Customer Reviews

R. Crumb: Conversations (Conversations with Comic Artists)

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Poor ol' Robert Crumb, reluctantly labeled father of the underground comic movement has moved to France with his lovely, comely and protectant wife.
These conversations help the reader get into Crumb's head. They give an autobiographical and historical perspective of Crumb, from his harsh family atmosphere to when he escaped from a greeting card company to find the summer of love in California.
Many have been offended by what he has produced. He is an artist and as an artist he does what he is supposed to do; make you look at the (our) world in a different way.
These conversations give the reader the opportunity to be an auteur into the artistic psyche. Whether you believe Crumb is an artist or not, he was there; he saw, he came (in more ways than one) and he went away. It's a fascinating read and brings you closer to him. (It is impossible to meet him. Don't bother him in France and he no longer does any tours/talks-too busy drawing!)
It is worth it to have reviewed or be familiar with some of his comic work if you have not done so already. (Where have you been?) There are many sources on the Internet as well as published to accomplish this.
These conversations begin in the 60's and break into the 21st Century. I look forward to the next conversations, if he allows them.

Freudians should read this book. Crumb has a very modern set of aversions. Instead of doing a pamphlet for Planned Parenthood, he says, "But it's political. I don't know how I feel about all that. It's all so complicated." (p. 68). The topics discussed in this book cover the psychic interior, and the corporate entities have subtle names, as in, "Nevertheless, Last Gasp has gone on to become the second largest underground publisher in the country." [back in 1974, when eight hundred dollars covered printing costs for an underground title] (p. 93). R. CRUMB CONVERSATIONS (2004) has an index (which only has boldface listings for 6 pages showing cartoon characters, and it should've had boldface for Lenore Goldberg on p. 193 and Crumb as character on p. 198) on pages 233-244, and the Chronology on pages xiii-xxii includes such great years as 1993:

"Crumb illustrates INTRODUCING KAFKA. Summer: The last issue of WEIRDO (No. 28) is edited by Aline. June: THE COMPLETE DIRTY LAUNDRY COMICS is published. R. CRUMB SKETCHBOOK, May 1987 to April 1991 is published. Fall: A Crumb wall calendar for 1994 is published. November: R. Crumb Retrospective is shown at Alexander Gallery, New York City. Kitchen Sink issues a Mr. Natural squeeze doll."

Four pages in the index are devoted to Crumb's views and works. For example, on page 235 you can find:

on Fritz the Cat, 120, 212-13; on Fritz the Cat (movie), 12-13, 28, 57-61, 174;

But anyone who is in the part of the index devoted to Crumb's works will notice that Works on page 236 begins with THE ADVENTURES OF FRITZ THE CAT (Cavalier), xvi; and includes eight lines of listings of other Fritz the Cat characters in the second column on page 237, up to "Fritz the Cat Superstar," 174, 213.

Crumb has problems he feels because of his being a celebrity as a result of the documentary movie that was made about his life. `When people asked me if I liked it, I said, "It's a good movie. It completely ruined my life, but it's a good movie!" (Laughs).' (p. 218). I usually feel that Crumb is being most honest when he says things that correspond to my feelings, but my situation has more concerns about sexual harassment in the workplace. Comics is work that takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. I used to subscribe to "Funny Times Magazine" (if you get a subscription and die laughing, it might be my fault, but it's not likely) and see what the more politically observant cartoonists were producing, but I was usually too tired to read each issue. R. CRUMB CONVERSATIONS is more like reading a book. With 18 major selections, mostly interviews, originally published in 1968, 1972, 1974, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1998, 1999, and 2003 (with an illustration from 1971 on page 11, from 1970 on p. 19, from 1967 "I wish somebody would tell me what `Diddy-Wah-Diddy' means..." on p. 22, from 1968 on p. 25, from 1959 on p. 30, from 1961 on p. 31, from 1972 on p. 32, from 1965 on p. 43, from 1963 on p. 45, a greeting card "I got a German shepherd" from 1967 on p. 46, "Keep on Truckin'..." from 1967 (the hit song "Truckin" by the Grateful Dead was years later, but the idea came from an old blues song) on p. 70, from 1967 on p.86, Whiteman on p. 89, from 1970 on p. 110, from 1985 on p. 124 and p. 139, from 1987 on p. 145, from 1971 on p. 153, from 1967 on p. 173, from 1970 on p. 192, from 1969 on p. 193, from 1982 on p. 198, from 1981 "Excerpts from Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763," on p. 207, and from 2002 on p. 228), the book does not explain that "Diddie Wah Diddie" was an old song until the final interview conducted by mail in April, 2002.

`I don't spend nearly as much time dwelling on items that I "must have" for my collection as I used to. That said, I recently found an old collector willing to sell me an old bunch of fabulous and rare old 1920s blues records, stuff I've been trying to find for decades, such as Blind Blake's "Diddie Wah Diddie" and Memphis Minnie's "Cherry Ball Blues." They're not cheap, but not top dollar either.' (p. 226).

It is easy to find Academy Awards twice in the index, but only because of the Chronology for 1991 "April: Crumb's account of his attendance at the previous year's Oscar ceremony is published in `Premiere' magazine." And for 1994 "September: CRUMB, Terry Zwigoff's documentary about his longtime friend, premieres at the Toronto Film Festival and goes on to become a hit. Controversially, it is not nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary." About his participation in the movie starring his character, Fritz the Cat, he said, "Me and him [Ralph Bakshi] and my wife went out to lunch. After that I said: I'm going to do something, I'll see you later. And I just skipped and didn't come back for a week. I left him with my wife--it was really a bad mistake. He talked her into signing the contract. I never signed anything. I can't blame her, she had my power of attorney." (pp. 105-06). Crumb is not as rich as he deserves to be.

Robert: They gave me ten thousand dollars.
Al: You haven't got any royalty checks or anything?
Robert: Nah. Ten thousand dollars is what I've gotten from them. You know, I ain't poor. I'm probably upper middle class compared to most people I know.
Al: All these products that have been coming out with Mr. Natural on them and Keep on Truckin', that's really pirate stuff.
Robert: Most of it is. (pp. 69-71).

Back in 1972, it was the most famous cartoonist who was getting the most money. "Charles Schulz has the highest salary of anybody in the world." (p. 71).

Fans of underground comix art who wish for insights into the counterculture artist and innovator R. Crumb, whose illustrations have received wide distribution both in his own collections and on the faces of records, newspapers, and t-shirts, will find R. Crumb Conversations an excellent gathering of interviews and profiles covering various periods of Crumb's life and works. Comic art jokes, interactions with publishers and the public, and Crumb's influence on the underground comic art world are all revealed in the course of some excellent surveys.

I grew up reading the original underground comics that Robert Crumb was creating.
His work is obviously not for everyone, but then that's true of all artists with a unique vision.
This book is a chronologically ordered series of interviews which spans most of Crumb's career. There's something about hearing (mentally) the words of someone whose work interests me, that I find really fascinating.
If you feel the same way you will enjoy this. There is quite a bit of repetition, as some of the interviewers tend to cover, some of the same territory.
I do recommend seeing the film "Crumb" before reading this. It makes it so much easier to imagine R. sitting there when you have been exposed to his voice and mannerisms. At least as he was when the film was produced.
Interesting stuff.

So says R. Crumb (p. 163) from a 1989 interview included in this intriguing collection of conversations with him (including one joint conversation with Crumb and his wife-occasional collaborator Aline Kominsky). Part of the University of Mississippi's Conversations with Comic Artists series, the collection contains 18 interviews with Crumb. They first was conducted when he was 24, the last in his 59th year (Crumb turns 65 this year, hard as it is to believe!).

The interviews shed a lot of light on what makes Crumb tick. In them, he discusses his miserable childhood, growing up as the son of a career Marine and a diet-pill popping mom. The family moved a lot (following the dad's career), the parents fought constantly, the three brothers (there were also two sisters, about which almost nothing is said except that one once broke a banjo over Crumb's head) were all unbelievably dysfunctional although also arguably geniuses. Crumb finally escapes the family, gets a job at the American Greeting Card Corporation, marries, moves to San Francisco, drops LSD, and almost overnight, his creative juices flowing, becomes the "father of underground comics."

Crumb's journey from hippie hero to serious social satirist, confessional comics artist, and family man (sort of) is chronicled interview-by- interview. Always a deliberate outsider, a despiser of corporate America and the "artsy" crowd, Crumb has even separated himself from his own work whenever he's sensed that it was becoming mainstream: Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural (although he's recently put out a Mr. Natural Mystic Comic), the obnoxious "Keep on Truckin'" slogan.

In many ways, Crumb has been one of the most perceptive--and surely one of the most honest--voices of my lifetime. He chronicles the weirdness of human existence, a weirdness that he alternately finds fascinating, hilarious, hideous, enraging, fearsome, and celebratory. Perceptive readers of Crumb's fans will discover information in the interviews collected in R. Crumb: Conversations that enhance appreciation of his "sweaty, nervous, uneasy" work.

I've only one caveat: the collection contains numerous typos, many more than one would expect from a university press publication. Almost all of them are mere annoyances, but one (p. 163) changes the meaning of an entire sentence. The sentence reads "I'm not so alienated from the culture that my work doesn't reflect the collective consciousness of the period, and many people find the work I'm doing now extremely dark." The "not" should be "now."