Customer Reviews

The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 2: Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle (Complete Crumb Comics)

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First I must mention that here I am reviewing "THE COMPLETE CRUMB COMICS VOL. 2 - SOME MORE EARLY YEARS OF BITTER STRUGGLE" AND NOT -- REPEAT NOT -- Vol. 3 (with Fritz the Cat on the cover). This review may show up under a copy of Vol. 3 as the software at both Amazon.com AND affiliates such as Barnes and Noble are totally screwed up when it comes to this book. The first time I ordered Vol. 2 I received Vol. 3 for this reason!! Make sure before ordering that Vol. 3 is NOT listed above this review by photo or in any other way. I learned the hard way!

What can I say about this book? It's vintage Crumb. A lot of comics he was doing just as he was leaving home and facing the big bad world in Cleveland. There is a great introduction by Crumb's longtime friend (now passed away) Marty Pahls, telling more of Crumb's story. One big disappointment was when I read in Pahls' introduction that Crumb's first wife Dana would not allow Fantagraphics the publishing rights to reprint ANY of The Yum Yum Book, which she owns copyright to as Crumb gave it to her.

There are some comics in here which clearly Robert did with his brother Charles. The dead giveaway, besides some of his artistic style, is Charles' tendency toward the end to put the lines and lines especially on garments. (Sorry, I don't know how to describe it.) However I believe this was also when Charles was losing interest in doing comics, and even those comics feature much more of R. Crumb's work than his brothers, generally speaking. If you are familiar with R. Crumb's printing it is pretty easy to tell also when Charles wrote the dialogue.

It is hard to know what to say about this book. To me, it is full of many mysteries and unanswered questions -- but then, wasn't that exactly what the Great Artist was experiencing at that time of his life? I would never recommend this volume to anyone new to Crumb or who had never seen Crumb's work. I believe this one is best savored by those who are die-hard Crumb fans -- or perhaps die-hard Fritz the Cat fans, since there are a lot of great Fritz comics in these pages. A strangely lovely book, in a melancholy kind of way. For the non-Crumb fan I would probably rate this as a 3-star book rather than 5. Sorry if my recommendation is ultimately ambiguous. It's the best I can do except to say that if you can't get hold of this volume and have all the others but don't want to pay more than retail, and if you don't just HAVE to complete your set, you won't be missing terribly much if you don't ever get this one.