Quotes of the Day

Robert Crumb will undoubtedly go down in history as comicdom's most complex artist. Publicly shy, he nevertheless makes himself the focus of much of his work; highly critical of consumer culture he nevertheless has tons of "merch" and a website to push it; most importantly he uses the "harmless" medium of comic books to explore the outer reaches of adult assumptions about race, sex and the American condition. New Yorkers recently had a rare opportunity to see Crumb face his contradictions and his legacy when he appeared at the New York Public Library in a conversation with Robert Hughes, the irascible essayist and TIME's art critic for more than 30 years. Though the event quickly sold out, TIME.comix was there to bring you highlights of the 2-hour event.

The appearance was organized to promote Crumb's latest book, "The R. Crumb Handbook" (MQ Productions; 438 pages; $25), a hardcover collection of Crumb's work over the years. Though it sounds redundant— everything touched by Crumb's pen, short of his ink stained sleeves, has been published already — this collection has great appeal to both Crumb neophytes and Crumb obsessives. Unlike other collections it is edited and designed, by Crumb's pal Pete Poplaski, as a kind of illustrated autobiography. Crumb provides commentary on his development as a person and an artist in passages interspersed with copious examples of his art and family photos. (A full multi-media package, it also comes with a CD of Crumb's recorded sessions with various amateur string and jug bands.) In a conversational style that frequently lapses into hilarious tirades against consumer culture, the media and any of a half dozen other peeves, Crumb reminisces about growing up as a child of 1950s suburbia through his later years as a museum-worthy "arteest" living in France. Always entertaining, "The R. Crumb Handbook" works as both an introduction to and enrichment of the author's work.

Crumb's appearance onstage at the New York Public Library made a striking contrast with Robert Hughes' paunchy ruddiness. Thin, with a full salt and pepper beard, eyeglasses and matted hair parted down the middle, Crumb wore a dark vest and suit jacket with a colorful tie and white shirt with an old-fashioned collar. The two explored Crumb's influences, contradictions, and the next big Crumb project, an illustrated version of the Book of Genesis. Highlights of the conversation:

Primary Influences
HUGHES: I want to know something about where your work begins from.

CRUMB: Well, there's the Egyptian hieroglyphs...

HUGHES: You didn't grow up looking at Egyptian hieroglyphs. What did you grow up looking at?

CRUMB: I'm a total child of popular culture. That's all I ever saw until I was 20 years old. TV. Comic books. That's it. In my family we had a TV when I was 5 years old in 1948. We started watching it a lot. We watched Howdy Doody and the Lone Ranger. That was the stuff that was deeply imprinted on me. Little Lulu and Donald Duck and Felix the Cat — real basic popular culture that was fed to kids. My parents had no culture. Not what's considered a culture with a capital K.

The Early Years
HUGHES: In your cartoons there's this character, very clean cut, straight, with a rigid suit. Is that your dad?

CRUMB: That's my dad, yeah.

HUGHES: In real life what did your dad do?

CRUMB: He was in the U.S. Marine Corps for twenty years. He joined in 1936. My mother made him retire in 1956. He loved the Marine Corps. He would have stayed if my mother had allowed him to. She made him quit because she got tired of being transferred around all the time and living in tract houses on U.S. military bases.

HUGHES: You were a base baby?

CRUMB: Yeah, I was a base baby. My father was that kind of man. That real classic, American John Wayne type of guy. A very intimidating man. Deep booming voice. A hot temper. If he got angry he might strike you.

HUGHES: Did he let you know that he loved you when he wasn't striking you?

CRUMB: No. He was from very reserved farm people. When I would come home to visit after I left home he would say, "It's good to see you Robert," and shake hands.

HUGHES: Did it ever cross his lamps that you would have ever ended up as an artist?

CRUMB: Well, we were always drawing comics as kids. My brother Charles made me draw comics. I was very much under his domination. He was actually a much stronger artistic visionary than I was. I had to do it to be a worthwhile person. And my father saw this and he used to say, "oh you guys will get over this when your reach your teens and you get out and play football." He was just totally bewildered by us. He saw us as Martians. We'd be lying on our beds in the fetal position, reading comics. He was a man of action, a U.S. marine. "Get off your duffs!" We broke his heart. He had three sons and they all turned out to be complete defective weirdoes. My older brother [Charles] committed suicide. He's dead. But my other brother [Max] is still alive. He lives in a hotel in skid row in San Francisco. He's lived in the same room for 25 years.

Crumb's Misguided Bid for Love
HUGHES: One of the reasons you've been so popular is because we think of you as fearless and crazy. You are one of the few Americans I have ever come across who seems to be totally unaffected by the notion of political correctness.

CRUMB: Maybe I should be more correct.

HUGHES: Why?

CRUMB: It's not nice to draw those pictures of women with no heads and those jiggaboo images of black people and stuff. I didn't realize how hurtful it was when I did it. I was surprised when people didn't love me after that. I want everyone to love me. Please love me.

HUGHES: Yeah, but you're the kind of loon who thinks that if he tells the truth about his own inner drives and if he exposes things, then people will love him.

CRUMB: Then they'll see that I'm human like them, and I just want acceptance.

HUGHES: But you see you're horribly wrong.

CRUMB: I realize that now. You can't make everybody love you. It's an exercise in futility and it's probably not even a good idea to try.

[A woman in the audience yells "We love you!" The audience applauds.]

CRUMB: Don't embarrass me. I know you love me, ok, alright. You're killing me you love me so much. Back off.

HUGHES: What I want to get to is the way these images worked on people. You have been furiously accused of being a racist.

CRUMB: Yeah well, [characters like Angelfood McSpade] were just stereotypical 1920s images of big-lipped black people which actually had very little to do with real African Americans. They were cartoon stereotypes I was playing around with. All that stuff I did in the late 1960s was cartoon stereotypes. I was playing around with them in a psychedelicized way. I dunno. It's hard to explain. It's not my job to explain it.

HUGHES: Well let's try to explain it. Why did practically nobody else get on to that very intense content and make something out of it the way you did?

CRUMB: I think that you had to be really, really alienated to get that point. You had to be very alienated from the culture.

HUGHES: Why is it that some artists will handle something that most of their audience would find reprehensible?

CRUMB: You've got to have nothing to lose. If you're trying to work the art game, if you're like Andy Warhol or something, then you're in with cake-eaters of society. You want to get in with them and please them and get their money.

The Art World
HUGHES: You're one of the few people I've ever met who hates the contemporary art system even more than I do.

CRUMB: It's the kiss of death.

HUGHES: I thought that nobody hated Warhol and what he stood for more than me but you do.

CRUMB: It's just kind of annoying when a Marilyn Monroe silkscreen print goes for $100,000 when a drawing I worked really hard on [inaudible] I saw a small Breughel painting for sale for less than an Andy Warhol silkscreen print.

HUGHES: That doesn't surprise me at all. If you consider the relative merits of a $5000 Goya Capriccio and on the other hand a $500,000 work by the "immortal" Jeffrey Koons, you become aware that there's been some really, serious, mass-hysterical degeneration of taste. But let's go to what really influenced you in "museum culture." You do note a number of museum artists as being primarily influences...

CRUMB: Not primary, no. All the primary influences for me go back to those childhood comicbooks and TV shows and old movies that I saw on television. Everything basically comes from that.

An iconic 60s sequence from Crumb's first issue of "Zap"

The 60s
HUGHES: If there was some side of your imagery in the 1960s that you wished you had stretched more than you did, what would it be?

CRUMB: Good drawing probably. It was sloppy. I was taking too many drugs.

HUGHES: Did you at any time share that view that was so prevalent at Haight Ashbury and other "great centers of world learning" that dropping 250 mics was going to somehow or other induct you into a better world, which if everybody else dropped along with you would then turn out to be kind of utopia?

CRUMB: Yes I did believe that, I'm embarrassed to say. I remember preaching that to people.

HUGHES: It was a kind of self-congratulation in a way.

CRUMB: Well, no because all the hippies that took LSD felt that, in the beginning with some actual validity, that they had perceived a lot of things that were wrong with the direction that industrial civilizations was going. And this was all suddenly revealed very clearly. It got fogged over a bit with all the other crazy stuff that was going on but in the beginning when you took LSD you saw that there was something all wrong with this whole set-up here. "We've got to get back to the land. We gotta get back to nature. We gotta get rid of all this polluting chemical nonsense. We've got to stop this. It's unhealthy for the planet." It all became viscerally clear. It all became suddenly life threatening. All these cars coming at you.

HUGHES: Well it was life threatening

CRUMB: But in a normal state you just kind of adapt to it. But [on LSD] it all just seemed totally insane.

HUGHES: What interests me is the way in which this impacted your art. Because in point of fact, 60's discontent, 60s worries, 60s despair — that left its mark in writing and in music, but it didn't leave much trace in the visual arts. I'm wondering why this should be so. While you're not the only person to have approached this, you are probably the best known. Your work is one of the most powerful testimonies to it.

CRUMB: Well a number of my colleagues turned out similar stuff. I'm not sure why the museums and galleries are fixated on me.

HUGHES: Does it piss you off when people treat you as a representative figure of the 1960s?

CRUMB: Nah, I guess I got used to it. It was just kind of ironic because at the time I felt outside of all that. But in a way I was typical 60s guy. I took LSD. I said, "Oh wow! Groovy! Man!"

HUGHES: But there are certain artists who we don't talk about as 60s artists. We don't say, "Oh, Giorgio Morandi [(1890-1964)], the 60s artist"

CRUMB: Who?

HUGHES: He was this Italian who painted still lives, bottles, arranged on a table... One of the really great artists of the 20th century. Anyway, my point is that, let's say you are talking about Francisco Goya. We don't talk about Goya being an artist of [just] the 1780s or an artist of the 90s when he was doing the "Capriccios."

CRUMB: I understand what you're saying. You get stuck with this label. That's annoying as hell. What about everything I've done since then?

HUGHES: One of the great things in my opinion about cultural memory is that, if properly understood, it belies all that bullshit about avant-gardeism. Because everything is simultaneously present.

CRUMB: I agree with you completely. And the thing about comics is that comics are part of a definite, specific lineage and no cartoonist has considered himself a complete, groundbreaking innovator. You're proud of the fact that you picked up from this guy and that guy before...

Artistic Motivations
HUGHES: I wanted to ask about work ethic. You're very, very American in a lot of ways, not least in your commitment to continuous, relentless production.

CRUMB: That's not so true any more as it used to be. It's tapered off a lot more now that I am slightly more well adjusted.

HUGHES: Are you happy?

CRUMB: I'm a little bit happier. Yes. I don't feel as driven. When I was younger I just lived my life on paper. I didn't really live in the real world very much. As a consequence I couldn't cope with the real world and real people very well. That in itself became life threatening so I had to stop drawing so much and learn how to cope with people. Otherwise it would have killed me.

HUGHES: Let's suppose you hadn't had that immense outlet for dreams and resentment...

CRUMB: Oh boy. I'd be drawing those big butts on some prison wall. Or in some lunatic asylum someplace. Or I'd be dead. I could easily have killed myself. I was so depressed. But now I'm better. Fame helped. Getting recognition helped.

HUGHES: Truer words were never spoken.

CRUMB: It can also be hell on earth. But suddenly being an object of fascination for attractive women because of being famous was nice.

HUGHES: It's what the great Dr. Sigmund (I think) said, that great artists are compelled by three principal motives: fame, money and the acquisition of beautiful lovers.

CRUMB: Acquisition of beautiful lovers I would put at the top myself. I could do without the fame and even the money I don't really give a shit about. But I couldn't live without the beautiful lovers.

HUGHES: I've found that the artists who say they could do without the fame and without the money are fairly famous and doing quite well.

CRUMB: I'm sure that's true. But the trick is you can't get the beautiful lovers unless you get the fame if you're a guy like me. I just didn't have what it takes. I was a wimpy, nerdy nothing.

HUGHES: I don't know about this Crumb. Your strips and your pages are full of horrendous looking, nerdy nothings with large overbites whose general apparent unattractiveness is nevertheless compensated for every few frames by the exhibition of this gigantic schlong.

CRUMB: It's all fantasy. And it was really fun to draw.

A page from Crumb's sketchbook, as it appears in "The R. Crumb Handbook"

The R. Crumb Genesis Project
HUGHES: I want to talk about Robert Crumb's Genesis. It's something that every ex-Catholic boy might entertain nightmares about doing.

CRUMB: [jokingly]I've gotta get it off my chest.

HUGHES: What's it doing on your chest?

CRUMB: I was fooling around with Adam and Eve one day. Doodling about Adam and Eve. At first I did this satirical take off on Adam and Eve — lots of jokey asides and Jewish slang because they're Jewish right? God is Jewish.

HUGHES: Now you're going to get it for anti-Semitism.

CRUMB: Finally I got over fooling around and I realized I just had to tell it straight.

HUGHES: Is God going to look like Mr. Natural?

CRUMB: Nah. He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I've got God.

HUGHES: And what did she look like?

CRUMB: I went through that whole thing too; maybe I'll draw God as a black woman. But if you actually read the Old Testament he's just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch. It's a lot of fun doing Genesis, actually. It's very visual. It's lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people.

When to Quit
AUDIENCE: Do you ever feel like maybe the fame isn't worth it?

CRUMB: All the time. But then my ego starts to push me forward. It just happened recently. I was in London doing this thing and these paparazzi were taking pictures of me and it was so horrible. I was so angry I just wanted to smash their cameras in their faces. Later that night I just thought, "I'm going to quit drawing. It's just not worth it." Life is a trap.

• Andrew D. Arnold
• TIME.comix captures a conversation between the veteran cartoonist and Robert Hughes