Waiting for Food Number 2: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings [Hardcover]

Robert Crumb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

Everyone knows the temptation of doodling on a restaurant tablecloth — but no one performs this deed as masterfully as R. Crumb. In this second collection of often irreverent and always mesmerizing placemat drawings, Crumb depicts fellow diners, Americana, French culture, and flights of fancy, offering a glimpse into the mind of an inspired artist and savvy social critic. 120 black-and-white illustrations are featured.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Last Gasp (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0867199008
• ISBN-13: 978-0867199000
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 10.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,899,076 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moments in a quirky mind, December 27, 2010

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Waiting for Food Number 2: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings (Hardcover)

Crumb has been a driving influence in comics since the 1970s, at least, and continues to shape the visual world. This collection presents a few moments of that intense and creative mind at play - not idle, since Crumb seems productive no matter what he's doing, but letting his thoughts work themselves out on restaurant napkins around France.

Of course, the French bistro scene gives him plenty of material to work with, a permanently changing collage of all that humankind has to offer. Some of his sketches stay close to the real world, others drift back to historical styles, and yet others wander away into erotic and odd world where, for example, a fireplug can morph into a lush, womanly torso. I can't call this book a must-have, but it's an interesting and insightful look into this off-beat mind and its creative process.

-- wiredweird

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Waiting for Foodot, March 24, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Waiting for Food Number 2: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings (Hardcover)

Friends, acquaintances, and his wife Aline have remarked on R. Crumb's habit of withdrawing to his sketchbook when he's in large crowds, distancing himself mentally if not physically from loud and bustling situations. Probably some of this is a defense mechanism, a retreat into a safe, inner place. Some of it, as he says in the very brief preface to Waiting for Food #2, is motivated by boredom. But surely the main reason is that Crumb is fascinated by the world around him and, like all artists, wants to capture some of it in his chosen medium. When his sketchbook isn't handy, he uses paper placemats at restaurants. And now that he's relocated to France, where spending long periods at restaurants is part of the culture, he's got lots of them. Hence this second volume of placemat drawings.

The unnumbered pages in this collection reproduce a wide variety of Crumb's doodlings and sketches. Some of them are whimsical and goofy: "Dopey Dawg" or a hilarious (but, in typical Crumb fashion, also ominous) scene in which aliens are preparing to give a human captive a rectal probe. Others are sketches of musicians, not unlike the trading card series that Crumb created a few years ago. Still others are simple sketches of folks he sees regularly: Aline, the waitress at his favorite pizza joint, friends. There are one or two slaps at contemporary culture (for example, "Capitalism on the March" and the delightfully sneerful "The French Mouth"), and one incredibly revealing self-portrait: Crumb, Sisyphus-like, is lugging a huge boulder toward a heap of other boulders and groaning, "I gotta pile up these rocks!"

But for me, what's most stunning about this collection are the sketches of strangers Crumb observes at restaurant tables. They're not aware of being watched. Their defenses are down. Their faces are totally honest, totally transparent, staring off into space as they drink their coffees and smoke their Gauloises. So many of them have the vapid, blank, quietly desperate expressions that one associates with those eerie cast-plaster, life-size statues by George Segal. "Anorexic French Girl," "At the Micocoulier Restaurant": these people, perhaps like Crumb himself, are listlessly anxious. They're waiting for more than just food. Their waiting, as Beckett suggested in "Waiting for Godot," is a waiting for deep meaning in their lives (a theme which Crumb admits interests him more now that he's in his 60s and feeling his mortality). Crumb's sketches of them are studies in existential anxiety--as, in fact, is his self-portrait on the book's cover.

Highly recommended. Readers interested in the existential side of Crumb might also want to look at his recent Kafka, as well as his not-so-recent comix featuring Sartre's Nausea.

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Sketchbook, though not his wildest stuff, July 18, 2009

By 

Michael Dubisch "Reader, Writer, Illustrator" (San Diego) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Waiting for Food Number 2: More Restaurant Placemat Drawings (Hardcover)

Lots of great portraits and doodles here, very little that is as involved as a full page illustration. A great window into his technical process and how he views day to day life as an expatriot in France. This would be an especially good aquisition or gift for someone who loves Crumb's art but is offended by much of his typical output, there is some nudity and strange depictions of the female, but not as much objectification and only a very small amount of sexual content (probably because he was drawing in a social situation.)