The idea of corporate production is one of his particular nightmares, representing one of the aspects of modernity he most hates and a 'Crumbland', filled with tides of sperm and excrement, not to mention slavering old men and teenage pudenda, is not likely to open for business any time soon. Crumb is a cottage industry, and a tiny cottage at that. You could almost think of Crumb as a weird counterpart to Disney, except that he is entirely a one-man show - he has no staff of 'Imagineers', inkers and letterers. This is the best film I have ever seen about a living artist and his work, though I have to admit I was (briefly) in it. It not only offered a very good sense of his work, but also described the enormous wound that lies behind some of it - the death of his deeply neurotic brother Charles, whose obsession with the comic strip medium helped turn the younger Robert into a cartoonist. The big success, in film, has been about Crumb rather than by him: Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, released in 2001. Maybe some day one of the geniuses of Japanese anime will get together with Crumb and produce something, but it is hard to imagine a union between the super-estheticised mode of Japanese animated film and Crumb's mean, grubby vision of human beings trapped in their meshes of hysterical frustration and lust.) (The Japanese audience loves him but in Japan there seems to be a public of some sort for nearly everything.

Films have been based on his work, usually to Crumb's own intense disappointment - the really awful flop, from his point of view, being Ralph Bakshi's 1972 animated version of his Fritz the Cat. There are even plastic dolls, made under licence in Japan, representing his grotesque characters. Instead of being confined to reproduction on the stapled-together pages of ephemeral magazines - Bizarre, Zap Comix, Motor City Comix, Yellow Dog, Snatch Comix - he has spread and metastasised into real art galleries in France (where he is regarded as a hero of the history of the Bande dessine, with shows from Paris to Angouleme), in America and even in Germany, where the Ludwig Museum in Cologne organised a Crumb retrospective complete with solemn art-historical colloquia in 2004.Ī flood of books about him, mostly anthologies of his drawings, has come with the past few years: the latest, The R Crumb Handbook, which is basically a memoir of his own life illustrated by his own past and present drawings, is published in London and New York this month. Some of them, we oldies with long memories still think of with affection: what happened, for instance, to the American Gilbert Shelton, inventor of the those three musketeers of the smoking joint, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, with their motto 'Dope will get you through times of money better than money will get you through times of no dope'? Where now is Martin Sharp, whose weird drawings used briefly to lighten the pages of the long-defunct Oz magazine? (Answer: back in Australia, an acid casualty, still said to be pursuing his 20-year fantasy of making a film about the justly forgotten entertainer Tiny Tim, with his greasy ringlets and stupid little plastic ukulele, wherever he may now be.)īut Crumb - Crumb lives and, despite his beanpole appearance, expands. The tide of the Revolution that Never Was receded, as it had to, and left them on the beach. Others have fallen by the wayside, either because there was no wider audience for their work or because they burned out. But it is a fact, and it becomes a more interesting one because Crumb alone, of all the artists, cartoonists and scribblers who were active then, has continued to flourish and develop. Why couldn't they have fostered more visual achievement? Certainly they left few enough traces in writing.

It may seem an odd claim, given the often elaborate visual character of underground magazines in that long-ago time. Robert Crumb, now in his 62nd year, is the one and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, either in America or Europe.

Robert crumb drawings