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Robert Crumb United States of America    PWF 2009

“There’s a lot of weird shit in everybody’s head. Anybody could be a cartoonist if they could draw. Like Groucho Marx said, if we could tell what everyone was thinking, everyone would be in jail.”

Robert Crumb — the father of underground comics — commonly known as R. Crumb — was born in 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Compared favorably to Brueghel, demonized as a misogynist, defended by feminists, and lionized in the award-winning documentary film Crumb, he is firmly established as one of the most controversial and technically gifted cartoonists of the second half of the twentieth century.

In 1968, Crumb put Blind Boy Fuller’s Keep on truckin’ riff into Zap Comix — a slogan, which became an overnight sensation and now rests ingrained in the collective American psyche. Crumb brought existential absurdity — along with sex and drugs — to the American comic book — “an American Hogarth with a blown mind”.

Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Devil Girl, and Big Ass comics — “let’s face it, minds are a dime a dozen, but a fine, round, sturdy female ass” — are among his greatest hits, as well as the album cover for Janis Joplin’s Cheap Thrills.

“I try to deal honestly with my own obsessions, and how it boils up inside of me. I have to get it out — I have this devilish compulsion to foist it on the public — it’s all in the comics.”

R. Crumb lives with his wife — the cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb — in France.