Robert Crumb was born in Philadelphia in 1943, the middle child of five. His father, Charles Crumb, was a career Marine, a martinet not averse to physically chastising recalcitrant offspring: when Robert was five, one of his father’s rages resulted in Crumb The Elder breaking Robert’s collarbone. Robert’s mother was addicted to amphetamines, and the eldest son, Charles Jr, was eager to inherit his namesake father’s alpha-male role. He was, however, a comic-book obsessive who started his younger sibling on wehat was to become his ultimate career path. Charles Jr drew his first comic when he was eight and Robert five; the following year both brothers worked on Chuck And Bob Comics: at nine years old, Robert produced his first solo comic, Brombo The Panda.
The summer of ’62 found Crumb relocating to Cleveland and working for the American Greetings Corporation, first as a colour separator and then as an artist. He had already formed a preference for older forms of popular music, and at a record sale commenced a lifelong friendship with a fellow collector, ‘Cleveland’s last beatnik’ Harvey Pekar. In later years, Pekar, inspired by Crumb’s success, started producing his own comic, the autobiographical American Splendor. Undeterred by the fact that he couldn’t draw, Pekar cajoled various artists, including Crumb, into illustrating his strips. Subsequently collected into book form, they became underground classics despite having barely broken even on original publication, and were recently adapted into an award-winning movie in which Crumb is portrayed by James Urbaniak.
It was also in Cleveland that Crumb married his first wife, Dana — literally the first woman he’d ever slept with — and discovered LSD. “The barrier betwixt the conscious and the subconscious was broken open somehow,” he later wrote. “A grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carnival of dissociated images kept sputtering to the surface. These jerky animated cartoons in my mind were not beautiful or spiritual. Pretty disturbing … and what a boon to my art! It was during this fuzzy period that I recorded in my sketchbook all the main characters I would be using in my comics for the next ten years … it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, like a religious vision that changes someone’s life, but in my case it was the psychotic manifestation of some grimy part of America’s collective unconscious.”
After having “figured out a way to put the stoned experience into a series of cartoon panels,” it should come as no surprise either that Crumb eventually found his way to San Francisco, but that he should become the freak cartoonist par excellence, even eclipsing Gilbert Shelton, creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Shelton also now lives in France, though he moved there several years before Crumb). His lovable stoners — the missing link between the Three Stooges and Cheech & Chong — are as abiding and iconic a creation as any of Crumb’s, yet Shelton’s work entirely lacks the darkness in Crumb’s.
It wasn’t until 1994, when Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb documentary, financed by Crumb admirer David Lynch, was released, that some of the sources of that darkness were finally revealed. After much persuasion, Zwigoff was able to take his cameras to the frowsy Philadelphis abode shared by Crumb’s mother and his brother Charles, the latter heavily medicated for schizophrenia and having barely left the house since the end of high school. The youngest brother, Max, a convicted sex offender, was seen in his rundown hotel room practicing yoga: Crumb’s two sisters flatly refused to appear in the movie at all. The year after he was filmed, Charles Jr committed suicide.
The general reaction was something like: jeez, if you think Crumb’s screwed up, wait ’til you see his family. He’s the sane one! Crumb himself later commented, “It’s a good movie. It completely ruined my life, but it’s a good movie!” One reason that Crumb later grew a beard and swapped his trademark fedoras for a beret was that the movie had rendered him too recognisable.
But one surprise the movie had to offer was the sight of Crumb himself, recorded by a camera rather than his own Rapidograph. In acute contrast to the hunched grotesque of his cartoon self-portraits, the real Crumb was … if not precisely good-looking, then at least striking. Tall and gawky in his dapper-gone-to-seed Thirties threads, he cut an unexpectedly engaging figure.
Nowadays, the Crumbs are as unlikely a happy family as the Osbournes or the Zappas. Jesse, Crumb’s son by his his first wife, runs the Crumb family website. Sophie, his daughter by Aline Kominsky (the marriage, and their collaborative comics, are still going strong after thirty years) creates her own comics and art. And the weird sex is more likely to emerge in the older sketchbook material published alongside his regular finished art and stories than in his current work.
And those few people who meet the Real Crumb are generally likely to report was a nice guy he is. And why shouldn’t he be? “After reading your comics,” a young Chicago journalist once told him, “I thought you’d be some kind of monster.” Crumb replied, “Well, ya see, I foist all that on the public, so it’s easy for me to be a nice guy in real life.”
Independent, 2005
