Digging 'Underground'
In a Temple of High Art, the Lowbrow Work Of R. Crumb Certainly Rises to the Occasion

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, October 26, 2008

PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- I don't know if the comic book is the lowest form of art, but it's way down there.

This is central to its charm.

The comic that's worth remembering isn't fancy-schmancy. It's quick and coarse and cheap. It doesn't seek admission to the higher realms of art. It's closer to the pits.

Ah, the pits! Ah, the nostalgia! "The Vault of Horror" and "Tales From the Crypt," two favorites of my childhood, were deliciously disgusting. Those pulpy-paper booklets published by EC Comics were so dank with rotting monsters (this was part of their attractiveness), and so appalled my righteous parents (this was another), that I had to keep them hidden, buried, under the mattress -- which brings me to R. Crumb.

The old reprobate himself -- he of Mr. Natural, Zap Comix and Meatball, and don't forget "Keep on Truckin' " -- is shamelessly exhibiting 50 years of his comics at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art.

The war upon the cute mounted in the '60s by the counterculture's comics was a multi-front offense. The cartoonists who produced them -- S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, Skip Williamson and others -- then seemed a sort of army, a scraggly one for sure, and Crumb was the lewd leader of those stoned and savage warriors, commanding from the front, Rapidograph in hand.

So many heroes met in comic books are muscular and handsome. Crumb isn't. He's scrawny and geeky. He is not nice. Still, his drawing is implacable, and his skills are undeniable (he's the captain of the crosshatchers, perhaps the best since Thomas Nast). His museum retrospective, precisely as intended, soaks you in a hose-pipe jet of gags and hideosities, old-timey yearnings, nerdy sexuality and eye-grabbing delight.

His exhibition in his birthplace, the city of brotherly love -- of which he doesn't have much -- is titled "R. Crumb's Underground," which sounds exactly right. Underground is where you put the cesspits and the secrets. The now-abandoned underground of counterculture fun, of hairiness and head shops and San Francisco dreamin', of sex and pot and rock-and-roll (or in Crumb's case, early blues), is where his comic-corrosive vision first burst into view.

Its outrageousness is stunning. Most of us (and I include the hippest and the freest) have walls around our thoughts, imagination boundaries, established in our heads. Crumb dissolved his with LSD. He breaks ours with his drawings. Few goaders of his period -- not William S. Burroughs of "Naked Lunch," or savage Lenny Bruce, or "Fear and Loathing's" Hunter S. Thompson -- were as assiduous as he at liquefying decencies.

America is chockablock with rude people who draw comics, and most are pretty awful. In some ways Crumb is awful, too, but he is also excellent -- excellent at lettering and onrushing narrative, at baseball caps and street clothes. He's also very good at telephone poles; no one draws the wires that sag across the shoddy backways of America more poignantly.

Measured by celebrity, by scholarly attention and by the quantity of stuff that, erupting from his id, pours straight through his pen, Crumb's the best we've got.

So the art world now agrees. Crumb has won them over. And he's come at them from below.

Other artists more high-minded (Walt Disney, Roy Lichtenstein, even Andy Warhol) sought to elevate the comics, but Crumb did no such thing. The man is not high-minded. He went the other way. Down and down, deeper and deeper, down under good manners, underneath propriety and way below the belt.

The boot fetishes, the juvenile horniness ("I look, I see, I lust"), the alienated bitterness, the decaying Catholic guilt -- one encounters his effusions with odd, appalling glee. R. Crumb has a troubled soul, which isn't rare in art. He also has within him a large amount of funniness, which in the higher realms of art (one does not laugh in church) is very rare indeed.

The brash big-footed beings encountered in his comics -- Flakey Foont and Whiteman ("I've tried! God knows I've tried!"), Mr. Snoid and Meatball, and the grossest of the gurus, bearded Mr. Natural, "the man from Afghanistan" -- are aspects of the man himself. They clambered from his depths. And then spread out through the world. His "Keep on Truckin' " was at one time near-ubiquitous. Posters beyond counting showed its shuffling male chorus line, as did car decals and little paper squares of blotter LSD. And lots of us took notice. Steve Martin, for example, said that "Keep on Truckin' " taught him how to walk.

Crumb's art tends to get misread. True, he moved to San Francisco in the psychedelic heyday of the Fillmore and the Dead, and sold his comics on the Haight, but R. Crumb was no hippie. "I couldn't dress like them," he has said. "I couldn't go dancing in the park, and I couldn't stand the music."

Nor was he a lefty. In the bygone days of hippiedom, much counterculture art, in America at least, leaned toward the progressive, but Crumb's did no such thing. His Angelfood McSpade savaged racial harmony. His "Lenore Goldberg and Her Girl Commandos" did the same to women's liberation. He never wore the headband. Crumb preferred the fedora. Had the man no shame? Nope, none at all. Crumb just kept on drawin' and kept on diggin', down past the eight-pagers, and the stick-figure graffiti, down as far as he could go.

And what did it get him? I'll tell you what it got him. It got him a house in France, and perhaps a score of scholarly publications (not by him, but about him), and shows around the world, and a memorable movie ("Crumb" by Terry Zwigoff, in 1994) all about his life.

If you think that Crumb himself is weird, you should see his family. His father was a tyrant, his mother was on speed, his brother Charles a recluse, a depressive and a suicide. At one piercing moment in Zwigoff's documentary, the artist's younger brother, Maxon, who is living all alone in a San Francisco flophouse, pulls his bed-of-nails out from underneath his bed.

And yet R. Crumb has prospered. His art has been displayed in a slew of exhibitions in legitimate museums. (Crumb, who's 65, first exhibited in Washington at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1969.) He has a gig at the New Yorker. His work attracts collectors. In the highest, most demanding circles of the art world, no contemporary cartoonist has had more success than he.

Once upon a time, all images were art. Not anymore. Now the art world is a precious place, rigorously defended, and cartoonists aren't admitted. A Nixon drawn by Herblock or a Churchill drawn by David Low, a "Pogo" by Walt Kelly or a "Krazy Kat" by George Herriman, much less a checkered demon by S. Clay Wilson, or, God forbid, a Disney cel -- such images are seldom seen in shows of master drawings. The art world has its boundaries. But somehow Crumb got in.

After being dunked in his show in Philadelphia, you begin to see the reasons. Crumb's art is transgressive, and the art world loves transgression. Crumb shocks his toughest viewers, and the art world longs for shock. Crumb's drawing is superior, there is little doubt of that, and his art is full of references -- to Mutt and Jeff, to Kilroy and Walt Disney, and to Classic Comics, too. Also, one might argue, it extends a great tradition: See how it takes you back through Daumier and through Goya all the way to Giotto, whose famous fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel (Padua, Italy, circa 1305) is as graphic and sequential as a strip cartoon.

And although Crumb creates comics, his are never cute. The art world gags on cuteness. Also, let's admit it, the art world thrives on fame. And R. Crumb is a star.

It isn't just the movie, or the many exhibitions, or the coffee-table books. Crumb's complex myopic stoop-shouldered persona -- his obsession with big legs, his banjo-picking geekiness, his high school days in Delaware (especially playing footsie with luscious Jeanette Bates in their American history class), his early work in greeting cards, his travels through the Rust Belt, his marriage to Aline, his revulsion at pretension, his collection of 78s, his admiration for the songs of Charley Patton and the blues of Bukka White -- all of this, and more of him, pours out of his art.

When you look into Crumb's comics he is there, in person. "Y'know," the artist wrote in 2002, "I'm probably one of the few, maybe the only human on this planet with no secrets. My deepest, bizarrest thoughts and fantasies are known by millions of people! Between my comics and published sketchbooks and the 'Crumb' documentary, and various published interviews and articles about me, there's not a corner or cranny of my life and psyche that hasn't been publicly explored, put on display, held up for ridicule, for laughs, to ogle at, as an example, as a freak show, or just out of my own narcissistic compulsion to exhibit myself, like when Lyndon Johnson pulled up his shirttail and showed his scar."

Flakey Foont and Mr. Snoid, the big-legged women with vulture heads, the outrages, the orgies and instructive Mr. Natural -- all are facets of the man.

Do they make you feel all icky? Do they fill you with revulsion, expose your inner creepiness or elicit your guffaws?

Don't worry.

"Remember, it's only lines on paper, folks!" -- or so says R. Crumb.

R. Crumb's Underground includes more than 100 objects. Organized in San Francisco by Todd Hignite for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, it will remain in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St., through Dec. 7. For information call 215-898-7108. The ICA is open from noon to 8 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Admission is free.