Robert Crumb: Survivor

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Sean Michael Robinson

I was a teenager the first time I saw a drawing by Robert Crumb, and I had an immediate, visceral reaction, a feeling of nausea, a slightly floating, psychic displacement from my physical self. I don’t remember now what the specific image was, nor does it really matter at this point—it wasn’t the content that repulsed me, but the neurotic, shaky, compulsive lines, invading every form, erratic, descriptive of the hand that made them as much as the subjects themselves.

My disgust deepened after my first exposure to his comics—they seemed so tightly drawn, so cluttered and cramped that I felt anxious, trapped in neurosis. And when I did, finally, make it past the surface to the actual content, I found nothing to reassure my trembling stomach—even in the less overtly challenging short stories, I found the neurotic aggression overwhelming, overpowering. I moved on and found work to read that didn’t make me physically ill.

A few years later, a film about the cartoonist himself changed all of this. Crumb, a 1994 documentary directed by Terry Zwigoff, transformed Robert Crumb’s work permanently for me, by providing context, nuance and even ambiguity to work that had up to that point seemed alien and severe. The movie opens with gentle upright piano music and a close-up shot of a sculpted, hand painted statue of a woman’s muscular butt, and in a slow, shaky pan takes in row after row of wooden spools to which faces have been elaborately, lovingly drawn, remarkable objects that, it slowly becomes clear, seem to have no practical or commercial purpose. From the very first shot the film suggests that Crumb creates because he must. His artwork is a need, the spools say, open-mouthed, eyes agog. The shot continues, and lap dissolves into a pile of sketchbooks and records, and finally Robert himself, back to us and facing his stereo, knees to his chest, rocking slowly to the music.

Cut to a drawing, and a hand with brush moving rapidly across the surface of the paper. “If I don’t draw for a while I get really crazy. I start feeling really depressed, suicidal.” These are Crumb’s first words in the film, delivered in a quiet, distant voice. “But sometimes when I’m drawing I feel suicidal too.”

“What are you trying to get at in your work?” someone, presumably Zwigoff, asks off-mic.

“JESUS,” Crumb says, suddenly animated. “I don’t know.”

Robert Crumb’s drawings are unflinching in their taut, sweaty grotesquerie, but the man himself flinches—he laughs nervously, stutters, cringes, equivocates.

He continues. “I don’t work in conscious messages. I can’t do that. It has to be something that I’m revealing to myself when I’m doing it, which is hard to explain. Which means that while I’m doing it I don’t know exactly what it’s about. You just have to have the courage or the… to take that chance. What’s gonna come out of this? I’ve enjoyed drawing, that’s all. It’s a deeply ingrained habit, and it’s all because of my brother Charles.”

Because of the powerful presence of his brothers, particularly Robert’s older brother Charles, the movie almost inevitably focuses on Crumb’s childhood, seemingly the source of both his obsessions and prodigious skill. By both their accounts Charles forced Robert to draw comics with him from a very early age, and was a domineering and seemingly crazed and competitive presence in young Robert’s life. Despite appearing for what probably amounts to about twenty minutes of screen time, Charles dominates the film, an intelligent, witty and doomed ghost of a man who seems in a way to have already passed on. So much of his life seems to be over, so many of his desires extinguished, that it seems inevitable that he will not last the duration of the movie.

We see examples of Charles’ and Robert’s comics from their childhood and teenage years, and get a glimpse at how these two remarkable young talents developed in parallel. Robert discusses his interest in other forms of art, and how it was his brother’s dogged persistence that kept him making comics, that in fact, it’s his brother who he still thinks of as his audience when he’s creating comics.

Young Charles’ work is truly remarkable, the work of someone who’s internalized at a very young age a whole host of cartooning skills and already developed his own visual style. But as Robert narrates the work chronologically, we slowly see that something seems to have gone awry in Charles’ mind. His style blossoms slowly into a collection of strange, grotesque visual tics, and pictures give way to more and more words, at first a rush, and then a torrent, panels and finally pages dissolving into microscopic scribble. And then, finally, his marks are nothing but scribble at all—content-less, without thought, finally, just tic. We watch as Robert flips through page after page of his brother’s illness made physical via pen and paper.

In the movie Charles serves as a harrowing parallel to his younger brother, a brilliant young cartoonist turning ever more inward, until there’s no communication left, no outside at all. He is the brother that could not escape the orbit of his childhood, who was unable to find a way to free himself from whatever it was that held him in thrall for so long.

What type of shared experiences shaped these three brothers? The movie hints at the edges—an abusive, withholding father, a mother who was either mentally ill, a drug user, or possibly both; but it presents no easy answers to these questions. What it does do, however, is provide a context for even the most extreme of Crumb’s works, and present a compelling argument for a man being saved by his art. Is it possible, the movie invites us to ask, that the difference between Robert and his brothers is that Robert found both release and escape?

Context also comes from the aesthetic decisions by Zwigoff himself. An early sequence of some of Crumb’s most violent, arguably mysogynistic drawings is accompanied by a haunting, keening voice, backed only by a circular, searching guitar and a blanket of hiss and pops. It is a song of “calamitous loss,” as Robert said earlier, and to hear such a song as the camera slowly pans and zooms across the twitchy surface of the drawings changes the experience of the drawings themselves from one of naked animal aggression to one of bewildered, pained loss. Where have these thoughts come from? the music seems to suggest. What has happened to this man?

Through its use of music and its austere, uncluttered editing and cinematography, the movie has great rhetorical power, great enough to reframe and even change the art that is ostensibly at the center of the film itself. A sequence mid-film presents an Angelfood McSpade strip with no narration, accompanied solely by a jaunty piano ditty that helps create a satirical tone that might be more arguable or problematic without the aural reinforcement.

The film also gives significant screen time to Crumb’s detractors, a strategy that defuses some of the uncomfortable edge of the work presented, which has the curious effect of allowing the viewer, or more specifically this viewer, to take his side again. Objections stated, points duly noted, we can return to the man himself and his obvious, almost palpable, need to create his work.

And that naked need, and the remarkable story of his brother Charles, are the reasons I’ve returned to Crumb so often, why despite a host of reservations, I showed the film, admittedly highly-edited, to my high-school cartooning class. Because Crumb is, in a winding, fractured, way not just the story of an artist, but a portrait of a survivor.
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Update by Noah: This post is loosely affiliated with an ongoing roundtable on R. Crumb and race.

Cheap Thrills

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Yesterday, Robert Stanley Martin argued that there was satirical intent in R. Crumb’s Cheap Thrills album cover.

Contrary to Noah Berlatsky’s reading of the second panel in his “Crumbface” essay (click here), I don’t feel any of it is gratuitous. It’s a pointed rebuke that did not flatter its ostensible targets. Telling Joplin that’s she’s engaging in a “Mammy” routine, as well as identifying her audience in part with an Al Jolson figure, is not something that would be calculated to endear Crumb to either. And given the avowedly anti-racist liberal politics of the San Francisco counterculture scene that Joplin and her early audiences belonged to, Crumb also pointed the way for their political enemies to cluck at them for hypocrisy. It didn’t cause offense because Joplin and her audience were sophisticated enough to both recognize and at least tacitly acknowledge the failing Crumb was highlighting.

It’s a thoughtful defense. I’m still not convinced though.

First, Robert says that Joplin and her fans would not have found Crumb’s satire of their black appropriations comfortable.

However, Drew Friedman’s account seems to contradict this:

Interestingly, Crumb’s original intention was for this art to run on the back cover and a portrait of Joplin to run on the front. But Joplin loved the the comic strip art so much, (she was an avid underground comics fan, especially the work of Crumb, and already at that point in her escalating career, had the power to hire her own cover artist), she decided to run it on the front.

That certainly doesn’t sound like Crumb’s satire made Joplin at all uncomfortable. I haven’t been able to find anything online suggesting that fans were put off either. Maybe Joplin’s just kind of dumb of course…or maybe, as Robert suggested, she was self-aware enough to find a pointed reference to her black roots amusing. Still, if satire doesn’t cause its targets even the least discomfort — if they in fact want to put it on the cover of their product — does it make sense to call it satire?

More important than intention or audience reaction, though, is the image itself. And I don’t think that image sustains a claim of satire.

Look at the rest of the album cover; the images other than the blackface caricatures. None of those images is satirical, or pointed. Instead, they’re silly and/or sexy and/or energetic. Many of them rely on goofy puns (“Piece of My Heart”, “Combination of the Two”) The center top image shows a woman (probably meant to be Joplin) in a sultry pose with prominent nipples clearly visible through her top. On the left hand side, there’s a drawing of a goofy, stereotypical Indian with traditional headdress. On the bottom, there’s a caricature which seems to conflate Jesus and Eastern mysticism.

Robert argues that the blackface caricatures are different. Instead of an expression of high-spirited high-times and easy irreverence, he argues, the blackface caricatures are a critique. In them, Crumb is showing Joplin’s connection to and reliance on a black musical tradition, and linking her to earlier white performers who relied on that tradition, like Al Jolson.

But, as an alternate reading…couldn’t Crumb just be more or less thoughtlessly using blackface iconography because it’s funny and energetic? Couldn’t the images just be examples of high-spirited high-times, and of Crumb’s irreverent refusal to bow to the 60s equivalent of political correctness? Couldn’t his use of blackface be like his use of prominent nipples or his use of a sacrilegious Jesus caricature? That is, couldn’t the blackface caricatures be used because they are fun, and because they are (at least somewhat) shocking, rather than because they skewer Joplin and her fans?

Intent is hard to parse, of course. But I think if you’re going to argue for satire, you need to explain what Crumb has done to distinguish between blackface-as-critique and blackface-as-nostalgic-scandalous-good-times. If the cover can be read as fun good times, and the blackface can be easily incorporated into the idea of fun good times, and Joplin and her fans embraced it, presumably as an icon of fun good times, it’s really not clear to me why I should give Crumb credit for making a pointed political statement. On the contrary, it seems to me that he’s using blackface like he’s using nipples and silly puns — as a cheap thrill. And, as I said before (to Jeet Heer’s annoyance)using blackface as a cheap thrill still makes Crumb, to my mind, kind of a shithead.

I have to say too…even if Robert is right, and it’s a satirical take, I still find it pretty dumb. As I note in that Comixology article, “Summertime” is one of the great interracial collaborations in American song. Written by George Gershwin about the black experience, it was based on Eastern European folk melodies and adopted by many of the greatest American performers of various races. It’s a song whose history challenges the usual narrative of white appropriation of black music. George Gershwin didn’t don blackface to become a pretend black person; he collaborated with black people over decades in order to interpret an American experience through an American art that was neither white nor black.

The usual narrative of blackface appropriation— applied to Elvis, or Janis Joplin, or whoever — is itself part of our racist past. It assumes that blacks are the authentic creators of music, the magical Negroes, to whom whites must go to draw upon true musical genius. And I think you can actually see Crumb’s cover as plugging directly into this; his use of black caricatures does not so much critique Joplin’s music as light-heartedly validate it. The caricature in the center bottom panel, the black man digging Joplin’s music, is not a sneer at Joplin — it’s a goofy thumb’s up. See! Whoohoo! Even black people dig this music! Similarly, the shouting baby, all gusto and throat, is not a critique, but a funky wink. Joplin gets her lungs from that true source. And that true source is a stereotypical black mammy.

American music is, and has always been, both black and white, with performers of every race borrowing and learning from each other. The reason blackface is racist is not because white performers were inspired by blacks, but because they gilded their black influences with invidious racist stereotypes. Crumb’s use of blackface caricature is, therefore, neither fun nor, even in the most generous interpretation, insightful. It perpetuates simplistic images of black people and of race in the U.S. The Cheap Thrills cover is an ongoing testament to Crumb’s great illustration and design skills, and to the extremely limited intelligence with which he often employs them.

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Update: This post is part of an ongoing roundtable on R. Crumb and race.

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs: Blue Velvet

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Spooky pop melodrama download; Click to download Blue Velvet mix.

1. Cry Me a River — Julie London
2. Falling — Julee Cruise
3. Crying — Roy Orbison
4. I Miss You So — The Orioles
5. Blue Velvet — Gene Pitney
6. He Cried — The Shangri-Las
7. I’m Me — The Paris Sisters
8. She’s Got You — Patsy Cline
9. Hope There’s Someone — Antony and the Johnsons
10. Salvador Nao Inerte — Virginia Rodriguez
11. Rising Moons — The Horse’s Ha
12. The Owl of Love (featuring Shara Worden) —The Clogs
13. Meadowlark — Fleet Foxes
14. All My Sorrows — Lindsey Buckingham
15. ‘Till I Die — Beach Boys
16. Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart — Julee Cruise
17. It’s My Party — The Paris Sisters

Snap Judgments: Five DC Reboots

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Richard Cook

The comics blogosphere can’t stop talking about the DC Comics reboot in September. Some bloggers are cheering. Others are jeering. But anyone can offer a general impression. A true comics blogger explains why something sucks, and then explains how everything would be better if said blogger was in charge.

Action Comics #1
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Rags Morales and Rick Bryant

Pros
Grant Morrison has written great superhero comics.
And lots of people seem to really like Morrison’s All-Star Superman.

Cons
The unbearable Modern Myth/Super Jesus/Underwear Messiah garbage.
And All-Star Superman was incredibly overrated.

Odds That It Will Suck
High. In his 70+ year history, Superman has starred in about 5 good comics. The rest are about why the world “needs” Superman and his crappy merchandise.

How I Would Make It Better
Superman is an escapist fantasy about male potency, which is why Action Comics should be an adult comic. Every issue should be 22 pages of hardcore sex where Superman fucks his way through Lois, Lana, Lex, Jimmy Olsen, Martha Kent, Krypto, and consequently saves the world. Superman isn’t Jesus Christ. He’s Ron Jeremy-meets-Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Wonder Woman #1
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Cliff Chiang

Pros
Azzarello has written some good (crime) comics.
I like Cliff Chiang’s artwork, if for no other reason than it doesn’t look like everyone else’s artwork.
The new costume is a slight improvement over the last new costume.

Cons
Azzarello has written some terrible (superhero) comics.

Odds That It Will Suck
Super high. When it comes to crappy comics, Wonder Woman has an even worse track record than Superman. Nobody at DC knows what to do with this character.

How I Would Make It Better
I’m tempted to just write “make it porn” for each these. But in all seriousness, the only way that Wonder Woman would ever be good again is if William Marston came back from the grave. The next best alternative would be to find a writer who has a similar personality to Marston: feminist, polygamist, BDSM enthusiast, lesbian fetishist, furry, all-around pervert and political visionary, etc.

Teen Titans #1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund

Pros
Lobdell has experience writing teen superheros, going back to Generation X.

Cons
Generation X was actually kinda boring.
Superboy is not and will never be badass, no matter how many ‘tats he has.

Odds That It Will Suck
Very high. Teen Titans was tolerable for about 3 years in the early 1980s. Everything before and after was a miserable failure.

How I Would Make It Better
The core problem with Teen Titans is that it’s never been about teenagers, but rather what adult writers want teenagers to be. Superboy, Robin, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash – these kids revere their elders and try to emulate them. Fuck that noise. Adults don’t deserve reverence. Plus, teenagers don’t want to read about obedient, law-abiding teens, and adults reliving their youth don’t want to read about obedient, law-abiding teens. They both want sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll (or substitute in hip hop). The Titans shouldn’t be fighting crime, they should be fighting for the right to party, and generally reminding adults how much they suck.

Batgirl #1
Written by Gail Simone
Art by Ardian Syaf and Vicente Cifuentes (cover by Adam Hughes)

Pros
Having a writer with an actual sense of humor never hurts.

Cons
Barbara Gordon can now walk again, which means DC eliminated one of the tiny handful of disabled heroes.
That Adam Hughes cover freaks me out. She keeps smiling at me with her cold, dead eyes…

Odds That It Will Suck
Medium. Batgirl is a fairly straightforward character who stars in straightforward adventures. No history of greatness, but no history of terribleness either.

How I Would Make It Better
Comics starring solo heroes often tend to be a dreary reads because the protagonist rarely has anyone to interact with. This leads to page after page of mind-numbing narration just so the writer can justify their wage. This book needs a big supporting cast, preferably other superheroines who accompany Batgirl on her adventures. So it would essentially be Birds of Prey with Batgirl. And like Birds of Prey, there should be plenty of lesbian subtext, because lesbian subtext improves everything.

Swamp Thing #1
Written by Scott Snyder
Art by Yanick Paquette

Pros
I’m drawing a blank here…

Cons
Mediocre writer, mediocre artist, a character who is ill-served by being dragged back into mainstream superhero comics.

Odds That It Will Suck
Certainty. Alan Moore is a tough act to follow. And outside of Moore’s run, Swamp Thing doesn’t have a rich history to draw from.

How I Would Make It Better
Well, I probably wouldn’t make it at all. But if I had to, I’d shamelessly rip off the best parts of Moore’s run. At minimum, the comic should have purple prose, leftist politics, and psychedelic yam sex.

Reach for the Prehistoric Stars, American Comics!

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

There should be more American comics like Yohei Sakai’s Dinosaur King volume 1.

Not that this is a great comic. Or a good comic. Or a comic that in any way makes you not want to seek out Yohei Sakai and force-feed him every Happy Meal in your local McDonald’s emporium, including the special toy Alvin and the Chipmunk figures, until his colon is completely encased in plastic, opening an anal fissure in space/time into which you can chuck him in the desperate hope that he, in turn, will be devoured by a fire-breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex, or, preferably, by a non-fire breathing Tyrannosaurus Rex so that he can confirm that no, really, Tyrannosaurus Rexes did not breathe fire, you shithead.

And then, as he’s torn into bloody, un-flaming gobbets, you can point out to him cheerfully that even if you grit your teeth and really, really try while simultaneously proclaiming your love of dinosaurs and whimpering softly about how you lost your mother at a tender age, encountering a T. Rex is still really fatal.

Where was I?

Oh right.

Yes, this book is bad enough that I wish hideous and improbable constipation and death on its creator and its distributor and its protagonist and, indeed, on dinosaurs, if, in their case, the death was not somewhat redundant and the constipation unlikely given the widespread absence of fossilized intestines.
But for all its manifest, egregious, bottomless badness, this book has something to teach American publishers. If you’re going to be bad, why not cater to the poor taste of the broadest possible herd? Fuck the decadent costumed multi-colored lantern corpses with the 30 years of repeatedly retconned backstory (no, not literally. What is wrong with you people?) Fuck the Forever Ultimate X-Claremont McKenna that 12 people want to read. Yes, Dinosaur King seems to say, those things suck like Youporn inhaling a vacuum cleaner. But I suck too, and I have cute baby dinosaurs and spunky young protagonists who have the amazing ability to talk to dinosaurs, and also I have full-sized dinosaurs with special ninja attacks. And, hey, I’ve got trading cards too. My artwork is even entirely decent in a stereotypical over-carbonated shonen kind of way. There are lots and lots of kids clamoring for just this kind of badness, and I aim to deliver it directly to their malleable, sugar-spasming adrenal glands and long-suffering parents.

Stop your elitist, clubby, insular dreck, American comics! You too can make dreck for the masses! I just know you can! There’s nothing you can’t do if you just try!
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This review first appeared on tcj.com.

Gluey Tart: Rock On, Fan Fic Woman

Posted on June 20, 2011 by kinukitty

After years of comfortably not thinking about Stevie Nicks at all, she is back in my life. And since YOU WANT TO KNOW!!!!!!, I will tell you all about it.

For reasons best not explored, I have been exposed to an enormous amount of Fleetwood Mac over the past few months. Not the Peter Green version that has, I think, a certain amount of critical sympathy, if not cred (if you like blues-based rock at all,“Oh Well” is just an awesome song). No, I’m talking about the Lindsey Buckingham-Stevie Nicks version, which was ubiquitous in the ’70s and has less critical sympathy. I have even listened to Buckingham-Nicks, their first album (never released on CD, which hardly seems possible, but there you are). (They’re naked, if that helps.) I have listened to that Walter Egan album Buckingham and Nicks worked on, Fundamental Roll (remember “Magnet and Steel”? Anyone?). I have listened to all of Lindsey Buckingham’s solo albums. I have listened to part of a Christine McVie solo album. I have listened to and, I’ll admit it, enjoyed late, decadent Fleetwood Mac in the form of Tusk.

And in the sort of oooh spooky cosmically significant dream catcher sort of coincidence one associates with Stevie Nicks, I also saw her on TV recently. Circumstances conspired against me in a perfect storm of crap that included watching “Dancing with Painfully Annoying Has-Beens Like Ralph Macchio, and also Kirstie Alley, Who Is Actually Pretty Great.” Stevie’s lost all that post-cocaine-addicted-to-some-kind-of-painkillers weight, I noticed. Good for her. She also forgot one of the verses to Landslide, I’m pretty sure (I might not be remembering properly since I was pretty focused on feeling wildly sorry for myself, and I don’t multitask well). (I mean, how many times has the woman sung Landslide? If you laid every performance of Landslide end to end you’d be in outer space.) She was pretty and her voice didn’t sound too bad and she didn’t look hopped up or insane, so that’s really more than anyone has any right to expect, and good on her.

So I’ve been thinking about our girl Stevie. I have a long history with her. One of the first albums I owned was Rumors (along with Rod Stewart’s Night on the Town, which I stand by to this day, and Roger Daltrey’s One of the Boys, which I don’t) – in 1978, for my twelfth birthday. (And, ouch.) I was obsessed with Stevie Nicks in the late ’70s, as was just about everyone else in the United States. I first saw her on TV in 1975, probably, twirling around in her chiffon and top hat and shit, and I was in love. I adored Stevie Nicks in the uncritical and utterly absorbed way only a nine year old can. I can still remember how badly I wanted to be her – a cruelly thwarted ambition on par only with the realization that I really wasn’t ever going to find a wardrobe that would lead me to Narnia. (I still haven’t quite given up on becoming an intergalactic princess.)

I didn’t know anything about what being Stevie Nicks would involve, but that didn’t make the distance between us any easier. So I did what everybody does in a situation like that: I wrote fan fiction.

My nine-year-old fan fiction was no doubt excruciatingly embarrassing, and it is a mercy that none of it still exists. But I clearly remember spending long, happy hours imagining Stevie’s life – where she lived, what she did in her spare time, whether or not she cooked. (No, I decided.) I agonized over whether or not her boyfriend (I didn’t realize that was Lindsey Buckingham, at the time, so I made one up) lived with her or not, and whether I should refer to him in my stories as her boyfriend, which seemed old-fashioned, or her lover, which seemed risqué. I was extremely unclear on the details, mind you, but I was sure she’d have one, whatever it entailed. The actual storytelling was sparse because I had no idea what Stevie Nicks and her fictional boyfriend, Ted, might do. But I did spend a lot of time browsing catalogues, picking out items for Stevie’s fictional home. Clothing was difficult, since the only catalogues I had at my disposal were Sears and Spiegel (for fancy), so I especially enjoyed picking out furnishings and linens, which were less obviously wrong. I also remember that Stevie had a Siamese cat, much like I did.

So in addition to watching “Dancing With the Stars” and listening to Tusk, I’ve also realized that I’ve been writing fan fiction since I was nine. Awkward, isn’t it? Still, it’s best to lance the wound and let it heal. And it could be worse. (No, really. Two words: Mackenzie Phillips. Who wrote that book about having an affair with her father. Definitely worse.) (Also worse [in Stevie’s own immortal words (from “Crystal,” on Fleetwood Mac): “The crystalline knowledge of you/Drove me through the mountains/Through the crystal-like clear water fountain/Drove me like a magnet to the sea.”] [Drove me like a magnet to the sea? I figure she originally wrote “Drove me like a taxi to the airport” but decided that wasn’t romantic enough.])