THE R. CRUMB STORY IS an amateur Freudian’s delight—I’m speaking of Freud the mischievous aesthetic theorist/detective, who thought that creativity and perversity share the same origins. Artists are people who’ve figured out how to transform their forbidden urges and fantasies into culture, lauded as heroes because the rest of us are pissed off about having to renounce our instincts, too. But direct encounters with those desires are unpleasant for socialized types—painful and shaming, thus repressed. Art becomes the repository for all this relinquished stuff, but in disguised and “sublimated” forms—we go visit it in museums, field trips to reconnect with what we’ve lost.
Then came the ’60s, and sublimation went out of fashion. The cartoonist R. Crumb, an id-governed freakishly talented man-child and king of desublimation, quickly became the counterculture’s reigning hero. He was funny and artistically original, and his unleashed fusions of kinky sex, violence, vulgarity, and jokey racism crystallized the preoccupations of the moment. LSD also deeply informed his aesthetic, as it did his generation’s, freeing him from useless fears and hang-ups, he believed. Who knows what restraints his work might have been subject to minus the acid trips?
According to his biographer Dan Nadel, curator-at-large for the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Crumb’s genius was dragging comics into adulthood, stretching the medium into a vehicle for social critique—merged with his obsessions, free associations, and truckloads of self-loathing. His disinhibition was a permission slip for succeeding generations to be as expressive and formally inventive. As Art Spiegelman, the medium’s next great innovator, put it, “Every cartoonist has to pass through Crumb to find out what your voice might be.”
Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life is a supremely well-told story and, though an authorized bio, not entirely uncritical of the man. Nadel does a great job of placing Crumb’s emergence against the backdrop of the counterculture and the nascent institutions that nurtured his career: initially the underground papers whose “free economy” ethos meant Robert and his first wife had to survive on cornflakes and spaghetti, later the hippie entrepreneurship of head shops and fledgling distribution networks of the underground-comics movement. His work started circulating and he finally got paid for it, about which he was perpetually ambivalent. He did the cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s 1968 album Cheap Thrills (Janis Joplin was a Crumb fan), which sold millions of copies (he got $600), then turned down one for the Stones—he hated their music. By his mid-twenties, he was famous.
As with Terry Zwigoff’s disturbing and astonishing 1994 documentary Crumb, Nadel’s biography doubles as an alarming family portrait. The kinship between art and neurosis is a familiar trope, but the collective Crumb afflictions went way beyond the usual middle-class angst. Having watched Zwigoff’s version multiple times over the years, I’m plagued by the same questions each time I do: Is artistic style pretty much a done deal, sealed in place by childhood? Also: What on earth happened to this family?
NADEL FILLS IN MUCH of the backstory. The Crumbs were, to begin with, a family riddled with secrets, among them that at age fifteen, Robert’s mother Bea had had a child with her fourteen-year-old stepbrother, outraging their Catholic neighborhood; her parents claimed that the child was theirs, raising her as Bea’s sister and banishing the stepbrother. As a teenager, “Aunt Catherine” frequently babysat for Bea’s subsequent five children, who had no idea she was actually their half-sister.
There were more household secrets: Robert’s father Chuck may have been gay or bisexual (he was spotted by, and possibly hit on, a friend of his older son Charles at a local cruising spot). At home he was abusive, breaking Robert’s collarbone when he was five (telling the hospital he’d fallen down the stairs) and mercilessly beating Charles—who’d known he himself was gay from an early age—then carting him to a psychiatrist. Charles was, in turn, abusive to his brothers and sisters. Robert bullied his younger brother Maxon, who never recovered from being the family whipping boy. Bea chased Chuck around the house with a knife, popped pills and grew disastrously unstable. Chuck had her committed more than once.
If Chuck was closeted, other family members were less guard-railed. Robert had his first orgasm at age fifteen while wrestling with his twelve-year-old sister Sandra, and continued to pleasure himself in this fashion for six months until she called a halt to it. Sandra would later have an affair with her older sister Carol’s husband, sometimes having sneaky sex with him while all were under the same roof. Did having a mother boundary-indifferent enough to sleep with her stepbrother (in the not-exactly freewheeling early ’40s) play some part in shaping the family culture? And though Nadel doesn’t ask the question, I will: Would growing up in a secret-riddled family predispose a budding artist toward an aesthetics of exposé, to baring the sort of stuff bourgeois proprieties devote themselves to veiling—orifices, the tenacity of the infantile in “adult” sexuality, incest, and so on?
The disinhibition Robert later became celebrated for was the family geist. It was a household of precocious cartoonists whose collective style—Zwigoff supplies the visual evidence—was imported directly into Robert’s later work. Charles, the most talented of them, played the role of artistic overboss, domineering his sibs into producing an entire twenty-page comic book every month, berating them as worthless if they didn’t meet their quotas. Being shamed by a brilliant—and increasingly mentally ill—older brother molded the person who became R. Crumb as much as anything. Their intense teenage philosophical discussions about the sham of American middle-class life—Charles diagnosed the Catholic church and Walt Disney as similar constructs, enthralling children then exploiting them—became the intellectual cornerstones of his work.
Zwigoff, who’d known the family for decades and thought the brothers were geniuses, shot brutally candid interviews with all three (the two sisters declined). Alarmingly articulate and mordantly funny about their various disorders, each brother is equally obsessed with sex and tormented by it. Charles, who’d never actually had sex because he was too depressed to leave the house, remains erotically obsessed with Disney’s 1950 Treasure Island and its impish twelve-year-old lead Bobby Driscoll. Living at home with his strange and obese mother since graduating high school, he’d barely ever worked, was heavily medicated, and attempted suicide numerous times, once by drinking furniture polish. (He succeeded the year after the interview was filmed, ingesting an overdose of his medication.)
Maxon, who has a history of untreated epilepsy, is living in an SRO while practicing various of the more grisly Eastern-inflected bodily disciplines: meditating while sitting on a board of nails, and swallowing lengths of cord that make their way through his intestinal tract as some sort of cleanse. He makes a living by begging. He’s also been arrested numerous times for molesting women on the street, a compulsion he laughingly admits to on camera: he likes yanking down their shorts or pulling up their skirts, a process he describes in alarmingly jocular detail.
As far as what happened to the family, Nadel is hard-pressed to say. The children “began experiencing debilitating mental and physical health conditions that went largely unexamined and completely unexplained.” There was certainly a family propensity toward depression, but no doubt the one-two punch of an abusively tyrannical father and an emotionally damaged, pill-popping mother who liked to threaten her sons with enemas (as Charles and Robert reminisce), didn’t help.
The question I’m left with is what to make of the family resemblance between Robert’s work and the swamp of sexual fixations and aggressions he shares with his brothers. Maxon forcibly unveiling women’s legs and butts on the street and Robert insistently unveiling women’s legs and butts on the page share a similar iconography, both similarly disguised as jokiness. The glimpses we get of Charles’s teenage journals share Robert’s adult obsessions and look to be drawn by the same hand. Zwigoff’s documentary further unravels the distinction one might want to maintain between art and life, with Robert filmed acting out the sexual scenarios of his cartoons, and jokily mauling (not consensually) an old girlfriend to the point that she kicks him in the shin to get him to stop. Women who are in a position to know provide on-camera testimony about his proclivities for infantilism in bed.
Given how much of Robert’s oeuvre is devoted to the adventures of a depressed band of perverse, lascivious, and highly endowed cartoon characters, Mr. Natural might as well have been a fourth Crumb brother.
ROBERT WAS THE SURVIVOR of the three, with a robust enough sense of self to stamp the imprint of his id on an entire generation. Art saved him, fame saved him: the world accommodated itself to his strangeness.He lucked out by coming of sexual age as the counterculture was emerging, under the guidance of figures like Norman O. Brown, the brilliant proponent of polymorphous perversity. Robert had very specific sexual tastes and a dedication to getting them met: mommy-fixated on and off the page, the same sexual type dominated him in both art and life—hefty women with large butts and massive, powerful legs, as if he were a toddler staring up from the vantage of a stroller. He was obsessed with female strength, and his opening gambit when he met a woman who was his type was to jump on her butt or back and demand a piggyback ride.
The coincidence of his growing fame—he was twenty-five in 1968—and the heyday of women’s “sexual liberation” (yes, those are scare quotes) at least made it easy to find willing female accomplices to act out his sexual kinks. To feminist critics who charged that Crumb’s work was stuck in a state of “arrested juvenile development” or protested the rape depictions and women with orifices in place of heads, his considered response was a sixteen-panel monologue that concluded, “Well listen you dumb-assed broads, I’m gonna draw what I fucking-well please to draw, and if you don’t like it, FUCK YOU!!” In later life he’d admit to having been a chauvinist asshole—having a daughter he adored and a relatively happy marriage with the cartoonist Aline Kominsky may have had a chastening effect—though in later life he’d also become an anti-vaxxer and “aids dissident” who believes that AZT leads to HIV rather than treating it.
WONDERING WHAT CAUSES SOMEONE to become stuck in the vantage of a five-year-old boy is, I suppose, normative, possibly prudish, as if entombing infantile desires were the key to lifelong happiness rather than the key to routine adult misery. At the same time and in my own defense, Crumb may have become the emblem of countercultural freedom, but no one’s less free than a fetishist, nothing less liberated than a fixation.
Also, times have changed, cultural fashions have shifted: we’ve moved on from polymorphous perversity to trauma narratives. We’ve become well-schooled in locating childhood sexual violation (rather than repressed childhood desires) as the root of adult neurosis. And Robert never did repress or sublimate much—“his unconscious is, in a sense, conscious. His private and public voices are identical,” as Nadel puts it. So when Crumb draws his mother Bea fellating him as a man-child in “The Confessions of R. Crumb,” and in the next sequence jumps on the big butt of a different woman for a horsey ride, as he did compulsively in life (“compulsion” was his word), are we in the genre of gleeful taboo smashing, Oedipal fantasy, or—as the critic educated in the literalism of trauma detection may find herself wondering—memoir?
Freud himself acknowledged the difficulty in distinguishing unconscious fantasies from memories that have become unconscious—either is capable of making you a traumatized neurotic. But would being fellated by one’s mother as a baby or toddler have to be traumatic? Please restrain your horrified politesse and just consider the question. After all, it’s not like we’re born knowing there’s an incest taboo, universal though it appears to be (the parent-child variety, at least). Anyway, it’s not me asking, it’s R. Crumb, still our regnant desublimated genius: What’s so wrong with a kid being blown by his mom?
I think Freud’s answer about the consequences of such an episode is that it would be too pleasurable. That much satisfaction would irrevocably thwart your accommodation to the renunciations required by the reality principle. Your instincts would remain uneducated, feral, stuck in place; you’d risk remaining an eternal infant.
BY FAR TGHE MOST DISTURBING moments in the documentary are Robert laughing. He giggles while Charles discusses his suicide attempt, chortles while Maxon talks about molesting women, and sniggers whenever the emotional content is pain and tragedy, to the point that he starts seeming indistinguishable from one of his lewd cartoon characters. He becomes a self-drawn caricature.
But it’s not just Crumb’s laugh that’s unsettling, it’s the very physiognomy of the family. In earlier childhood photos they look like a normal enough bunch, but as the years progress the sons seem to get uglier and uglier; features and expressions grow distorted, as if their faces and bodies were a pliant medium on which to record some particularly miserable story. And it was miserable: the more awkward and unsightly they became, the more viciously they were bullied at school. Reminiscing about it they all laugh, the same distinctive family cackle.
I recall once reading an account of the psychology of laughter that described children progressing from using their entire bodies to signal pleasure and displeasure into the refinements of language and thought, learning to use adult tools for mastering the world. Laughter is actually a residue left over from infancy and childhood—in other words, a sanctioned regression. And a culturally shared regression: laughter can be a profoundly social act. It solicits identification—we often start laughing at someone else’s laughter without even knowing what we’re laughing at.
Of course it’s complicated, since “inappropriate” laughter also invites social punishment, not to mention self-rebuke. Adult proprieties are, after all, instilled in us with emotional Gestapo tactics and enforcement techniques: loss of parental love, getting smacked, social ostracism, and so on. All of which makes the medium of adult cartoons such a perfect feint, especially in Crumb’s hands: smuggling in childhood perversities and aggression by means of sophisticated adult skills, masking the subversion as a joke.
Maybe it’s the reason the Crumb brothers’ maniacal laughter feels so unnerving. Watching them makes me realize what subtle curators of laughter we mostly are, instinctively recoiling from fake laughs and false notes. At some level I think we know when a laugh is also a mask, forcing something else, probably something perverse or aggressive, aside. It’s a defense, but also a subterfuge: “I’m really a harmless person,” it announces to the world. “Look how I’m laughing!”
The Crumb laugh isn’t just unconvincing, it’s painful. Something disturbing is going on, for which the laugh is a bribe. It buys you off, deflects your attention, solicits your collusion. I know that something grotesque is being smuggled in, I just don’t know exactly what.
Laura Kipnis is the author, most recently, of Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis (Pantheon, 2022). She lives in New York.