throats, that is.
2005-07-15 17:42 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]What saved Crumb from the same fate was his fame. His [I]enfant-terrible of underground comics[/I] status, occurring during the late 60s to boot, and the perks of that fame - groupies, acclaim, free dope, art-gallery phonies gushing over your every jot and tittle - gave him the confidence to keep improving (Crumb's 80s-90s work is far, far superior to his celebrated 60s & 70s strips, though much less well known), and the freedom to put anything he chose to on paper. Had anyone else drawn WHEN THE JEWS TAKE OVER, or ANGELFOOD McSPADE, they'd've been pilloried and shouted down off Olympus regardless of 'ironic intent', but 60s heroes get comped through such storms and strife. It's safe to say that Robert Crumb knows that, there but for ZAP COMIX goes a Xerox of Max - or Charlie - Crumb.[/QUOTE]
The thing about R. Crumb that really struck me in the film was his utter contempt for the whole hippie thing. He was the court artist for the Haight-Ashbury scene for Pete's sake, but he really had no use for any of it personally. He really built a sort of little cocoon for himself and lived in a sort of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world. He lived literally at the corner of Haight and Ashbury in the mid-60s but couldn't tell you who the Grateful Dead were. He just listened to his Delta Blues records oblivious to that whole amazing musical phenomenon that went on all around him.
I mean, whether or not you liked Jerry Garcia as an artist is fine, but how in the world could you be alive in San Francisco in 1967 and not have even heard of him?
He had a famous panel drawing of a stoner staring off into space, chin cupped in his hands, as face slowly melts away like so much candle wax. That was an absolutely ubiquitous image when I was a teenager. But for Crumb it was just some dross he threw off for a few bucks.
The hippie-dippie scene seems to have irritated him to no end.
As a non-artist (I really have zero talent for drawing or anything like that) I found R. Crumb's conversations with his artist son endlessly fascinating. The young artist was working on a rendering of a 19th century photograph of a female inmate of some Dickensian insane asylum. It was a very disturbing photograph, and I just thought it was so interesting how they talked about capturing her essence by getting her mouth just right. It's really lost on me, but I think it's way cool that other people can actually do that.
The film seemed to indicate that the real problem with all three of those boys was their crazy father, who was a kid-beater without peer. I suspect that's the thing that broke his older brother's spirits.
Of the three of them, I suspect that the greatest talent was that of his older brother. R. Crumb is a genius in his own bizarre way, but I think that his older brother had a leg up on him in the intellect department.
In the film, the older brother Charlie (?) was told of the younger brother Max's weird daily ritual of swallowing a string while sitting on a pad covered with sharp metal strips. The look in Charlie's face as R. Crumb told him about this was very moving. He was so genuinely concerned about his crazy little brother. He seemed so aware of the terrible mental illness they shared. I dunno. He just struck me as the kind of guy I would have really liked.
What a tragic waste.
2005-07-15 18:11 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno] I've come to have great empathy for recluses and oddballs these past few years. Hard to fathom how one doesn't grow alienated from the scheisskultur, particularly as one grows older. Modernity holds few charms once you're no longer a self-obsessed adolescent, unless you find something of particular fascination in the repetitious grind of [I]garbage-in, garbage-out[/I]. [/QUOTE]
Shoot, I'm ready to become a recluse myself. Any trip to any Temple of Consumerism causes me nothing but despair and hopelessness for the human race.
Anyway, I remember seeing Crumb's documentary when it came out in the 90's because my friends were Crumb fanatics. I couldn't believe that this was the dude who did all those comics! Oh, his one brother was a total disaster. Sad.
Anyway, I saw the film "American Splendor" about Harvey Pekar. Robert Crumb did the artwork in Pekar's early comics. Excellent movie about another oddball recluse.
2005-07-15 21:34 | User Profile
Walter, you ought to - I dunno how exactly beyond second hand bookstores - take a look at Crumb's later work. The composition and shading and cross-hatching is INSANE....so obsessively detailed and meticulous.
As an impromptu, park-bench sketcher, he's without peer. The off-the-cuff, first-take stuff he captures is simply amazing. He even published a few books of these things - tossed-off sketches of passersby, doodles on restaurant napkins, etc. His instincts and steadiness of hand - they floor me. I think the only real peer he had from the underground comix days is Bill Griffith; ironically, another guy who more or less despised the hippie culture, and [I]definitely[/I] despised the generic youth culture that followed the hippie era. He draws the ZIPPY THE PINHEAD syndicated strip, which is notable for being the only newspaper strip left that features [I]actual drawing [/I] as opposed to stick-figure talking heads. (He once described Cathy Guisewite's awful strip CATHY as "looking like someone dropped string on the floor, and then Xeroxed it".)
2005-07-15 22:00 | User Profile
He'da been better than the Chimp...
[img]http://www.universohq.com/quadrinhos/2004/imagens/zippy_presidente.jpg[/img]
2005-07-15 22:06 | User Profile
VS:
[img]http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/MT/94/Jun94/mt27aj94.gif[/img]
2005-07-15 22:10 | User Profile
[img]http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/arts/2005/03/09/crumb_angelfood512.jpg[/img]
Sho' Nuff!! :afro: Hyeagh, hyeagh, hyeagh...
2005-07-15 22:27 | User Profile
[QUOTE=xmetalhead]Shoot, I'm ready to become a recluse myself. Any trip to any Temple of Consumerism causes me nothing but despair and hopelessness for the human race.
Anyway, I remember seeing Crumb's documentary when it came out in the 90's because my friends were Crumb fanatics. I couldn't believe that this was the dude who did all those comics! Oh, his one brother was a total disaster. Sad.
Anyway, I saw the film "American Splendor" about Harvey Pekar. Robert Crumb did the artwork in Pekar's early comics. Excellent movie about another oddball recluse.[/QUOTE]
You'd probably enjoy the movie "Ghost World", too--with its R. Crumb-like antihero and an artist heroine for whom Crumb's daughter provided the notebook sketches.
2005-07-16 00:01 | User Profile
I saw the Crumb film a few years back, does he still live in France? I think the focus of the film was his wrapping up his affairs before moving. The older brother would have been an interesting subject for a biopic in his own right. Many years ago, there was an NPR show about Crumb, I think it was on the Soundprint series, something that was on at 2 or 3 AM on Sunday nights after Harry Shearer's awful show, and Alan Watts, and Ken Nordine and whatnot. He discussed living in Cleveland and moving to San Francisco on the spur of the moment, even having to write his wife and tell her to follow him. It would probably interest those who liked the film, if they can track it down. I don't know if the series still airs.
2005-07-16 02:39 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]Walter, you ought to - I dunno how exactly beyond second hand bookstores - take a look at Crumb's later work. The composition and shading and cross-hatching is INSANE....so obsessively detailed and meticulous.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I remember that when it first came out. I remember being rather appalled by it.
Back when I was a student I had a friend named Bruce who was a comic book artist. He actually wound up majoring in graphic design at the university and makes a good living at it to this day. Bruce's comics were quite good, IMO, although I believe he never managed to get any of his work published. Bruce wanted to marry my trampy cousin Maureen, but she dumped him and wound up with a French guy named Maurice, but I digress. That was the late 70s back when I liked to party hearty. My memories of that time are sketchy at best!
Anyway, I do remember Bruce was really concerned about Crumb when that stuff started coming out. He and his artiste pals talked endlessly about their hero Crumb's apparent crack-up. His work was all swirlly lines and disjointed stories. I agree that it was obviously the product of a diseased mind. It's when I stopped following Crumb, and really I only got re-interested in him after the film "Crumb" came out a few years ago. He seems to have come out of it to some degree, thankfully.
X, I really liked American Splendor, too. This was by the same director who did "Crumb", no?
2005-07-16 03:51 | User Profile
I use to see the yogi brother all the time, sitting around lower Market street , full-lotus, sunken eyes, with a coin cup for spare-change, but I haven't seen him in years.
2005-07-16 06:33 | User Profile
[QUOTE]Yeah, I remember that when it first came out. I remember being rather appalled by it.[/QUOTE]
No, I don't mean the experimental/abstract stuff, I mean 'insane' in the sense that the more recent stuff - like his Kafka adaptation, or his bluesmen biographies - combines his cartoony quality with almost photo-realistic rendering. Miles beyond Mr Natural and Fritz.
Part of a somewhat-recent interview:
[QUOTE][url]http://www.gettingit.com/article/599[/url]
GettingIt: Who's your favorite comic artist these days?
R. CRUMB: I guess Dan Clowes. I also like Richard Altergun. He doesn't do very much work, but he's great. There's a lot of good comic artists now that are younger kids. It's a young person's medium, comics. It's hard to keep it up when you get older.
GI: What isn't hard to keep up when you get old?
RC: Maybe that's it [Laughs]. You know, you got to be on your toes, quick on your feet, nimble, you know, fast and energetic.
GI: …to be a comic artist?
RC: Yes, to be prolific and keep coming up with funny, amusing ideas and all. You see those old farts that do those strips in the newspaper that are just terrible. They're dead, they're dull, they're boring.
GI: Do you want to talk about the Zap thing? I don't know what you want to call it, a fight? There was a lot of speculation about what happened.
RC: The Zap incident? It's not a big deal. It's all in the comic. I did a two-page comic about it and that's exactly what happened. I explained to those guys years ago that I just kind of wanted to quit the title and let it drop. They just couldn't let it drop. I guess they felt there was still some glory in that title. They felt like they were a rock band or something, "We're like a band, you can't quit, you know. Look at the Rolling Stones, they still go on." [Laughs] But I didn't feel that way. I didn't feel I was in a band [Laughing].
GI: Is there a big artist community where you live?
RC: There are a lot of artists around there, mostly bad. The French government supports art, they give a lot of money to art. So there's all these bad artists just living off the government. So atrociously bad, you can't believe how bad it is. Openings all the time, so much nonsense, art nonsense and music nonsense, dance nonsense. It goes on all the time there. The French live for the pretty things.
GI: You don't like most modern art?
RC: No, awful. I can't believe it goes on and on, how bad art just goes on, crappy abstracted shit. It looks like, like that stuff we saw yesterday… like stuff by retards.
GI: What did you see?
RC: Student art at the [San Francisco] Art Institute. It was just…wretched. Well, [students] get confused and intimidated by the teachers, and then they don't know what they're doing anymore, they become unsure of themselves, lose their own footing. Same thing in France, the same bullshit.
GI: If you were coming of age in the '90s, would you still go into comics or would you go into computers?
RC: Geez, I have no idea. I would have been raised on a whole different set of cultural inputs. When I was a little kid, comics were at their peak. You know, the first comics of the '40s and '50s. Now there's no good mainstream comics. So, God knows what kids today are influenced by…computer games.
GI: Are you into computers at all?
RC: No, don't touch 'em. It's amazing in America. Everybody I know in America now spends some time on the computer. In France, personal computers are not happening. It's just not happening. Here, it's amazing. Everybody does it at their job, or for recreation, or... People stare at that screen all day, it's incredible. It's what you gotta do now.
GI: Have you seen eBay?
RC: Yeah, it's amazing. It's impressive as hell, incredible. Revolutionary.
GI: Isn't some of your art on eBay?
RC: Oh, yeah. It's amazing. But I'm not attracted to it. It's amazing but I guess I'm stuck in the 19th century. I guess I don't read too good.
GI: You like the physical paper?
RC: Yeah, I like paper and pens and stationery supplies…
GI: And girls.
RC: Guh-guh-guh-girls. Real girls that you can feel, and they're rubbery and warm.
GI: That's why you can't give up the Devil Girl statue. How long did it take you to make?
RC: Months and months of labor… every day. It was an incredible amount of work. I'll never do it again [Laughs].
Part of the problem was that I wanted the anatomy to be correct with that statue, you know, like working on that knee that's jutted up, I got all these women and I would be like: "Can I see your knee?" I couldn't get the knee right. Every woman's knee was different. No two knees are alike.
Of course actually getting somebody to get anywhere near that pose was impossible. I have photos of some Chinese contortionist girls who can actually sit on their own head like that [Laughs]. But they didn't have the right build. But at least they're in the right position [Laughs].
GI: Did you make that for yourself, originally?
RC: Yeah, sure. I made her so I could climb on her. I spent so much time and so much concentration working on her that, as the form started to really become sharp and clear, she started talking to me. I was with her so much, obsessed with her, really…It was so weird to just start hearing her voice while I was working on her, you know. She'd say, "put little hearts on my socks!"
GI: You actually heard her talking?
RC: Yeah, I'd hear her voice in my head. Very strange.
GI: Did she suggest that you put her little pussy there too?
RC: No, that was my idea.
GI: So why do you hate women? [One of the most common criticisms leveled at R. Crumb is that he's a blatant misogynist.]
RC: Why do you hate men? Everybody… it's the battle of the sexes. Love 'em, hate 'em, you know how it is. You go around and around with it.
GI: But why do you like to bend 'em?
RC: Why do I like to bend women? It's thrilling. And they're so bendable. Women are way more flexible than men. It's a thrill. I don't know. Why do guys develop any fixation, fetish? It's a mystery.
GI: How old is your daughter?
RC: She's 17.
GI: She grew up in France, right?
RC: Yeah, she was nine when we moved there, so she's totally French. Not totally, actually. She's not as deferential to men as the French girls are. She wasn't raised that way. French girls her age are almost all focused on what the boy wants to do and what the boy likes. She's more independent than that.
Some French boys like that, some of them don't at all. I'm glad she's not like those French girls.
GI: Well, Sophie's read all of your comics now I guess?
RC: No, Sophie has [I]not[/I] read my comics. She doesn't want to know. She can't handle it, you know. She's too young, she just doesn't want to look at it -- to see that her daddy drew all this raunchy, perverted sex stuff. She really can't deal with it. Someday I think she will, but...I don't even think [I]I [/I] could have dealt with my own comics when I was that age. When I was 17, I couldn't have looked at it, either.
GI: Robert, you did the cover to this record [referring to "Cheap Thrills" playing on jukebox].
RC: I did the cover to this record?
GI: Yeah. This is Janis Joplin. You did the cover to this record.
RC: [Laughs, sarcastically] Awesome.[/QUOTE]
2005-07-17 16:14 | User Profile
[img]http://www.rageboy.com/images/r-crumb-whiteman.jpg[/img]
2005-07-18 03:29 | User Profile
[QUOTE=il ragno]No, I don't mean the experimental/abstract stuff, I mean 'insane' in the sense that the more recent stuff - like his Kafka adaptation, or his bluesmen biographies - combines his cartoony quality with almost photo-realistic rendering. Miles beyond Mr Natural and Fritz.
[/QUOTE]
I'll check it out. Thanks for the tip.
2005-07-18 13:23 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] X, I really liked American Splendor, too. This was by the same director who did "Crumb", no?[/QUOTE]
Walter, [B]American Splendor[/B] was directed by Robert Pulcini and [B]Crumb[/B] was directed by Terry Zwigoff. Mr Zwigoff also directed the film [B]Ghost World[/B], which is a recommended view according to our OD resident Howard Campbell, Jr. I looked it up on IMDB and I'm very interested in seeing it now.