R. Crumb helped invent modern comics, but we haven't known much about his life … until now

Boston Globe

09-04-2025

Robert found sanctuary from this raging domestic mess in comic books, though he rejected superheroes. Who was Superman, really, if not another brawny bully like Crumb's alcoholic uncles? Instead, he was drawn to the animal adventures of Walt Disney's animation empire, especially Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics penned by a former Disney 'story man' named Carl Banks, whose richly detailed work, '[imbued] with psychological and emotional depth,' suited Crumb's desire for a meticulously rendered private universe. Young Robert began furiously drawing, inking, and writing his own comics with Charles. A few years later, Crumb hightailed it to Cleveland for a key apprenticeship making birthday cards for American Greetings.
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Crumb felt the pull of the nascent counterculture well before he became a reluctant counter-cultural figure, taking his first acid trip with his first wife, Dana, in 1965, a mammoth 600-microgram dose that changed his life. 'When I took LSD I realized I was trying to be smart all the time,' he tells Nadel. 'And LSD made me realize that doesn't matter at all. If you trust your instincts … it's all right there.' Acid introduced Crumb's subconscious to the hermetic world of his art, a liminal space, writes Nadel, 'that ushered in ideas whose real meanings were a mystery even to him.' Crumb in 1966 would create his familiar gallery of comic book avatars — Eggs Ackley, Flakey Foont, and Mr. Natural, his first 'Keep on Truckin'' high-stepper. The comics were brazenly perverse and sharply satirical, stories of sexual fetishism and urban depravity next to gently savage attacks on religion and the nuclear family. The die was cast: Crumb was an outsider raging against the mindless conformity of postwar America, Salinger with a Rapidograph pencil.
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Nadel pegs this as the moment when Crumb's id took charge, ushering in a new era of highly idiosyncratic personal and social exploration in comic art. In 1967 Crumb was settled in San Francisco, just in time for the Summer of Love and a psychedelic renaissance. Zap Comix, Crumb's first comic to get wide national distribution, was a watershed moment in adult comics. Grounding his work in what Nadel calls 'surreal happenstance … semipolitical essayistic comics, or visual poetry,' Crumb became the leading voice in an alternative comics movement that also included Gilbert Shelton, Victor Mososco, and S. Clay Wilson.
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With Crumb's success came an ambivalent entry into the mainstream of American consumer culture, the very thing he had savaged in his comics. The perennially poor Crumb took on a few commissions, most notably the album art for Big Brother and the Holding Company's 'Cheap Thrills,' thus finding his work landing in the bedrooms of suburban teenagers everywhere. Mr. Natural became the first meme of its time, appearing without his consent on posters, T-shirts, and lunchboxes. Crumb sued every one of Mr. Natural's bootleggers. The idea of selling out was anathema, especially if it meant compromising a worldview that was taking on a darker, more disturbing cast.
'Snatch,' a 1968 comic book collaboration with Wilson, was an opportunity for Crumb to work through his complicated feelings toward women, a preoccupation which became a leitmotif for Crumb's career. Yet even as he insisted that stories like 'Don't Touch Me!' and 'The Adventures of Dick Nose' were pornographic satires, it's hard to find the humor in them. Understandably, this is the place where many Crumb fans get off the bus, as it becomes difficult to square the lacerating satirist with the coarse misogynist. Nadel, to his credit, doesn't make excuses for Crumb, calling this work 'the ugliest vision of white male heterosexuality' while allowing that Crumb's sexual frankness was a form of self-laceration: 'He was ruining the wet dream with grotesque nightmares.'
Crumb is a complex guy, in short, and Nadel understands that genius and virtue are often incompatible, especially with an individual as tortured as his subject. There is a lot of ugliness from Crumb here, including parental neglect and serial philandering, but there is also his abiding love and deep respect for his second wife, comic book artist Aline Kominsky, which held for nearly 50 years until her death in 2022. Nadel tells their story movingly, with empathy and affection.
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Having hounded the reclusive Crumb for years to get his approval and cooperation, Nadel, a curator-at-large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, was amply rewarded with unlimited access to Crumb's personal archive: thousands of pages of diaries, letters, and sketchbooks, as well as a timeline of Crumb's life from 1943 to 2005. This material, as well as Nadel's interviews with Crumb, gives his biography the kind of granular texture and thematic heft that Crumb's life and work deserves.
CRUMB: A CARTOONIST'S LIFE
By Dan Nadel
Scribner, 480 pages, $35
Marc Weingarten is the author of '
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