In 1967 he moved to San Francisco-the center of the hipsters’ universe at the time-and was launched on the burst of creativity that established his career. In 1964, Crumb married his first wife, Dana Morgan, and the following year ingested his first tab of LSD-a substance that was to play a big role in his life for the next eight years. To me, he’s the perfect painter.”ĭespite his admiration for practitioners of fine art such as Bruegel, German Expressionists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann and for English caricaturists George Cruikshank and James Gillray, Crumb opted for a career in popular art, a career that began in 1962 when he moved to Cleveland and landed a job designing greeting cards for American Greetings Corp. “He created such a dispassionate reflection of the world around him, but at the same time, he was caught up in the attitudes of his time. “What amazes me about Bruegel is that it’s impossible to find his ego in his work,” Crumb enthuses. It’s easy to see Mad’s influence on Crumb’s work the presence of his other artist hero, 16th-Century Flemish genre painter Pieter Bruegel, is a bit more subtle but is definitely there. “Mad regurgitated 1950s America in an incredibly brilliant way and was a big inspiration to me,” recalls Crumb, who had committed himself to a career as a cartoonist by the time he was 16. “I saw no hope of ever connecting with anything.”Ĭrumb detected the glimmerings of hope when he discovered Mad magazine, a leading voice of dissent during its golden period of the ‘50s. “As a teen-ager, there was no place where I fit in at all,” he recalls. My mother had personal problems all through the ‘50s and ‘60s, and my parents fought constantly.Ī painfully thin young man who spent his high school years minus his two front teeth after a bully knocked them out with a rock, Crumb toyed with the idea of suicide throughout his adolescence, while sinking ever deeper into the alienation that continues to fuel his creative drive. “I had a very rootless upbringing, and we moved around a lot because my father was in the Marines. “My family was completely crazy,” he recalls. An obsessive purist when it comes to music, Crumb listens only to old 78s of early blues, hillbilly and dance band music, and his collection of scratchy records occupies an honored spot in the house.Ĭrumb’s idyllic country home is diametrically opposed to the environment he grew up in, which he describes as “bleak, ‘50s tract-house America.” Born in Philadelphia, one of five children of a career Marine officer, Crumb drew his first comic, “Diffy in Shacktown,” at the age of 7 and continued to escape into the world of cartoons throughout what he calls a miserable childhood. Heated with a wood-burning stove, Crumb’s home is a colorful preserve of vintage quilts, antique toys, kitsch souvenirs and folk art. Crumb’s detractors often accuse him of being overly enamored with the past, and the house which he shares with his wife of 12 years, cartoonist Aline Kominsky Crumb, and their 7-year-old daughter, Sophie, is a virtual museum of Americana. I wasn’t too good at selling it either-I kept saying the wrong things to these studio people.Ĭrumb’s appearance may be a surprise, but the way he lives is exactly as one might expect. It’s a humorous, sex, burlesque story and it’s pretty weird. It’s based on a comic I did years ago about this wimpy guy who falls in love with a female sasquatch (huge, hairy creatures said to live in the mountains of North America), and gets abducted in the woods. “Me and a friend of mine, Terry Zwigoff, wrote this script and took it to Hollywood and pitched it to different studios,” he recalls, “and while the studio people seemed to find me an amusing character, the script was way too offbeat for the Hollywood machine. Considering that Crumb probably hasn’t sat through a mainstream Hollywood feature in years, it’s surprising that he applied himself to the task of writing a script that this defiant iconoclast didn’t get too far in Hollywood is less of a surprise. The virulent dislike of mass media that surfaces in nearly every strip he draws didn’t stop him from having a go-round with the film industry. Well, for one thing, he surfaced in Hollywood last year. Though Crumb experienced- endured is how he would describe it-a period of high-profile celebrityhood when he burst onto the scene, he has since removed himself from the media compost pile to the point that many who know of his work wonder: Whatever happened to R. In real life, however, the notoriously reclusive artist prefers to interact with his fellow man from a distance. Crumb, whose cartoons currently are published in the quarterly magazines Weirdo and Hup, is afflicted with a compulsion to confess, and in his work he invites the reader into his psyche.
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