I’ve been disgusted with American culture from the time I was a kid.” The instant I realized I was an outcast, I became a critic. I saw no hope of ever connecting with anything. Crumb has said: “As a teenager, there was no place where I fit in at all. Crumb’s family life set the tone for the art that followed. In fact, the film is in many ways the story of the Crumb family a family that created three artists – brothers Charles, Robert and Max – one of whom became famous. As Robert Hughes comments, “… you come away from Crumb’s work with the feeling that you’ve seen some part of human desires, fantasies, actions, aggressions, which are all actually very truthful about the way we fantasize, dream and act toward one another.”Ĭrumb’s finely-honed skills as a social critic were born out of a youth spent in a twisted rendition of the American dream. Crumb’s acute eye and ear render the familiar, painfully funny circumstances of life’s rich pageant with scintillating precision. Robert Crumb is a cult hero, an artist whose work is collected as fine art, and an iconoclast, a spokesperson for those who began questioning authority in the 1960’s.Īnyone familiar with his work knows that Crumb is as searing a social critic as anyone working today. Critics have come to recognize him as an extraordinary talent, and his work is now finding its way into museums. Since the early underground comic days (the first Zap comic appeared in 1968), Crumb has produced an enormous body of work and his comic work is more widely read today than ever. The second is his cover art for the Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin) lp, “Cheap Thrills” and the third is the adaptation of his randy character “Fritz the Cat” into a feature animated film by Ralph Bakshi. The first is his drawing, “Keep on Truckin'” which has adorned everything from mud flaps to coffee mugs. Jesse, 27, Robert’s son by first wife Dana Morgan, is a commercial illustrator.Īn ascetic, mildly disturbed painter/beggar who seeks peace by sitting on a bed of nails in his San Francisco flophouse.Crumb is best known for three pieces of work. A scathing satirist with eccentric - some say misogynist - sexual tastes often depicted in his work, he moved to southern France in 1991 with second wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, 46, also a cartoonist, and their daughter, Sophie, now 13. Natural, Fritz the Cat, ”Keep on Truckin’,” and other underground cartoon icons. But in February 1993, one year after being interviewed for Crumb, he committed suicide at the age of 50. Filmmaker David Lynch once talked of writing a screenplay for Charles to star in. Crumb shows him to be a highly articulate depressive and a recluse in his mother’s home. She now lives alone outside Philadelphia.Ī gifted cartoonist as a child, Charles pushed his siblings into art. Portrayed as a one-time amphetamine freak. He’s remembered in Crumb as a ”sadistic bully” who, in a rage one Christmas, broke 5-year-old Robert’s collarbone. Madness, drugs, sexual perversity - if not for the redemptive power of art, you’d have met this clan on Geraldo:Ī career Marine and businessman who died at 68 in 1982. Tolstoy believed that all unhappy families are different, but there’s none quite so different as the one we meet in Terry Zwigoff’s brilliant new documentary, Crumb, about seminal underground cartoonist-godhead Robert Crumb and his deeply dysfunctional family.
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