They figured it out fairly quickly. Crumb's rambling, hallucinogenic, sexually explicit cartoons became the visual expression of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Particularly potent was his "Keep on Truckin'" image from Zap #1. Inspired by the language of the '20s- and '30s-era blues recordings that Crumb collects obsessively, the famous cartoon depicts a goofy parade of big-footed pedestrians doing an exaggerated strut down the city streets. It was soon regurgitated onto posters, T-shirts and head-shop memorabilia, mostly without Crumb's permission or participation. (Eventually the cartoon caused legal and financial headaches for the artist -- in 1976 a judge ruled that the image did not belong to him, and subsequently the IRS pursued Crumb for unpaid taxes stemming from royalty payments.)

As an unpopular kid, Crumb had longed for the sweet revenge of fame. As a gawky adult in San Francisco, he longed for a little of that free love supposedly floating around. And suddenly, it happened -- the candy store was open. Keep on Truckin', along with Fritz the Cat and his cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company's "Cheap Thrills" album, helped make Crumb famous, an icon of the hippie scene and a babe magnet.

He reacted with contempt. Crumb felt scorn for the hippies, the women, the commercial exploitation, even the work itself. Keep on Truckin' in particular inspired his disdain, a theme that he revisited more than once. In a 1990 cartoon about the creation of the iconic image, Crumb described pop music as "the rhythms of cultural death. In my own spaced-out, inarticulate way, I tried to draw the images I saw in my mind when I heard modern pop music on LSD ... clownish fools boppin' and jivin' in the garbage heap they were making out of the Earth. ... I was fooled by my own drawings. Other people thought they were happy images of relaxed cartoon characters just havin' a good ol' time ... so I did too! I forgot what they really were. Photographs of the dance of death!"

Well, fair enough -- but as Crumb points out elsewhere in the same cartoon, "I guess I don't like to see people having a good time." Most of Crumb's work is suffused with the sullen attitude of the high school loser who has never escaped the cloud of early rejection. "The instant I realized I was an outcast I became a critic," Crumb has said, "and I've been disgusted with American culture from the time I was a kid. I started out by rejecting all the things that the people who rejected me liked, then over the years I developed a deeper analysis of those things."

In an essay from "The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book," the artist describes his passion for old 78s that began when he heard "Happy Days and Lonely Nights," a 1928 record by Charlie Fry's Million Dollar Pier Orchestra. Enthusiastically, Crumb avows his love for this old music and other artifacts of the era. The essay is titled: "To Be Interested in Old Music Is To Be a Social Outcast!"

There's probably some pleasure to be had from it, too, but I suppose that can't be helped.

By late 1969 Crumb had hooked up with S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez and Robert Williams to create the seven-member Zap Collective, which published copies of the magazine sporadically for the next two decades. Crumb also turned out voluminous work in publications with titles like "Weirdo," "Black and White," "Big Ass Comics" and "People's Comics," in which he killed off Fritz the Cat in 1972. (Not surprisingly, Crumb loathed "Fritz the Cat," the Ralph Bakshi animated film that starred his randy feline.)

Crumb is neither a gag writer nor a yarn-spinner. Aside from occasional flights of fancy and the visions dredged from his subconscious with an acid shovel, most of his work is autobiographical. Crumb cartoons are typically marked by a painful, neurotic honesty -- also, women with shelflike asses and legs like telephone poles. "My personal obsession for big women interferes with some people's enjoyment of my work," Crumb wrote in "The Coffee Table Art Book." "I knew it was weird and disturbing and even offensive to a lot of people, particularly women. But I couldn't keep it out of the comics. I would always try to give it some sort of metaphorical sense because I derived such masturbatory pleasure out of drawing these women in bizarre situations with these little guys doing stuff to them. Similarly, using racist stereotypes -- it's just boiling over out of my brain, and I just have to draw it ... All this stuff is deeply embedded in our culture and our collective subconscious, and you have to deal with it."

To reveal your own dirty laundry is one thing -- to have it exposed onscreen is something else, as Crumb and his second wife, Aline Kominsky, discovered in 1995 with the release of Zwigoff's documentary. The director was an old friend and fellow member of the Cheap Suit Serenaders, the group Crumb formed in the '70s to play his beloved old music. Winner of the grand jury prize at the '95 Sundance Film Festival, "Crumb" was a revelation -- a sometimes creepy and always fascinating journey that did far more than simply enumerate the artist's renowned peccadilloes. Robert may be a seething cesspool of misanthropy and sexual neuroses, but after a couple of scenes with older brother Charles and younger brother Maxon, Mr. and Mrs. Crumb's second boy begins to look positively mundane.

Maxon is the film's purest comic relief -- a late-blooming artist of genuine talent, his other hobbies include attempting to molest Chinese women on the street, pulling women's pants down in department stores, sitting on nails for hours on end and eating long cords of rope that take three days to shit out. "It gratifies the intestines," Maxon explains.

Charles, made passive and easygoing by tranquilizers and antidepressants, evokes more complex reactions. A benign, housebound Buddha ("Can you give me one good reason for leaving the house?" he asks rhetorically), Charles' mild manner and toothless grin belie the darkness he describes. Late in the film he calmly reveals that, in his teens, he struggled with the powerful urge to stab Robert to death in his sleep. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Charles reviews his life with the bemused detachment of a fired coach recalling a championship game lost years ago. "Believe me," he chuckles about his morbid solitude, "it's nothing to envy."

Charles developed an early fixation on the 1950 Disney movie "Treasure Island," starring Robert Newton as Long John Silver and Bobby Driscoll as young Jack Hawkins, filling reams of paper with variations on the story. In one scene, Robert reveals that the source of Charles' Treasure Island obsession -- a sexual fascination with Driscoll -- emerged only years later. Young Robert, dutifully slaving away at their pirate comic serials, had no clue as to the true nature of Charles' inspiration. In that way at least, their intense fraternal relationship was fairly typical -- big brother's actual motivations are rarely perceived by slavishly imitative little bro. It's a religion, and as with any religion, you don't ask questions.

Recent Stories