R.Crumb: Interview

Controversial American artist Robert Crumb discussed his medley of comic characters, his acid-fuelled days, existentialism and crosshatching with the Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell at the National Film Theatre. He was also joined on stage by his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Peter Poplaski.

Robert Crumb (after long and sustained applause): A couple of empty seats there. Not that popular, huh?

Steve Bell: I was going to talk to you about your style of work. It's traditional, isn't it? It's not modern.

RC: Stylistically, yes. I go with the old stuff, I like the old look.

SB: It makes you think of the early 20th century American newspaper strips.

RC: Yeah, there's that. There's also like 19th century, 18th century... I go all the way back.

SB: My first experience of your stuff was in 1967. It was a page of Fritz the Cat which was in a book called The Penguin Book of Comics. Wonderful book, it had stuff going way back. Your page was right at the end of the book - it was like the future of comics.

RC: I vaguely remember that.

SB: It was a great strip. And it hooked me. Now, Fritz the Cat was made into a terrible animated film by Ralph Bakshi.

RC: It was embarrassing.

SB: But the strips are something special, and what I like about them is the looseness of your line.

[Slide : Fritz the Cat]

SB: Fritz the Cat was your own creation, very early on.

RC: Yes, it goes back to my teenage years.

SB: What I love about this is the simple, ludicrous way you write - it just drags you in. It's almost stream-of-consciousness. You weren't on acid when you did this, were you?

RC: No, this is actually from the acid period. Look at how sloppy the handwriting is. I turned that out really fast. I don't do anything like that any more, I never work that sloppy or fast any more.

SB: Are you sure? Some of the stuff in the [The R Crumb Handbook] which are quite...

RC: Sloppy?

SB: Loose. Some of the later stuff, like... [shows RC one of the back pages]

RC: That's nothing like as loose as that [Fritz slide]. And also, that's a placemat drawing I did in a restaurant.

SB: Loose is good, loose is nice.

RC: It can be. But sometimes people are too loose.

SB: Like Toulouse-Lautrec? You live close to Toulouse-Lautrec don't you?

RC: Yes. Wonderful artist.

SB: Toulouse-Lautrec was a great influence on me, too. That wonderful fluid line he had.

RC: Oh yeah. He's very sure about what the human figure looks like. He must have drawn thousands of them.

SB: But you never had a proper art education, did you? You got your art education from just doing it, working for the American Greetings card company.

RC: A lot of pencil mileage. Through the years, I've continued to educate myself and draw from life. Do you ever do that?

SB: I don't draw enough. The only time I seem to do that is when I go to party political conferences. You'd love them - like at the Conservative party conference, you can get to draw Margaret Thatcher close up.

RC: Wow, [whistles]. That's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.

SB: You don't give a shit about depicting politicians do you?

RC: I hate them so much that the bile would just rise up and overpower me. I couldn't do that.

SB: Do you start with a blank page?

RC: I start at the upper left hand corner...

SB: And from that you get the nine frames?

RC: I roughly pencil them out on the page. I have a template which I can put on a piece of paper and mark off the edges.

SB: And do you work out the story in pencil first?

RC: I work out a couple of panels - two or three - at a time. I don't like to plan the whole thing, then it becomes boring, having to draw it when you know how it's going to end.

SB: Do you have to do it in a room on your own, or can you do it in a room full of people breathing down your neck?

RC: Originally I did it all alone, and that was fine. Then after I got kind of well known, I had to learn to do it in a room full of people, gradually over a period of decades. But I still prefer to do it alone. Cartooning is a lonely job. You have to sit by yourself in a room, masturbate and fool around with your stuff. Let the whole thing fester. You know. That's the creative process. It's sordid but that's how it is.

[Slide: Anal Antics]

SB: Ah yes, now we're getting into sex.

RC: That's a good one.

SB: Mr Snoid. We couldn't avoid it.

RC: Some ladies are leaving the theatre already I see. Getting up in droves.

SB: You said somewhere that all your main characters came to you in a sort of acid-fuelled frenzy over a brief period in the late 60s. One of whom was Mr Snoid.

RC: That's right. I saw them, I saw the Snoids. I was totally crazy.

SB: I love the title, Anal Antics. And then you put the subtitle: More Sick Humour Which Serves No Purpose!

RC: That was what a lot of people said, so I went along. "No social redeeming value whatsoever." Let's move on.

[Slide : Get It On]

SB: This is the ultimate depiction of being stoned.

RC: I was smoking much too much pot in those days. I was losing my ability to keep my train of thought for more than five or six seconds.

SB: Do you think it permanently damaged you?

RC: I don't know. I often wonder. Since it doesn't cause you pain if your mind is damaged, you can't really tell. Did you ever go through a period where you smoked a lot of pot?

SB: Yeah. Still do. Not as much as I used to.

RC: Do you feel you're damaged from it?

SB: Yeah, but who cares.

RC: I think our intelligence and awareness and our ability to perceive is something that we should value. So sometimes I worry that forgetfulness and things like that are caused by things like smoking too much pot. I don't know.

SB: But it fulfils a basic human need to get out of it, doesn't it?

RC: Yeah, escape from normal life. What's that about? Why do we need to escape? It is hell on earth, but I don't see what the big deal is. [chuckles]

SB: Anyway, you're not interested in depicting politics and politicians.

RC: Not like you do. You got that whole thing covered really well. There's no need for anybody else.

SB: You are quite strongly political and you have worked for worthy political magazines in your time.

RC: I'm kind of disillusioned.

SB: What was the name of the magazine you worked on?

RC: There were several - one was called Winds of Change. They all meant well and they all had high ideals and all that, but God, what a pain in the ass they were. Was it John Waters who said, "Leftwing radicals tend to generally be humour-impaired"? You could never do anything to please them - they wanted everything changed. They wanted you to be their hand, for their very specific idea, which was usually pretty heavy-handed.

SB: But you went along with it.

RC: Because I had those ideals. It was a good cause.

SB: You still have those ideals?

RC: I don't know. I'm very disillusioned now.

[Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Peter Poplaski, co-author of The R Crumb Handbook, join RC and SB on stage]

RC: If I'd gone through the last three days that Pete and Aline have gone through, I'd be dead.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb: We've been here all week and having a really good time.

SB: I only recently discovered, Aline, that you're not the original for Honeybunch Kominsky because Robert conceived of the character before he even met you.

AKC: Yeah, so we were destined to meet. He drew this character, and I already existed.

RC: People called her Honeybunch before we even met because of that cartoon.

AKC: Because I even look like that type of woman. So this guy wanted to introduce me to Crumb and brought me to a party at [Robert's] ex-girlfriend's house - he also had another wife at the time, nice guy. And I met him and he said, "You have nice knees."

RC: You do.

AKC: Somehow I had this sinking feeling that our destinies were intertwined. I was having so much fun. The last thing I wanted was to be attached to him.

RC: She was the belle of the ball. Men were flocking to her. I used to go to her house and I'd sit in this waiting room with five other guys.

AKC: Take a ticket, dear.

RC: We'd see who could outwait the others and be the last one left there - one by one, they'd drop off and go home.

AKC: You were the last one left there, obviously.

SB: How long have you two been together?

RC: Too long.

AKC: Thirtysomething years. Oh my God.

RC: I guess we're to be congratulated. I don't know.

SB: Who masterminded the move to France? You left the States in 1991, didn't you?

RC: She's the mastermind behind that whole deal, behind everything, basically.

AKC: Yes, it was my midlife crisis that propelled us to France. I can give you rational arguments as to why we did, but it was my midlife crisis. We were fleeing from Christian fundamentalists who called me the wife of the child pornographer in the small town that we lived in California. We wanted to get our daughter out of California - she was nine, and we did not want to have this teenage child in California, to have her become a mall rat. And teenage kids were saying things like "Duhhh". I'd wanted to get my child out of America for a while - that was part of it. But in general, I just wanted a more exotic life. So I just made him pack everything and dragged him over there.

RC: To France.

AKC: Well, isn't it a better place to live? Come on.

RC: Well, yeah.

AKC: We've got a really big place with a lot of space to work; in California we had a really small house and it was so expensive so we couldn't really have anything bigger. So when we moved to France 14 years ago, it was really cheap. Our village was half falling down and we were able to get a big old place. Since we work at home ....

SB: But you've sort of lost your subject matter. You're a commentator on the state of America. One of your strips, a lovely one, is called The History of America - it's a beautiful series of pictures which you see in the book. It starts off with an idyllic country scene which slowly erodes with the arrival of the horse and carriage, railroad and gradually gets built over.

RC: It ends up with a fastfood restaurant in the middle.

AKC: But isn't that happening everywhere in the world? We go back to America a lot and what we see is that corporate America coming through everywhere.

RC: It's okay, I don't mind moving to the south of France to die.

AKC: It's a good place to die, dear. He goes back and forth to the States all the time.

RC: I do landscape drawings in France, draw the pretty, old stone houses. [chuckles]

SB: But you have stone houses in the States.

RC: In the States? No way, dude! We got no fucking stone houses over there in America. We got wood, stucco, plastic exteriors and cardboard boxes.

SB: You do strips together, don't you?

RC: Yeah, we do a bunch of collaborations. Aline does her own stuff, which is great, even though the drawings are kind of primitive and crude and puts a lot of people off, but ...

RC: ... she's a great cartoonist, a great storyteller.

AKC: Next year, my book's coming out.

RC: Right, same publisher, MQP.

[Slide: Hypnagogic Hoodoo]

SB: Ah, now we're getting to the more recent stuff. Remember when I talked about your loose style. We've come back to it. Now this is from 1997, is it?

RC: That's from Sketchbook. Yeah, it's looser, but it's from a sketch.

SB: So it's just done straight, sort of raw, unmediated.

RC: Lots of whiteout.

SB: Hypnagogic - that means drawn from dreams.

RC: No, it means the state where you're halfway between asleep and awake. Someone once said it's like being high. You can get a lot of revelations in that state. If you can catch them, they're very elusive.

SB: There's a whole group of cartoonists who are into that state, isn't there? There's a Serbian guy called Zograf. Wonderful stuff.

RC: Oh yeah, Zograf was really tuned into that dream state. I find that stuff really interesting.

SB: So was this a dream you had?

RC: This was a hypnagogic vision that I used to have very often. I don't have it any more. Thank God it went away. I started watching for it as I was falling asleep. These creatures were kind of invading my psychic self and it happened quite often. They were not showing themselves to me, they were sneaking into my psychic space. I don't know if it was some vestigial thing from taking LSD or what, but it's gone now.

SB: What about the man with the hat and the strange system of ribbons around his face? Is that the Invisible Man?

RC: That's how one of them looked. He had all these things wrapped around his head and so I couldn't tell who or what he was.

AKC: That's so creepy.

RC: It was disturbing and it was creepy and I used to have this vision a lot. It would only last a split-second, but I'd be aware of these entities invading my psychic realm. Pete, what's that about? Tell me.

Peter Poplaski: It all goes back to the Greeks: What is reality? What's appearance? What's illusion? It's all your LSD visions coming back to haunt you, I think. With me, I just watched too much television, I never took drugs. With you, acid trips, man. You're not running away, they're coming back for you.

RC: I've really come to believe it. Somehow, acid monkeyed with the balance between the different bodies - you know, there's the physical body, the astral body, and the mind - and acid scrambled the membranes between these bodies and somehow allowed these psychic leaks which, in normal people, are sealed off from each other.

AKC: It's kind of an advantage as an artist to have that sort of seeping in.

RC: Yeah, it is an advantage as an artist but it can kill you as a person who has to survive in the world. Artists with that kind of vulnerability and sensitivity often die young.

[Slide: The Heartbreak of the Old Cartoonist]

SB: This is terribly sad.

RC: It's supposed to be funny.

SB: What's happened to the background?

RC: I was trying to imitate the style of normal comic strips of modern times, keeping it minimal.

AKC: We've just been doing it for too long.

RC: Yeah, I think cartooning, for the most part, is a young man's game, or a young person's game, because there are a lot of women doing it now. There're a lot of old cartoonists still doing good work, but there's not too many.

SB: I'm getting on, but I'm not as old as you.

RC: Especially doing comics. There's not much money, not a lot of glamour, people get families.

SB: But there are people drawing well into their 80s.

RC: Doing comics? Not many.

AKC: There's Bill Griffith. [Art] Spiegelman.

RC: Spiegelman, maybe - but he's not really doing comics any more. Comics take a hell of a lot of focus but for most people there's not a lot of reward in it.

AKC: So what do you think of our daughter becoming a cartoonist?

RC: I'm going down, she's coming up. She's great. Let the young people do it, take centre stage. It's their time.

The Guardian, 18 March 2005