The film's most disquieting moments record the contents of Charles' old sketchbook. With each page the "Treasure Island" characters become smaller and smaller, pushed to the bottom of the frame by an increasing torrent of words. Then there is nothing but writing and finally, terrifyingly, page after page of cursive lines -- like the CAT scan of a brain's descent into madness. It's eerily reminiscent of the "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" scene in Kubrick's "The Shining," but with the considerable added impact of reality.

Perhaps saddest of all is Robert's memory of how the unpopular and prematurely embittered Charles spread the virus to his siblings. Any display of enthusiasm on Robert's part would be squelched by Charles' trademark sneer: "How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure." Charles, the closing credits reveal, committed suicide a year after being interviewed for the film. Robert's life and career begin to look heroic by comparison. (Art and writings from Charles and Maxon can be found in "Crumb Family Comics," published in 1997 by Last Gasp of San Francisco. The collection also features work by son, Jesse -- born to Robert and Dana in 1968 -- daughter, Sophie, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Although Kominsky's best-known work has, not surprisingly, involved collaboration with her legendary husband, the native of Long Beach, N.Y., was already cartooning when they met in the early '70s. Kominsky's characters include Blabette Yakowitz, based on her mother. She and Crumb married in 1978. Sophie was born in 1981.

The documentary also neatly summarized the opposing critical camps that have formed around the artist's work. Leading the cheering section is Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, who calls Crumb "the Breughel of the last half of the 20th century," and also compares him to Goya. For the prosecution, Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones, examines Crumb's 1969 epic "Joe Blow" (the target of obscenity busts at comic stores), a gleeful tale of incest in a picture-perfect Eisenhower-era family. She sees something other than satire. "You sense that Crumb is getting off on it himself," English says, "and I think this theme is omnipresent in his work. It's part of an arrested juvenile vision."

Crumb himself pleads ignorance. "I don't work in terms of conscious messages," he tells Zwigoff. "I can't do that. It has to be something I'm revealing to myself as I'm doing it."

Crumb had mixed feelings about "Crumb," which, naturally, he expressed in cartoon form. "Head for the Hills" was published in the New Yorker in 1995 and contains Robert and Aline's ruminations on Zwigoff's project: "He was kind of creatively at a loss and we felt responsible for his well-being," Crumb says in the strip. "So we let him film the intimate details of our life." "He kinda used us to push his own ideas," says Aline.

Zwigoff doesn't disagree. "People don't seem to understand that 'Crumb' is a very subjective film," he later wrote in the collection "Family Album." "What the film reveals about me is as much a part of the equation as what the film reveals about Robert."

Whatever Crumb's feelings about the film, it frequently paints a more sympathetic portrait of the artist than the one presented by his own published work. Reading collections of Crumb cartoons can be an enervating experience. It's true that for someone like Crumb, who possesses the required taste and discernment to appreciate folk traditions, today's trash culture can seem like the sixth pot of tea from the same withered bag. Regardless, Crumb frequently comes off as a determinedly miserable sod. He wanted fame, got it and despised it. He wanted women, got them and hates them. Crumb's anti-consumerist ideals are definitely '60s vintage, but he can't seem to decide whether he misses the decade or loathes its memory.

But Crumb's saving grace is Crumb himself. There is virtually no criticism you can make of him that he hasn't already made -- his most merciless gaze is usually directed into the mirror. The same 1990 cartoon that contains his attack on those who love his most famous image -- "So Keep on Truckin', Shmucks!" Crumb jeers in the final panel -- also features a postscript by Mr. Natural: "Don't forget, Bob, that it was the compassion, the loving forgiveness, that they found so appealing in your cartoons, that made you so popular, that got you laid, that earned you a living. Keep it in mind!"

Well said, Bob -- er, Mr. Natural.

Moreover, Crumb's critics depend on Crumb for their ammunition. Attacking the man as a misogynist? Sure -- you know it because he told you so in cartoons like My Trouble with Women, Parts I and II. The cartoonist's commitment to brutal honesty is the most consistently admirable aspect of his work. Casual readers, too, need to remember that their information about Crumb comes largely from the source. "We only tell 'em what we want them to know," says Crumb in "Head for the Hills." "An' they assume it's all true," adds Aline.

Zwigoff's documentary also highlights a man who, whatever his failings, is certainly no hypocrite. Big money deals, the Rolling Stones, the chance to host "Saturday Night Live" (in 1976 when it would have meant something) -- Crumb spurned it all. Fellow cartoonist Bill Griffiths (Zippy the Pinhead) says admiringly, "This is not something you see every day in America, where selling out is everybody's ambition."

"Crumb, like all great satirists, is something of an outcast in his own country," Hughes remarks in the film. Father of Mr. Natural, murderer of Fritz the Cat -- Crumb's repudiation of modern America will remain trenchant, particularly for the underground culture that has always been his natural home.

But if you choose to immerse yourself in the collected works of Robert Crumb you might subsequently find yourself with a certain craving -- the urge to draw the drapes, throw "Saturday Night Fever" on the stereo and do the Dance of Cultural Death till you puke. And then thank your lucky stars that you're so easily amused.

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