Latest news with #Crumb
NDTV
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- NDTV
Jenna Ortega Just Made The White T-Shirt Dress A Summer Must-Have
With Wednesday Season 2 officially making its way back to Netflix, Jenna Ortega has become the talk of the town yet again. While her on-screen goth-girl charm has already become iconic, it is the actress' off-screen fashion game that keeps us totally obsessed. On Sunday, Jenna Ortega dropped a fresh set of photos on Instagram, and within minutes, the fashion world went into a total meltdown. Posing effortlessly on a forklift (yes, really), Jenna turned industrial chaos into a full-on fashion runway. The photoshoot was bold, playful and totally Jenna. The fashion icon rocked an oversized white graphic t-shirt dress that screamed effortless cool. The oversized dress featured a vintage-style 'Crumb' comic print. The fit was loose, breezy and perfect for the summer season. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Jenna Ortega (@jennaortega) To add an unexpected twist, Jenna Ortega paired the dress with sheer black tights, which gave the look a sultry edge. And let us talk about the choice of footwear – pointed-toe cream heels with a satin finish added just the right amount of polish and contrast to her relaxed fit. She wore her shoulder-length hair in soft vintage waves with a dramatic curl at the front. Her makeup was glowy and bronzed, with warm undertones, a nude lip and soft contouring that enhanced her natural features. Jenna Ortega completed the look with black oval sunglasses and a pair of tiny stud earrings that were low-key but luxe. A classic iced drink in hand added a cool-girl touch, and the entire setup (yes, even the forklift) felt like a rebellious take on street-chic. This look is everything your summer wardrobe needs – easy, breathable, bold and totally statement-making. Whether you are headed to a casual hangout or just trying to beat the heat with style, oversized dresses and soft glam are clearly the move. Oh, and for those count down – Wednesday Season 2 will hit Netflix in two parts. Part 1 drops on August 6, and Part 2 arrives on September 3. Mark your calendars, because Jenna Ortega is just getting started.
New York Times
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Feature: ‘Crumb,' by Dan Nadel
How fortunate that my first parasocial relationship, as they're now called, was with a genius. I encountered Robert Crumb's work at the age of 8 or 9, when his comics could be found — lurking and sweating — in the 'Counterculture' section of my local used-book store in San Francisco. Frightening stuff for a kid. Titillating, too. But 'Counterculture' was crammed with scary and spicy material. Only Crumb's work, specifically the autobiographical comics, wormed under my skin. The worming occurred, I understood much later, because of the material's intimacy. Few artists have the technical ability, desire, intellect and courage (or berserk compulsion) to render their souls legible on a page — not to mention their kinks, agonies, protruding Adam's apple and sub-ramrod posture. What I was sensing in my bookstore adventures with Crumb was an early glimmer of what it might mean to truly know a person, with all the joy and terror that such knowing entails. It hardly mattered that I would never meet the man. Except, 30 years later, I did. One morning in April an elegant figure in a fedora strolled up Avenue A in the East Village. He was instantly recognizable for his spidery hands and Coke-bottle glasses. With him was the author and curator Dan Nadel, who has written 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life,' a superb biography of an artist who, starting in the 1960s, changed the shape of comics in every decade that followed. Nothing escaped the penetrating eye of Crumb, whose work took on liberal hypocrisy, sexual and racial violence, Christianity, drugs, the C.I.A., existential distress, love, consumerism and death. To help promote the book Crumb had flown over from France, where he has lived since 1991 in a house that his late wife, the influential artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, found for the family. We met at the restaurant Superiority Burger, where the artist and his biographer slouched in a red booth and deplored the state of modern pants. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Cartoonist Who Tapped His Own Psyche and Found America's Unruly Id
R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, bumped into things when he was young. Before his eyes were tested in first grade, and he was fitted for Coke-bottle glasses, he could perceive neither depth nor distance. His parents thought he was clumsy. With no sense of spatial dynamics, he had to think his way into the world rather than enter it the way most of us do, by simple intuition. When he began to draw, it was as if he was already dipping into a deeply personal and self-replenishing reservoir. He was unusual — a weirdo, to borrow the name of one of his comic book series — right from the start. It's been nearly 60 years since Crumb helped define the visual iconography of late-1960s psychedelia, with surreal imagery that's as instantly recognizable as a Deutsche Grammophon record label and that seemed to come from the past and the future at the same time. His Zap Comix, not for kids, read like a stoner version of the Sunday funnies and gave us the loping and big-footed dudes in his 'Keep On Truckin'' panels and the bald, bearded and semi-baffled mystic Mr. Natural, who in one strip was kicked out of heaven for telling God it was 'a little corny.' There was his version of Felix the Cat, later adapted into the first X-rated animated film, and the cover he drew for 'Cheap Thrills,' the hit second album from Big Brother and the Holding Company, with Janis Joplin — the one with 'Piece of My Heart' on it. It's been more than 30 years since Terry Zwigoff's eye-popping documentary 'Crumb' (1994) reintroduced him to the world and fleshed out his sexual fetishes (notably his inclination to ride piggyback on big women's backs, occasionally uninvited), his demons and his obsession with old-timey 78 r.p.m. records. The movie humanized him — it made him seem like an earnest citizen out on a peculiar limb. The documentary also, as if interpreting the freak-show nature of many of his cartoons, the coarse Russian fairy tale vibe of them, set him alongside his troubled and profoundly eccentric family, which included his often institutionalized mother and a sibling who reclined on beds of nails and regularly passed a 29-foot strip of cotton through his digestive system, in the mouth and out the anus. Is the world ready, as if in every-30-years installments, for another rocky wagon ride into Crumblandia? I was, if only because Dan Nadel's new book, 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life,' is a definitive and ideal biography — pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I've ever read. He's latched onto a fascinating and complicated figure, which helps. But there's more going on here. Nadel, a museum curator who has written two previous books about artists and cartoonists, is an instinctive storyteller, one with a command of the facts and a relaxed tone that also happens to be grainy, penetrating, interested in everything, alive. He knows exactly when and how long to pause and tweezer in background information, a skill that flummoxes so many biographers. This machine kills boredom. 'Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life' is an official biography, written with Crumb's permission. He fact-checked the final manuscript, though he had no control over the final text. He imposed one condition, Nadel writes: 'that I be honest about his faults, look closely at his compulsions and examine the racially and sexually charged aspects of his work. He would rather risk honesty and see if anyone could understand than cooperate with a hagiography.' Robert Crumb's childhood was nomadic. He was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, but his father was in the Marines and the family (Crumb had four siblings) followed him from base to base. Crumb and his older brother, Charles, took to cartooning early, on the bedroom floor, their materials stuffed into coffee cans and cigar boxes. They deplored superhero comics, which were filled with intimidators solving problems with their fists. They were into oddball strips, like Walt Kelly's 'Pogo' and the early work out of Disney. When he was in high school in the 1950s, where he was painfully self-conscious, an absolute outsider, Crumb began to tune into discontented voices such as those of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Mad magazine was another revelation. He and Charles began sending their homemade comic books out into the world. He skipped college but lit out for Cleveland, where he got a job drawing for a major greeting card company. He married his first wife, Dana Morgan, when he was 21 and she was 18. They took LSD together and it permanently shifted the contents of his mind, in a manner he liked — it gave him a direct passage to his subconscious. He began to draw for alternative newspapers. He and Dana drifted out to San Francisco, where he embraced the counterculture, and it embraced him. 'Keep On Truckin'' appeared in Zap Comix No. 1, which hit the streets in 1968. The image was a widely bootlegged phenomenon, to the extent that Crumb would see it on the mudflaps of passing trucks. He was a sort of knowingly inverted dandy, to borrow Walker Evans's description of James Agee. He wore corduroy trousers, baggy pants, thick spectacles and fedoras. Joplin advised him to stop dressing like a dude out of 'The Grapes of Wrath.' He was 'beak nosed,' Nadel writes, 'Adam's apple ready to bob in distress.' He was not quite made for this world. Crumb's underground comics were transgressive comics — they were dirty. Zap No. 4, which came out in 1969, contained a strip called 'Joe Blow' about a family that cheerfully and explicitly commits nearly every variety of incest imaginable and sent a signal, Nadel writes, 'that the American nuclear family was not well.' Zap No. 4 was the first comic to be declared obscene. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested in his City Lights bookstore for selling it. Crumb's sudden fame drove him and his wife out of San Francisco. They settled up north in California's rural Potter Valley, where they slowly developed a commune of sorts. They had an open marriage, of which Crumb took more advantage than Dana did. Both had affairs, but Crumb had more of them, with some later ones lasting decades. He had a physical type: big haunches, bold posterior. His sexual obsessions don't swamp this biography, but they linger near the surface. Crumb carried a lot of baggage. He let his warty, untutored id loose in his work. He had a sense of himself as, Nadel writes, 'a grotesque ectomorph.' He sometimes drew comics about domination, about rape, about women without heads who seemed to be little more than pieces of meat. 'He was stuck between shame and desire; the spiritual and material; worship and hatred,' Nadel writes about some of these cartoons. 'They are also curiously devotional, drawn with great care and attention, as though Robert was mesmerized by his own fantasy.' Nadel presents the voices of women who were appalled; he cites just as many who ardently defended him, who felt that women have masochistic fantasies too, and that no one should be in the business of regulating fantasies. Crumb certainly did not run a P.R. campaign on behalf of his own psyche. He tinkered in his work with ugly racial stereotypes. These drawings deeply troubled many of his liberal cartoonist friends. His work was purging satire, he insisted, and others, including the poet Ishmael Reed, agreed with him. He became his own best character in his work; he was both ventriloquist and dummy. The second half of this biography shows us Crumb mostly running away from things, first in Potter Valley and later in rural France, where he moved with his second wife, Aline Kominsky, with whom he frequently collaborated. Too much socializing made him squirm. He'd often start drawing in the middle of a busy party. He ran from fame. He was determined not to be perceived as a joke that 1968 left behind. He avoided Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim when they wanted to make a movie with him. He turned down an opportunity to play banjo on 'Saturday Night Live' with his band, which sometimes went by R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders. He declined a $10,000 offer to draw a Rolling Stones album cover. He blocked most attempts to commercialize his work and characters. Over the decades he slowly began to feel that he'd run out of original ideas, though the sketchbooks he filled over the decades prove otherwise. Still, he more often illustrated the work of other writers — notably Harvey Pekar in the autobiographical and blue-collar 'American Splendor' series, but also James Boswell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Charles Bukowski and the Book of Genesis. He drew dozens of photorealistic and often solemn portraits of the long-forgotten musicians he so loved. There are a lot of road trips in this biography. Crumb was too dyslexic to learn to drive. He enjoyed the existential state, Nadel writes, of being the 'eternal passenger.' He took two stabs at being a father, a role for which he felt ill equipped, and did a bit better the second time around. His second marriage was an open one, too. Aline died in 2022, at the age of 74. Nadel is a canny visual reader of comics, and he traces Crumb's influence on a long line of cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman and Matt Groening to Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry and Seth. 'Every cartoonist has to pass through Crumb,' Spiegelman tells him. 'What happens when you encounter Crumb is like the accelerated evolution scene in '2001.' You had to pass through him to find out what your voice might be.'
Yahoo
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Gleeful, Chaotic World of Underground Comics
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Art Spiegelman, the artist most famous for his novel Maus, makes comix. No, that's not a typo, as he explains in an article The Atlantic published last week: Comix have a heritage distinct from the humorous strips found in newspapers. They're a gleeful blend of art and writing with roots in 1960s counterculture, X-rated cartoons, and the alternative press. Spiegelman is a well-known practitioner, but his path was paved by many earlier artists—people such as Jules Feiffer, who died in January at age 95, and whom Spiegelman remembers fondly as 'a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore.' Another one of the genre's most influential figures, and the man who 'effectively invented' the form, is the id-driven, lascivious, hippie titan R. Crumb: an artist who 'dove to the depths not just of his own subconscious, but of something collectively screwy, bringing up all the American muck,' as my colleague Gal Beckerman wrote for The Atlantic's May issue. Crumb's outlandish, sexual, over-the-top characters and drawings are the shoulders that a generation of artists stand on, happily or not. As Beckerman points out, Crumb is the author of 'brutal fantasies' about women that blur the line between commenting on cultural misogyny and replicating it. He also created satires of racism so blunt that a white-supremacist newspaper reprinted them approvingly. Reading about Feiffer and Crumb made me think of another set of underground comics, ones that also present a world of unrestrained, gleeful havoc, though from a very different perspective—Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Drawn in the 1990s, the series follows Hothead, an avatar of rage and delight who happily rejects society's stereotypes of women. She's a Mohawk-sporting, unshaven avenger in leather boots who chases down and attacks rapists, smug businessmen, and misogynistic catcallers; she embraces being known as a freak. TV commentators and respectable strangers find her disgusting, but Hothead bashes back, and she likes it. Over the years, her adventures, which were released in zine installments, grew to include more moments of repose, self-doubt, and community. She receives calming counsel from her wise older friend Roz; schemes and jokes around with her cat, Chicken; falls hard for an easygoing lover, Daphne; and talks to her lamp, which is also the voice of God. (As in other underground comics, a searching, sometimes psychoanalytic core can be found below the zaniness.) I first met Hothead in the anthology No Straight Lines, a 40-year survey of queer comics. She stands out even among decades of cartoonists' takes on the pressures of fitting in with heterosexual America. There she is, fighting back against the standards for respectable young ladies and promising to smash in heads on demand, with 'special services for incest & rape survivors' on offer. But DiMassa's creation has been woefully hard to find in recent years. Thankfully, New York Review Books will publish a Hothead collection this August. The sweltering, lingering days of summer feel like the perfect time for the title character to burst back out onto the sidewalk, bat in tow. The Dark Weirdness of R. Crumb By Gal Beckerman The illustrator dredged the depths of his own subconscious—and tapped into something collectively screwy in America. Read the full article. , by Noliwe Rooks Rooks's history of the educator, philanthropist, and civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune is more of a meditation on the effect she had on those in the Black community, including the author, than a formal biography. 'I think Bethune—her image, her statues, her name—may be a kind of talisman, or maybe a light, guiding, promising, showing a path,' Rooks writes early on. Over about 200 pages, Rooks unpacks Bethune's legacy in fighting racism, exploring her efforts to found a school and secure investors to buy land near the ocean and create Bethune Beach, the only beach in Florida's Volusia County where Black Americans could congregate without restrictions during Jim Crow. In 2022, a statue of Bethune replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall, where she represents the state of Florida. As Rooks puts it, the activist 'taught me that there is strength in numbers, always a reason to hope, and that if someone disrespects you and yours, it is in your best interest to find a way to use the metaphorical flag that professes your citizenship, rights, and humanity as a weapon, and 'get it done.'' — Vanessa Armstrong From our list: What to read when the odds are against you 📚 Atavists, by Lydia Millet 📚 Zeal, by Morgan Jerkins 📚 More Everything Forever, by Adam Becker PBS Pulled a Film for Political Reasons, Then Changed Its Mind By Daniel Engber The film would not be shown as planned on April 7, they explained, because executives at PBS were worried about Break the Game's transgender themes and the risk of further political backlash. 'PBS is our platform, and we have to respect their directive,' Wagner says White told her. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Gleeful, Chaotic World of Underground Comics
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Art Spiegelman, the artist most famous for his novel Maus, makes comix. No, that's not a typo, as he explains in an article The Atlantic published last week: Comix have a heritage distinct from the humorous strips found in newspapers. They're a gleeful blend of art and writing with roots in 1960s counterculture, X-rated cartoons, and the alternative press. Spiegelman is a well-known practitioner, but his path was paved by many earlier artists—people such as Jules Feiffer, who died in January at age 95, and whom Spiegelman remembers fondly as 'a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore.' Another one of the genre's most influential figures, and the man who 'effectively invented' the form, is the id-driven, lascivious, hippie titan R. Crumb: an artist who 'dove to the depths not just of his own subconscious, but of something collectively screwy, bringing up all the American muck,' as my colleague Gal Beckerman wrote for The Atlantic 's May issue. Crumb's outlandish, sexual, over-the-top characters and drawings are the shoulders that a generation of artists stand on, happily or not. As Beckerman points out, Crumb is the author of 'brutal fantasies' about women that blur the line between commenting on cultural misogyny and replicating it. He also created satires of racism so blunt that a white-supremacist newspaper reprinted them approvingly. Reading about Feiffer and Crumb made me think of another set of underground comics, ones that also present a world of unrestrained, gleeful havoc, though from a very different perspective—Diane DiMassa's Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. Drawn in the 1990s, the series follows Hothead, an avatar of rage and delight who happily rejects society's stereotypes of women. She's a Mohawk-sporting, unshaven avenger in leather boots who chases down and attacks rapists, smug businessmen, and misogynistic catcallers; she embraces being known as a freak. TV commentators and respectable strangers find her disgusting, but Hothead bashes back, and she likes it. Over the years, her adventures, which were released in zine installments, grew to include more moments of repose, self-doubt, and community. She receives calming counsel from her wise older friend Roz; schemes and jokes around with her cat, Chicken; falls hard for an easygoing lover, Daphne; and talks to her lamp, which is also the voice of God. (As in other underground comics, a searching, sometimes psychoanalytic core can be found below the zaniness.) I first met Hothead in the anthology No Straight Lines, a 40-year survey of queer comics. She stands out even among decades of cartoonists' takes on the pressures of fitting in with heterosexual America. There she is, fighting back against the standards for respectable young ladies and promising to smash in heads on demand, with 'special services for incest & rape survivors' on offer. But DiMassa's creation has been woefully hard to find in recent years. Thankfully, New York Review Books will publish a Hothead collection this August. The sweltering, lingering days of summer feel like the perfect time for the title character to burst back out onto the sidewalk, bat in tow. The Dark Weirdness of R. Crumb By Gal Beckerman The illustrator dredged the depths of his own subconscious—and tapped into something collectively screwy in America. What to Read A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit, by Noliwe Rooks Rooks's history of the educator, philanthropist, and civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune is more of a meditation on the effect she had on those in the Black community, including the author, than a formal biography. 'I think Bethune—her image, her statues, her name—may be a kind of talisman, or maybe a light, guiding, promising, showing a path,' Rooks writes early on. Over about 200 pages, Rooks unpacks Bethune's legacy in fighting racism, exploring her efforts to found a school and secure investors to buy land near the ocean and create Bethune Beach, the only beach in Florida's Volusia County where Black Americans could congregate without restrictions during Jim Crow. In 2022, a statue of Bethune replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall, where she represents the state of Florida. As Rooks puts it, the activist 'taught me that there is strength in numbers, always a reason to hope, and that if someone disrespects you and yours, it is in your best interest to find a way to use the metaphorical flag that professes your citizenship, rights, and humanity as a weapon, and 'get it done.'' — Vanessa Armstrong Out Next Week 📚 Atavists, by Lydia Millet 📚 Zeal, by Morgan Jerkins 📚 More Everything Forever, by Adam Becker Your Weekend Read PBS Pulled a Film for Political Reasons, Then Changed Its Mind By Daniel Engber The film would not be shown as planned on April 7, they explained, because executives at PBS were worried about Break the Game 's transgender themes and the risk of further political backlash. 'PBS is our platform, and we have to respect their directive,' Wagner says White told her.
