When Terry Zwigoff set out, with his 1994 documentary Crumb, to humanize the titular cartoonist, he did so, most prominently, by way of contrast. On one hand, there was R. Crumb, the artist admired by his community, who, by that point in time, was more or less universally agreed to be a trailblazing grandmaster of form and tone; on the other hand, there was Robert, the most well-adjusted, or at the very least the most ‘of the world,’ of the trauma-wracked Crumb family. Whereas Robert sublimated his trauma and neuroses into art, his mother and brothers Charles and Maxon (his two sisters, the viewer is informed at the end of the documentary, declined to take part) had all, to some degree, withdrawn from human society.
The impact of Zwigoff’s Crumb stems from precisely that contrast; it is a simultaneous display of the realm of art and the realm of home — one realm that is within Crumb’s control, and another that’s squarely outside of it. It should come as no surprise, of course, that Robert Crumb himself was somewhat horrified by the finished documentary; the parts about his family (concluding with an end-caption stating that brother Charles committed suicide some time after the end of the production) paint a devastating portrait of human helplessness and hopelessness, and, although the film itself operates on the assumption that Crumb is more or less the best, or, at the very least, the most important, cartoonist on the planet, the familial context grants that belief a somber implication. It’s a good thing, it seems to tell the viewer, that he went into art, because look where he might’ve ended up otherwise.
In his recent biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, Dan Nadel attempts a more even-handed approach, the tone of which is indicated by the second of two quotes in the epigraph, from Crumb himself: “No one understands… but of course, how could they?” A recurring and emblematic sentiment, simultaneously devastated and resigned, it corresponds very well with the texture of Nadel’s narrative approach. Nadel himself is not a sensationalist; his prose is subdued, not unpleasant but stylistically straightforward, with the occasional repeating tic or phrase. He writes with marked equanimity and structures his chapters to cover not specific key events but rather spans of time, giving the text a strong sense of flow and linearity.
Let us pause and break down what makes, at least on paper, a ‘good biography,’ and what sets apart a ‘good’ biography from a ‘great’ one. A good biography, generally, is a rule-follower: it presents a thorough, well-researched chain of events that outlines a human life. A great biography, on top of the above, offers a cogent and compelling critical perspective (not in the laudatory-or-denigrative sense so much as in the pattern-observation-and-analysis sense) that enriches one’s understanding of the ‘dry data’ by placing it within its surrounding context (social, cultural, political, and so forth). It appeals not only on the intellectual level but, ideally, on the human level as well.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the reason Crumb makes for an interesting biographical subject is less his stature in comics history than his extensive corpus of autobiographical material — which is to say, the fact that Crumb’s story has been extensively told, arranged, and curated by Crumb himself, serving as fertile ground for external reexamination and rearrangement.
Nadel, for that matter, is a strong reconstructor of human life, painting a vivid portrait of fraught lives and articulating their struggles (and personal failings) while largely reserving judgment. His thoroughness is greatly appreciated; going several generations back, he fleshes out a tight, detailed genealogical timeline, so that by the time he gets to the ‘main’ subject, Robert Crumb himself, the ‘incubating circumstances’ are well-established and understood.
In Crumb, Nadel finds a rich human portrait. Some elements from Zwigoff are carried over and affirmed, most prominently the contrast between Robert Crumb and his brother Charles, both of them oscillating wildly between compulsive artistic drive and hopelessness set on by trauma; Robert was the one who was ‘saved’ by art, while Charles withdrew deeper and deeper into his illness. This is not to say that art is a universal remedy, even for Robert — Crumb is portrayed as compellingly avoidant, even in the light of positive developments, and uniformly averse to external constraint. He swings wildly between infatuation with his first paramour (and future wife), Dana Morgan, and a fear of settling down (which would prompt him to seek long-term extramarital affairs and, eventually, with second-wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, an open marriage); between his passion for art (both comics and music) and the damper put on that passion by the obligations that come with success.
In many of these cases, although Crumb is presented in a sympathetic light (at least insofar as his psychological reasonings are laid bare), Nadel still underscores the damage done by the cartoonist’s neuroses and fears of confrontation. This is most notably embodied by Crumb’s eldest son, Jesse. Though Crumb tried his best to play the healthy father role as best he could, the relationship between the two was strained from the beginning due to his professed reluctance to become a father. Part of it, Nadel stresses, was not entirely Crumb’s fault (even after he moved away, he continued to send letters to Jesse and tried to communicate with him, attempts intercepted by Dana), but, in the cartoonist’s own words, “I refused to be forced into the father role that I never wanted and told her over and over that I didn’t want.” Crumb, Nadel stresses, “needed to do things his way” — often at the expense of others. In this case, it was Jesse who bore the brunt of the hurt, as he would for his entire life.
Like Zwigoff before him, Nadel is at his best when he serves as less a narrator than an arranger, presenting moments in their own words. The 1967 LSD-prompted journal entry “Points to Consider: New York Has Brought Me Down!” is an illuminating train-of-thought that lays bare Crumb’s neurosis, stripped of the compulsion for artistic flourish; a 1978 letter from brother Charles, detailing “A list of things I did in the past that I’ll probably never do again,” is, on the human level, just about the saddest texts I’ve read in a long while.
Yet, heartfelt (and human) as Nadel’s depiction of Crumb may be, on occasion one will be prompted to question the biographer’s devotion to truthful discussion. In this regard, sexual behavior proves a handy testing-ground. Little critical thought is paid to the less savory elements of Crumb’s behavior — most notably his notorious habit of jumping on the backs of women he found attractive for piggyback rides, a habit best described as sexual assault of the boundary-testing variety. Here, Nadel offers a simple explanation (“being [the persona] ‘R. Crumb’ made him very nervous, and the only way he felt he could cope was by either retreating into his sketchbook or acting out”), and a caveat of hostile reception (“[S]ome didn’t find it charming at all — they would throw him off, called him a creep or an asshole”), but these are undercut by an ultimate return to resignation: “It’s a sign of those times that so many women blithely accepted his behavior.”
If Crumb has reflected on this habit in the intervening years, whether because the cartoonist himself has changed or because the culture around him has, Nadel makes no effort to indicate it (terminology such as ‘sexual assault’ is reserved for the actions of brother Maxon). This is a noteworthy missed opportunity, if only because Crumb is, of course, extensively quoted throughout the book, from interviews both archival and by Nadel himself. These interviews are hardly hesitant to adjudicate or even ‘prettify’ the cartoonist’s ugly behavior; Crumb has no problem, for example, retelling an incident when an extramarital lover, Kathy Goodell, refused to leave Crumb’s home and he “totally lost it, began screaming at her to get out, picked up an old wooden folding chair and slammed it on her back.” With his forthright, matter-of-fact narration, the cartoonist appears less protective of himself—less afraid of indictment—than his biographer.
Nadel makes no bones about Crumb’s own involvement in the project: as a fact-checker, archival resource, and extensive interview subject all rolled up into one. As such, there is a distinct sense of immediacy, of a barrier broken down between subject and reader. Crumb himself is referred to by his first name; where the pen-name R. Crumb appears, it is often rendered in quotes in order to denote a clear distinction between person and persona.
Perhaps inevitably, this distinction, this parallel existence of public artist and private individual, is the source of many of Nadel’s falters. Early on in his foreword, he states that Crumb’s sole condition for the book was that the biographer “be honest about [Crumb’s] faults, look closely at his compulsions, and examine the racially and sexually charged aspects of his work. He would rather risk honesty and see if anyone could understand than cooperate with a hagiography.” A tricky situation, right from the get-go: by voicing a simple demand—one that we may assume would have applied even if it had not been broached, if only because it is an inextricable part of Crumb discourse past and present—Crumb, ever aware of his image, preempts criticism simply by voicing it first. From this point onwards, Nadel finds himself torn between this need for honesty and his own personal framing of Crumb.
Nadel himself is an avowed believer in the common view of Crumb as an observer, and expurgator, of the unadulterated American id. To me, however, what defines Crumb’s work, certainly in contrast to peers like Spain Rodriguez, is a sort of voluntary self-distancing that undercuts the political urgency. In most political themes1, in both life and art, Crumb insists on retaining the air of an uninvolved spectator; for example, as Nadel relates the 1968 bout of extreme police violence against hippies that inspired Crumb’s “Lenore Goldberg and Her Girl Commandos” (Motor City Comics #1, 1969), he states that Crumb “was appalled by the violence of law enforcement,” but also that it “struck him as a sort of cat-and-mouse game between the hippies and the cops.” The latter phrase, of course, tonally negates the former, upholding the tentative nature of Crumb’s critiques more than anything else.
It is this same self-distancing that allowed Crumb to center much of his work on the supposed separation of signifier and signified. Of the minstrelesque drawings of Black people, Crumb himself says that they “stood for what the stereotype itself meant to people, not what black people actually looked like to me. My fault was in not realizing that people would take these cartoon images literally,” – in practice, placing the blame on the reader. Using critic Gerald Early as his basis, Nadel offers the familiar furthering of that logic, arguing that the imagery is “both racist and excoriating. Robert indicts himself, the reader, and the entire culture. He can’t help but tempt fate in order to prove a point. No happy endings or pat lessons in Crumb Land.” As far as criticism goes, such lines of argument are dissatisfying and slippery; by folding failing into intent, they nullify the criticism and distort it into congratulation.
Similarly, when Nadel lingers on the back cover of Weirdo #1 (“a finely rendered version of a Brooke Shields Calvin Klein advertisement, the teen model thickened to Robert’s [preferred female] proportions, mouth filled with a semenlike substance, an indignant expression on her face”), he asserts that “Robert could still wreak abject havoc on the commercial heart of America”; yet I cannot help but feel that, by retaining Brooke Shields’ likeness, Crumb undercuts his own point by rendering her not a real person so much as a rhetorical cudgel. It’s mean-spirited, to be sure, and cynical, and all the things that Nadel says about it — but more than that, as far as satire goes, it is lazy and unfocused.
Furthermore, though Nadel will describe a comic as misogynistic or racist when egregiously so, or mention in passing that a certain work is sloppily drawn in relation to Crumb’s typical standard, his critical observations, more often than not, will be topical, exclusive to the work at hand. By and large, he fails to—or else will actively choose not to—seek out connections between Crumb’s professed call-outs and otherwise-manifest ways of thinking. For one such occasion, we may look to “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America,” one of two comics in 1994’s Weirdo #28 in which Crumb renders in fine detail the racist paranoia of conservative America. “‘When the Goddamn Jews…,’” in Nadel’s description, “has the Jewish people undermining Christian people through the media and psychoanalysis.”
This is complicated somewhat by Crumb’s own regard of Jews: “Robert is forever interested in Jews. Aline, [Harvey] Kurtzman, [Crumb’s first wife] Dana, Terry [Zwigoff], Albert Morse—all these impactful people in his life—all Jews. Until he was an adult, Jews only existed as the makers of the culture he loved and maintained a mystique—a unique place in history, outsiders forever perceived as insiders.” Later on, we are told: “When Aline was dying, Robert would meditate and try to send healing energy to her being. He said he would encounter a black mass, an ancient black form, blocking him from her. This was, he thinks, a thousand-year-old accumulation of anxiety, guilt, trauma, and self-hatred of the Jewish people.”
Though, granted, not nearly of the same antisemitic caliber as “When the Goddamn Jews…” (a comic that, famously, was reproduced in a white-supremacist newspaper along with its counterpart, which focuses on anti-Black paranoia, both taken at face value), there is nonetheless a mindset that fundamentally treats any Jew as exotic, as representative of some sort of Jewish hivemind whose constituents are, on some deep spiritual level, interchangeable, at least insofar as they2 are all collectively chained to the same mystical (and, by the sound of it, quite burdensome) conception of Jewishness. It’s a similar mindset, if a less in-your-face one, to Crumb’s representation of Black people: they exist as culture-makers (many of Crumb’s favorite jazz and blues musicians are, of course, Black), or as “the stereotype ‘coon’ image […] that had nothing to do with real black people” — but rarely as people to be viewed at eye-level.
Of this two-part comic, Nadel writes, “[Crumb’s] friends Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith said it didn’t work as satire, which it doesn’t. It works as a well-observed warning about the racism and antisemitism embedded in America, masked as cathartic art.” Not only is there that same Yes, but cadence — I struggle, quite frankly, to see the difference between ‘satire’ and ‘well-observed warning masked as cathartic art’; if anything, few satirical tools are more tried-and-true than the hijacking of the subject’s surface-aesthetic. In that typical reluctance to pass unreserved judgment on a Crumb comic, Nadel props up a distinction that is arbitrary to the point of incoherence.
All of this is in service of the framing of Crumb as someone who questions everything and never takes any set worldview as dogma: “Robert’s constant interior dialogue never resolves,” writes Nadel, “not in comics, notebooks, or correspondence. Any solid answer was immediately suspicious.” It’s an approach the biographer seems to valorize in some way, offering Crumb’s explications and justifications without considering a counter; he discusses the cartoonist’s COVID-19 denialism, he simply says that, “[g]iven the Crumb family history with prescriptions, institutionalizations, and mysterious illnesses, Robert’s suspicions and mistrust of the healthcare industry is understandable. It can be boiled down to his baseline query: ‘What’s really going on?’” and compares Crumb’s conspiratorial thinking to his record collecting. The implicit framing is as an idle ‘marketplace of ideas,’ untethered from the world: Crumb the antivaxxer, Aline the vaccinated.
And yet one notes even with his supposed questionings and universally-applied scrutiny, Crumb does, time and time again, buckle to mainstream premises. Consider, for instance, his design for God in the adaptation of Genesis, which the biographer says was inspired by a dream Crumb had had some years prior: “He had features almost like Mel Gibson or Charlton Heston, very severe but at the same time sort of anguished looking.” To this, Nadel adds: “The emotive fleshiness of the Heston/Gibson visage was the white European ‘God’ going back a millennium.” Perhaps inadvertently, this simple narratorial remark shows Crumb’s ‘questioning’ to be teleological suspensions at best: ultimately, he will return to the kneejerk3.
This view of Crumb-as-unsparing-critic is not the only point where Nadel the biographer is defeated by Nadel the fan. Throughout the book, Nadel sprinkles in the occasional direct value judgment (almost universally positive, naturally). Some of these statements are pertinent insofar as they are concrete, relating as they do to specific works in Crumb’s oeuvre; the only way to understand the significance of, say, “Joe Blow” (Zap Comix #4, 1969) is by discussing the comic itself. Less understandable, though, are the occasions where, to convince the reader of Crumb’s uniqueness, the author will put forward a claim that exists entirely in the abstract. It’s easy to say that in the ‘90s and onwards Crumb worked “at a consistently high level decades after most of his peers declined,” or that “where many cartoonists’ backgrounds are interchangeable, everything in a Robert Crumb composition is entirely his own.” As far as argumentation goes, it is rhetorically weightless — by propping up a dichotomy of Crumb versus the whole of the field, the proponent can treat just about any example as an exception that proves the rule.
The warranted question, then, is precisely what aim these statements serve. Nadel, after all, makes enough of a consistent effort to position Crumb as a great artist on his own terms. He breaks down the appeal of certain works; he places the cartoonist within a broader artistic lineage (Barks, Stanley, and Kurtzman on the one hand, the likes of Thomas Nast on the other) while articulating exactly how Crumb broke from that lineage and blazed a new trail; he even puts forward fawning quotes from subsequent cartoonists who were influenced by Crumb, such as Seth and Joe Sacco. Why, then, invent a multitude of unnamed peers to frame as less-than?
The answer: in order to prop up a ‘great man’ theory of comics history. In a recent interview on TCJ, Nadel asserted that “[the world of independent comics] would not exist without [Crumb]. And that should be reckoned with in a more constructive way. Because there’s no SPX without Crumb, there’s no small press comics without Crumb.” It’s a lofty claim, one whose pernicious effectiveness lies, of course, in its inherently speculative nature; it is as much a what if as any counterpoint would be. I bristle at it not only out of intuition (given the great advances that the small-press and independent circuits made from the 1950s to the 1970s in the fields of prose and film, I find the idea that American comics would somehow never have glommed on somewhat narrow-minded) but also specifically because Nadel’s own text indicates another reality. “Cartoonists had been trying to publish comics for adults for the better part of the decade,” he writes on one instance, citing Frank Stack and Jack Jackson; elsewhere, he cites other germinal notions that, to start with, had little to do with Crumb himself.
Such claims become increasingly galling as they grow in scope. Of Crumb’s impact in Europe, the biographer writes that “[e]very serious cartoonist, no matter how successful, reevaluated their approach” following the arrival of the American undergrounds in Europe and Crumb’s debut in the French magazines Action and Actuel. To be sure, Nadel offers evidence of Crumb’s own success—translations, collected editions, published sketchbooks—but for that above statement, sweeping though it may be, he offers no backing. Instead, he leaves his reader with that splendidly bombastic phrase, every serious cartoonist, a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy if there ever was one. (It may be noted, just as one counter-example, that Éric Losfeld’s alternative French publisher Le Terrain Vague was already publishing comics two years prior to Crumb’s appearance in Action.)
Inevitably, this fault in historiography also dictates how readers view the future of comics for generations post-Crumb. By citing the various admirers of Crumb from the ‘60s to the ‘90s, and by only mentioning those anthologies that were established as a direct response to Crumb (whether as embrace and furthering, in the case of Raw, or as rejection, in the case of Wimmen’s Comix), he deliberately aborts any discussion of broader contexts – an unknowing reader of Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life will not be blamed for assuming that, almost sixty years on, the whole of ‘underground comics’ (or ‘independent comics,’ or ‘alternative comics,’ or whichever term one favors) is still of a uniform aesthetic and discursive lineage of which Crumb is the incontrovertible fountainhead and point of reference. Even if one were to take as gospel the assertion that this was the case in, say, the first decade or two following Crumb’s arrival, to refuse to acknowledge the existence of a non-Crumb sphere after sixty years of cultural cross-pollination—between comics and other forms, between comics of different global cultures, and even between the mainstream and the alternative—is to do a disservice to the culture-at-large in the interest of one of its practitioners. To be sure, it may be said that Crumb was the first ‘underground’4 cartoonist to attain widespread success — but such accomplishments, evidently, are not enough.
In the interest of fairness, there are certain points I am willing to concede to Nadel, most notably that Crumb is, even today, so ubiquitous within the comics discourse—as are critiques and points of detraction against him—that it is all too easy to form an opinion on him without reading much, if any, of his work. Much of this, of course, is Crumb’s own ‘fault’; if there is one thing I might readily grant him, it is that, in synonymizing his professional output with his perceived personal shortcomings, the first few decades of his work are a valiant effort to kill, once and for all, the myth that art and artist may be separated.
But, though the introduction promises that “What follows is the story of Robert Crumb, not only as he would tell it,” this is only true inasmuch as Dan Nadel is a bigger Crumb fan than Crumb himself. As he combats what he might term anti-Crumb overcorrections, he betrays his own reluctance to reckon with the extent of Crumb’s shortcomings—the key condition, remember, to the book’s existence—beyond half-hearted concessions.
Of writing a biography of R. Crumb, Nadel said in his TCJ interview, “it just felt like this had to exist. And if it’s not me, it’s gonna be somebody else and I didn’t want it to be somebody else.” This, I suspect, is where the problem begins. Though certainly adding much in the way of biographical insight, on the critical level Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life hews to the same congratulatory narratives peddled for the better part of fifty years.
I suppose it’s possible I just don’t understand. But of course, how could I?
FOOTNOTES:
- A prominent exception to this is environmental issues. In this field, to express his points as heatedly as possible, Crumb often elects a cartoon mode inspired by Thomas Nast and nowadays practiced by Ben Garrison — usually-obvious synecdochic symbolism with captions for added clarity. ↩︎
- It is prudent to note that I am, myself, Jewish. I use such distancing verbiage as ‘they’ and ‘by the sound of it’ simply because I do not feel that that “thousand-year-old accumulation of anxiety, guilt, trauma, and self-hatred” is at all part of my Jewish identity. ↩︎
- Indeed, the kneejerk is an integral part of Crumb’s artistic ethos, and a major reason why I have been unable to connect to his art on the craft level: a line could easily be drawn from his disdain for the ‘artsy’—the abstract and outré—to his recurring failure to think beyond surface-level recognitions, as well as to his belabored approach to both panel-to-panel transitions and narration.
↩︎ - One notes that even the term ‘underground’ is more sweeping in ideological connotations than Crumb himself arguably intended. As Woody Gelman put it: “Bob Crumb spoke to me of this desire to do an underground—he didn’t call it that, he just said he wanted to do dirty comics.” ↩︎
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