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July 06, 2005

GUEST REVIEW: THE R. CRUMB HANDBOOK

Rcurmb The R. Crumb Handbook
By R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski
MQ Publications Limited
2005
440 pp.

GUEST REVIEW BY GABRIEL CARRAS

He’s been called everything from a misogynist who has been demeaning women for nearly 40 years to, perhaps most famously, the 20th century’s Brueghel. But no matter what you think of Robert Crumb or the merits of his work (or even whether or not you think a review of his work even belongs at a literary web site), anyone with any knowledge of the history of the comics industry must acknowledge the following – he was first. His simple attempt at entrepreneurship, selling his own comics in San Franciso’s Haight-Ashbury district in 1967, opened the floodgates for every article entitled “Hey, Everyone – Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!” or “The Graphic Novel Grows Up!” you’ve had to endure since then. Without Crumb, Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman would probably be best known as a Wacky Packs cartoonist, while someone like current favorite Chris Ware would probably be a highbrow book designer a la Chip Kidd.

The latest collection of Crumb’s work, The R. Crumb Handbook is a hybrid of Crumb’s cartooning, autobiographical text, other graphics (albums, book covers, photos, etc.), and even a CD featuring music played by various bands of which Crumb has been a part. Peter Poplaski, a long-time Crumb collaborator, successfully combines the elements to produce a book that stands as a welcome addition to Crumb’s work.

While there may not be that much new material in the Handbook, reading and appreciating Crumb is similar to appreciating mythology or Shakespeare – yes, it’s all been said before, and you may even know some of the lines, but it doesn’t make the work any less valid. His standard preoccupations are present – the fixation on powerful women with thick legs and large posteriors, his preoccupation with not getting swallowed up by people or corporations trying to seduce him with money and/or power, and, above all, his finely rendered cartooning, which covers a range of genres (screwball comedy, slice of life, biographical) that would make many writers envious.

The outline of Crumb’s life is familiar to anyone who has seen Terry Zwigoff’s documentary Crumb and/or anyone who has kept tabs on the underground comics movement since the 1960s. Born in 1943 to parents who had little idea what to do with an artistically precocious child, Crumb found his affinity for comics by following his older brother Charles’ lead. The Handbook bounces back and forth between Crumb’s descriptions of particular memories from his life and it utilizes whatever graphics are needed to illustrate a particular segment – a picture, a particular comic, etc. Poplaski deserves credit for his research and graphic sensibilities. For example, Crumb’s memories of a particular pamphlet he read while attending Catholic school are illustrated by that very pamphlet. The packrat in me wonders whether Poplaski found this pamphlet on his own or if Crumb has just been holding onto it since the 1950s.

Poplaski interviewed Crumb, transcribed the resulting conversation, and then they worked toward the final text. The resulting text is breezy and informal; it is not just an autobiographical recounting of Crumb’s life; it also includes what could probably best be described as treatises about Crumb’s philosophy toward media, gender relations and whatever other insights toward life he felt like ranting about on that particular day.

I happen to agree with many of Crumb’s beliefs about where our society is heading and where it’s been, so the book serves a similar role, say, as being a conservative Republican at a speech given by Karl Rove – it preaches to the converted in a comforting, reassuring tone. Having been born a bit too late to have lived through the 60s as anything other than a toddler, I can read and appreciate Crumb’s more “psychedelic” work, and I usually get a kick out of his Mr. Natural or Fritz the Cat stories, but the cartooning of his that I’ve always enjoyed the most are the stories he started producing for his own Weirdo magazine in the early 1980s; it was there that he added a greater depth and insight to his already-famous wit. (I also have a genuine soft spot for his collaborations with Harvey Pekar.)

My main criticism of the Handbook’s text is that it basically peters out … The last two chapters seem less weighty and considered than the earlier ones, which is especially odd since they’re trying to explore some important topics, i.e. Crumb’s feelings toward his mortality. In fact, most of the material presented in these chapters appears to be from Crumb’s ongoing sketchbooks, although these pages are actually quite text heavy and seem to be rants that Crumb wrote either to reassure himself or to simply put his thoughts down on paper. The following is presented as on page 376 in what appears to be a dialogue between different parts of Crumb’s personality:

“Stop Chasing Illusions, you dope, you sap, you fool! Yeah, but what else is there?!? It’s all illusion … Yes, it is, but stop running after it. Oh … Don’t look foreward (sic) to things … Look at this moment. Do not lament if you can help it. Sure your struggle is unique, but so is the next fellow’s. Yeah, words to live by, except that when I’m not chasing illusions, I’m lamenting my fate … One or the other, every second … Yep … I’ve spent a large portion of my life wallowing in feelings of persecution and martyrdom and victimhood … Take a deep breath … Calm down … Sit still … Don’t ‘do’ anything.”

Then again, he knows that there is an outlet for practically anything he would put on paper, so maybe it’s all for us. Happily, this rant is opposite a hilarious full-color self-portrait entitled “The Seven Chakras of R. Crumb” where arrows pointing to the two chakras at the top of his head read “nothing happening” and “inactive, not in service, out of order.”

I don’t often get to spend time with people who are more self-deprecating than I am. You will never find two artists more disparate than Crumb and Charles Schulz, but they do share at least one common element – even as they achieved a level of creative and financial success, they maintained their perspective on being able to analyze themselves and our society. I can’t offer a higher compliment than that, other than to say I’d be happier if Crumb’s work was even more popular today. Then again, he would probably rebel about such popularity, and I would probably write him off, too.

Gabriel Carras is a contributing writer to The Comics Journal.  He teaches English to wealthy eighth graders in a tony New York City suburb; in addition, he sponsors the school's acting club and directs its play every year

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