DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. R. Crumb is the most renowned of the underground cartoonists who emerged in the 1960s. He created Zap Comix, featuring an entire menagerie of his characters, such as Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, the Snoid and Devil Girl. His comics were eccentric, and so was he, as a 1994 documentary by Terry Zwigoff makes clear. Crumb wrote a memoir in 2005, titled "The R. Crumb Handbook." Reviewing the book then in Newsweek, Malcolm Jones wrote, quote, "Crumb has made strange and hilarious art out of his own neuroses. Insecure and paranoid, obsessed with sex in general and women with big behinds in particular, Crumb has never been afraid to draw and write about his own foibles and fantasies. His work is like an id unleashed with no thought for propriety," unquote. R. Crumb's work has been controversial, considered racist and misogynistic. Now there's a new biography of Crumb by fellow cartoonist and founder of the PictureBox comics, Dan Nadel. Crumb is now 81 years old and lives in France, where he's resided for decades. We're going to listen back to Terry's 2005 interview with R. Crumb.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS: R. Crumb, welcome to FRESH AIR. Do you think your early comics, some of the ones...
R CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Anthologized in your new book, do you think they look different out of the time period than they did to you in their time?
CRUMB: Different from this perspective of nowadays?
GROSS: Yeah.
CRUMB: Well, they're kind of timeless, you know, 'cause they're - they looked out of time then. When I did them, in the beginning, in '66, '67, '68, people looked at them and said, hey, these look like old comics from the '30s, you know? And some people, when they met me, were surprised that I was a young man at the time. They thought I'd be some old guy, 'cause it - so they already looked out of time then, and so I - they just kind of still look like their own thing. They don't - and I think a lot of young people that pick them up, they don't - when they first see them, don't realize how old they are. They just don't seem to be part of the '60s as it's known, stylistically, for such stuff as Peter Max or the psychedelic posters and all that stuff. It doesn't fit in with that. It's kind of its own thing.
GROSS: In your new book, "The R. Crumb Handbook," you described how you started some aspects of your style after a bad LSD trip. What were the...
CRUMB: Right.
GROSS: ...Images that you saw when you were tripping that made their way into your cartoons?
CRUMB: Whoa (laughter). That's a tough question. What were the images on LSD? What did they look like? Ooh. Well, I don't know, for some reason, I don't know why or how it happened, I just - on this one really strange LSD trip that I took, that there was something wrong with the drug, I got trapped in some level of the mental collective consciousness that was very tawdry and carnival-like in a kind of a cheap, gaudy way. It just stuck there. I was stuck there for months until I - actually, what cleared it up was taking another dose of LSD made it go away.
GROSS: Well, how do you think your drawing style was actually changed by this hallucinogenic imagery?
CRUMB: Well, it changed vastly. Well, before that, I was trying to be - you know, in order to get work as an artist and a cartoonist, I was trying to be contemporary and with it. And I looked at the work of people like Jules Feiffer. And the LSD just blew all that away completely. And I was always drawing in my sketchbooks all the time, and I was just drawing these images that were coming from my brain all the time in that two months, uncontrollably just completely changed my whole approach to what I was doing to the cartooning and took on this older '30s, '40s, kind of - and I starting looking more closely at these kind of brand X third-rate comics from the '40s that had - that were drawn in that style by these artists that never achieved, you know, renown among - even among comics people. They were a third-rate artist, but they had this working-class proletarian, funky, crude, vulgar - these comics were very vulgar, violent.
GROSS: So what are some of the characters that you started drawing in this period after taking the LSD?
CRUMB: That was my first - you know, that two-month period when my ego was completely, like, fragmented by that bad LSD, I drew Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Angelfood McSpade, the Snoids, the Vulture Goddesses, the Vulture Demonesses, whatever you want to call them. I know lots of characters - The Old Pooperoo (laughter).
GROSS: OK, Mr. Natural's this kind of, like, guru kind of figure with the long...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Really long beard. Was he based on anybody who you knew or a type that you knew?
CRUMB: It was actually, more or less, a combination of the mysticism of LSD experiences, combined with this old cartoon stereotype of the little old man with the long beard..
GROSS: Right.
CRUMB: There was several of these, kind of like, standard, you know, cartoon figure in old comic strips going back to the '20s, even earlier, probably, that little old - funny little old man with the long beard. I didn't invent anything out of whole cloth. It's - all has antecedents in the popular culture, all of it.
GROSS: And Angelfood McSpade - I mean, this is an African American woman who is drawn like - some of the Black people in your early comics look like the African cannibals in the Betty Boop cartoon where they...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Have her in a big pot.
CRUMB: That's right, exactly.
GROSS: Yeah. Why...
CRUMB: Precisely.
GROSS: Why did you draw them that way?
CRUMB: 'Cause they were there and they were part of the whole experience of all that tawdry, low-class imagery that was boiling in my brain. That was part of it, that jungle bunny image, that was there. It was part of it. It wasn't there before, but it boiled up, and so it's obviously in the collective subconscious. And I just didn't have any control. I just had to draw what was there. And I don't think Angelfood McSpade can really legitimately be called an African American woman. It's a car...
GROSS: (Laughter).
CRUMB: It's a cartoon stereotype crazy image of something that's like in the imaginations of people. It's not, you know, it's not actually a representation of an African American woman (laughter).
GROSS: Did you worry that people would misconstrue it? Because certainly a lot of people didn't see it that way. They just saw it as a crude stereotype.
CRUMB: Yes, they do. A lot of people just took it at face value. And, you know, I can't let that stop me. Like, it has to come out. What's been in there had to come out. Had - you know, I really couldn't stop it. And I - if I worried about how it was going to be construed too much - I mean, I had - well, obviously, I had some concern of that, but, I - you know, I didn't want to be too hurtful, but at the same time, I had to put on the paper - I had this direct line from, you know, the brain stem to the paper. There was no super ego, you know, the socialized self, you know, all that was just swept away.
GROSS: And it was swept away in your sexual imagery, too.
CRUMB: (Laughter) You betcha, yeah. So, you know, I - yeah, I have no secrets. I'm probably one of the few human beings on the planet - I have no secrets. Everybody who looks at my comics knows exactly what I'm about.
GROSS: (Laughter).
CRUMB: It's all there.
GROSS: Everybody knows what your sexual fetishes are and everything.
CRUMB: The darkest side of me, it's all on paper. I - you know, so that makes - allows me to be a pretty nice guy in real life, you know? It's all out there on paper, foisted on the public.
GROSS: But was there ever a part of you that wanted to censor that part of your mind, or at least...
CRUMB: Of course.
GROSS: ...Kind of keep it private and hidden, which is what most people do with those?
CRUMB: Of course. Yeah, sure. I'm a normal person in that way. You know, before those LSD experiences, and I just decided to let that all out, I used to make those drawings and tear them up and flush them down the toilet. Oh, this is terrible. What's wrong with you? What is it? Why? You know? But - and also the - as I started doing it for publication, then it all - then the floodgates opened. The crack just got wider and wider until I just let it all out. Let it all out there. Oh, look, the dark side of myself, it's all out there. I have less of that impulse now. I think I got it out of my system, a lot of it.
GROSS: What was it like for you to go from, like, loner, eccentric weirdo...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...To, like, in-demand...
CRUMB: Right.
GROSS: ...Popular person...
CRUMB: Right. Cool Mister...
GROSS: ...Who everybody wants to publish and buy, and know?
CRUMB: Right. Mr. Cool Guy. It was very disorienting because I was quite young. I was only, like, 25, 26 when all that happened, originally. And it was both, you know, thrilling to my ego - I had a big ego - but also very confusing and scary, even, because, suddenly, this whole element of people that I'd never, ever had any dealings with before were suddenly there, interested in me, wanting to hustle me, wanting this and that and everything, you know, get - sign me to a five-year exclusive contract, da, da, da. You know, these people are trying to cash in on the hippy culture and the youth movement, and make money off it, you know? And I was so young, I didn't know how to deal with all that. But at the same time, it made me more attractive to women. So that part of it was nice.
GROSS: (Laughter) So...
CRUMB: It was. Before that, I was, like, this, you know, nerd that at a party no woman even noticed. I was just part of the shrubbery or something. But after that, oh, there's R. Crumb. Oh. You know? Suddenly, they were interested, and that was nice.
GROSS: Well, you were also, like, suddenly, you were an important part of, like, the hippy counterculture. Did you identify with that culture? Did you feel like a part of it?
CRUMB: Well, I guess, you know, the elements of that culture, like, the music and the stylistic stuff - no, I didn't identify with that at all. I identified with some of the values, like the political values, some of, like, the Eastern religious stuff that people were into - I like - I was attracted to that and, you know, the drug thing, the psychedelic drugs - I was into that part of it. I also got caught up in the general optimism and hopefulness and idealism of that time, the late '60s, you know? But stylistically, I was always alienated from it. I hated the music.
BIANCULLI: Cartoonist R. Crumb, speaking to Terry Gross in 2005. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2005 interview with cartoonist R. Crumb. He had just written a memoir. He's now the subject of a new biography, "Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life," written by fellow cartoonist Dan Nadel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: You write that puppet and marionette kid shows made a deep...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Impression on you. You say the adult...
CRUMB: Oh, yeah.
GROSS: ...Assumption was that these puppets were cute and lovable.
CRUMB: Right.
GROSS: But they were actually grotesque. And the shows tried to tell kids that life could be fun and exciting. But the unconscious message was that the adult world is strange, twisted, perverse, threatening, sinister.
CRUMB: That's right (laughter).
GROSS: What was it about, like, "Howdy Doody" or the other...
CRUMB: Ooh.
GROSS: ..."Kukla, Fran and Ollie"...
CRUMB: Oh, oh, oh.
GROSS: ...that you found, like, grotesque and sinister?
CRUMB: Oh. Well, especially "Howdy Doody."
GROSS: (Laughter).
CRUMB: "Howdy Doody" was really grotesque.
(Imitating Howdy Doody) Hi, kids (laughter). And Clarabell the Clown and all the - oh, it was all...
GROSS: (Laughter).
CRUMB: ...Very, very sinister and scary. And Buffalo Bob Smith - did you ever see that stuff when you were a kid?
GROSS: You bet. I sure did.
CRUMB: Jeez. My wife, Aline, actually - she grew up in New York. She actually got to be in the Peanut Gallery when she was a kid on the Buffalo Bob show and "The Howdy Doody Show." And she said it was a defining moment in her life. She was, like, 8 years old or something - 7 years old. And she saw the adult world behind the scenes of "The Howdy Doody Show" and how these people were all kind of cranky and stressed. And she said the seat of the pants of Bob Smith's outfit was kind of frayed and - you know (laughter). And he was, like, real mean to the kids when it was off camera (laughter).
GROSS: So...
CRUMB: "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" was cuter, though. That was - "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" - that was a little bit - that was better than "Howdy Doody" that way. It was more lovable. You know, Kukla was kind of a cute, little lovable guy, little hand puppet. And Fran, the woman - she's, like, talking to the puppets, so it was a little more reassuring. It was - you know, it was cuter. But...
GROSS: Did the frozen smile on Howdy Doody's face strike you as deranged?
CRUMB: It was just creepy and weird. You just said, what the heck? You know? This - what does that have to do with, you know, anything? It's - he doesn't - didn't look like a kid. He was supposed to be, like, a kid in a cowboy suit, but he didn't come off that way. He just came off as a creature, like, from Mars, you know? He wasn't - there's some underlying thing you can't quite define that was just disturbing and sinister and scary about it all - all that stuff.
GROSS: OK. The things that you say about these puppet shows - that they show that the adult world is strange, twisted, perverse, threatening, sinister - that's...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...A kind of description of what your cartoons became like - strange, twisted...
CRUMB: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...Perverse, threatening, sinister. It's - like...
CRUMB: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...That's what you set out to do (laughter).
CRUMB: Well, yeah, but I guess...
GROSS: Not for children...
CRUMB: ...What I was...
GROSS: ...Of course. I mean, it wasn't for children.
CRUMB: What I was - yeah. What I was trying to do was to uncover that sinister quality - the dark, sinister, strange, disturbing part of things - and not hide it, not keep it hidden. You know, I started doing that in '68, '69, putting it out there - the Snoids. You know, they were these little, creepy gnome creatures that I - you know, on LSD, I would catch out of the corner of my eye sneaking around and giggling in the background of my life, you know?
GROSS: (Laughter).
CRUMB: I just had to show that. I wanted to show that the - that sinister aspect, that noire or dark side of things, and how it's - I guess it's almost like making fun of the veneer of cuteness or whatever it is that they think covers that. You know, it's just all a veneer. It's not real cuteness. It's a completely fake attempt to cover up what life is really about in, you know, the whole mass media thing. And we're all in - grow up in America, you're a child of the mass media, the pop culture, unless your parents, like, guard you and protect you from that very conscientiously. I mean, my parents didn't. They just shoved us in front of the TV, and we're just products of pop culture. So, you know, that's what you have to work with.
GROSS: You know, we've talked a little bit about how your visual imagery was changed by LSD. What about your sexual fantasies? I mean, so much of the comics that you've done...
CRUMB: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...Have had to do with...
CRUMB: (Laughter).
GROSS: ...Sexual fantasy. And now, what the...
CRUMB: Hi, girls.
GROSS: Were they - were those fantasies as dark before LSD as they were after?
CRUMB: It - yeah. They - unfortunately, the LSD didn't really change much in my way of my sexual fantasies, but I found a way to express them that made them metaphorical to me. I could solve them more metaphorically. You know, on LSD, you see that life - everything in our world is a metaphor. Or, as Allen Ginsberg said, things are symbols of themselves (laughter). And so I saw my own sexual fantasies that way. It's all - and tried to understand what they meant metaphorically. You know, otherwise, we just feel helpless in the face - if things don't mean anything, we feel helpless. What does it mean? What do these fantasies mean? Where do they come from? Why do I have them, you know (laughter)?
GROSS: So...
CRUMB: Tried to understand or express that somehow, in some way. But...
GROSS: Well...
CRUMB: ...I got off drawing those things. I got off drawing them. I admit it. I confess (laughter).
GROSS: But that's - I wanted to ask you about that. Did you want your more sexually oriented comics to function as turn-ons, to be like pornography...
CRUMB: No. No.
GROSS: ...In the lives of its readers? Or did you want to..
CRUMB: No, I didn't. No. It was only for myself. I had no motive to turn other people on to my sexual fantasies or my sexual preferences at all. I was just expressing what was inside myself in some way that revealed the - what - hopefully, the metaphor that it was, you know, in the - in many variations of that, you know, the Angelfood McSpade, the Vulture Demonesses or the Bigfoot-Sasquatch character that I did - the big, hairy female - or the Devil Girl character. These are all - and when feminists complain and say, these aren't real women. These are Crumb's fantasies, they're absolutely right. I can't - you know, I got no argument with that. Yeah. That's what it is, yeah. Yeah. It just comes - all comes out of my mind.
GROSS: Well, in your new book, you describe yourself as in a - as sexually in a state of arrested development. You say...
CRUMB: Right.
GROSS: ...All my natural compulsions are perverted and twisted.
CRUMB: Right. Right.
GROSS: So...
CRUMB: (Laughter) I see myself as a very negative person, actually. I'm almost like a negative of the normal, well-adjusted guy. You know, I'm the - everything that he is, I'm not, and everything I am, he's not. You know, it's almost how I see myself. Maybe not 100%, but, you know, I'm like the - a person of the night. He's a guy of the day, you know? Well, etc, etc, you know?
GROSS: Now, when you were young, you went for a while to Catholic school. For a while...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...You went regularly to church. You say you went through...
CRUMB: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
GROSS: ...A period of being fervent and devout.
CRUMB: Religious, yeah.
GROSS: What - were you - what happened to all those fantasies that you had during this period when these fantasies would've just been horrifying to you?
CRUMB: Correct. Horribly. Horrible guilt. Horrible guilt, of course. Praying desperately - please, God, what is this about (laughter)?
GROSS: Did you pray to get rid of these thoughts?
CRUMB: I - you know, it's a funny thing. At the same time, the thoughts were - the fantasies were attractive and gave me pleasure, and at the same time, I was deeply disturbed by their sinfulness. So something had to go, and what went was the church and the whole sin thing. That had to go.
GROSS: Now, you quote one woman in your book that's accusing you of ruining underground comics by encouraging all the younger boy artists to be bad and do comics...
CRUMB: Right.
GROSS: ...About their own horrible sex fantasies.
CRUMB: Right.
GROSS: Do you feel like your - you know, your comics inspired a lot of...
CRUMB: Other artists?
GROSS: ...Other comics of - yeah, of kind of, you know, bad, sexual...
CRUMB: Yeah, I did.
GROSS: ...Misogynous? Yeah.
CRUMB: (Laughter). Well, it just - you know, it opened the gates for other young boys who had these - who probably were also comic nerds when they grew up, and that's why they're drawing comics. And so they also had the same kind of frustrations and resentment towards women, or the same kind of - not precisely. I never saw anybody else draw precisely the same kind of stuff that I drew about sex, but, you know, similar things. Or just - it allowed them, it permitted them, when they saw my work. Crumbs - he's cool and he's doing it, so, you know, I guess I can draw stuff that puts women in these - this position, too, but - you know, of having violent acts committed against women.
But I don't think - I can't think of any artist offhand who is, like, totally obsessed with just drawing brutal violence against women. I think this is, you know - but, you know, feminists and other people that are involved in any kind of a, you know, political obsession like that - and you can't blame them for it. There's no - they're looking for that. So they're looking - oh, here's one right here. Look, here's an example of, you know, somebody being violent to women, or, here's somebody abusing a woman. You know, this is - so, yeah. So they - they're looking for that. And, yeah, sure, you can find it. It's there. Yeah.
GROSS: Do you...
CRUMB: But I - my - one of my defenses is that I don't think I ever drew it in such a way as it could be taken as propaganda for behavior like that. I don't make that sort of behavior towards women look heroic or commendable. I mean, the characters that are doing those things are always, you know, creepy, little twisted guys. They're not, you know, heroic, virtuous images of - that someone would want to emulate.
BIANCULLI: R. Crumb speaking with Terry Gross in 2005. We'll continue their conversation after a break. And we'll also listen to a later interview in which the cartoonist is joined by another cartoonist - his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb. And film critic Justin Chang reviews "Thunderbolts*," the newest superhero movie from Marvel. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF R. CRUMB AND HIS CHEAP SUIT SERENADERS SONG, "HOME")
BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. Let's get back to Terry's 2005 interview with R. Crumb, king of the '60s underground cartoonists. He created Zap Comix and such characters as Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat. His comics came out of his dreams, nightmares, fantasies, LSD trips and sexual obsessions. He's the subject of a new biography. When Terry spoke with him, he'd just written a memoir.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: Before you started doing underground comics, you worked...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: ...For American Greetings. Now...
CRUMB: Right.
GROSS: ...Were you doing greeting cards? Or...
CRUMB: Yes. Yes. I drew hundreds and hundreds of greeting cards.
GROSS: Gosh, I'd like to see those. Have they been exhibited?
CRUMB: No.
GROSS: What were they like?
CRUMB: They're pretty bland. They're bland. I didn't write them. I just did the drawings. They had a staff of writers. And you went to work. It was a 9-to-5 job. You punched a time clock. It was in Cleveland. You know, I got up at 6 o'clock in the morning and took the rapid transit to work every day. And, you know, I went to the bar after work and drank with the guys and then went home and asked myself, is this my life? Is this what my life is going to be from now on?
GROSS: So what are some of the things that you drew for the greeting cards? This is - what? - birthday cards, get-well-soon cards, stuff like that?
CRUMB: Well, they had this department that - at that - in the late '50s, they started making these kind of more hip-looking greeting cards. They were tall and thin, you know?
GROSS: Yes. I sure do.
CRUMB: That was - I was in that department.
GROSS: And they were funny or "funny" in quotes.
CRUMB: They're funny. Yeah, they were...
GROSS: Yeah.
CRUMB: ...Funny. And some of them actually were funny. They had a couple of writers who actually were gifted comedy writers who just got stuck in Cleveland 'cause they were alcoholics or whatever. But they wrote very funny cards. Often, their best cards were censored and never used because everything had to pass by the approval of the wife of the guy who owned the Walgreen drug chain. And if she didn't like the cards, then they couldn't be distributed. So some of the best stuff never actually got distributed.
GROSS: Now, we've talked a little bit about how influenced you feel you were by early comics. And, you know, musically, so much of the music you love is from the '20s and '30s.
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: How were you first exposed to, like, graphics of that period and music of that period?
CRUMB: Right. Right. Well, as a kid in the '50s, the comics were in decline. The TV wasn't that great, you know, so you start looking for older stuff. And the first older stuff that I - what - you know, what - that piqued my interest was older comic books that you could find in Salvation Army stores and also old stuff on the kiddy shows on television. On TV on these kiddy shows, they showed old cartoons from the '30s - you know, old Betty Boop and Popeye and all that stuff. And the music was great. The drawing style was great. They were very, very appealing to me as a kid. This is like '53, '54, '55, in there. And the music was - I don't know, just grabbed me somehow. And then also, you could see these really old Hal Roach comedies - Laurel and Hardy, "Our Gang," "Little Rascal" stuff. I loved that stuff when I was a kid.
And as I got into my later teens, I always looked for really early movies that were on TV on "The Late Show," movies from 1930, '31, '32. I just loved the whole style of the period. Somehow, it attracted me deeply, the music and everything. And then I started looking for some other way to find the music of that period 'cause I loved hearing it in those TV - you know, reruns of those old films. And then I discovered old 78 records. I discovered that this old music was actually on these records that were sitting around in these same places that the old comic books were and other old stuff. And so I started buying old 78s - and still collecting them today.
GROSS: And how did you start playing banjo?
CRUMB: I had musical inclinations from childhood. And at first, I tried to make myself a cigar-box ukulele, but that didn't play so well. I couldn't really make it play efficiently and effectively. So then my mother for Christmas when I was 12 years old, gave me a plastic ukulele, which was playable - could actually tune it and play it. So I learned to play that. And then I graduated to the banjo later. I just, like, attracted to old music and, you know, kind of out-of-it nerd. I, you know, wasn't really much into rock 'n' roll or things of my contemporaries. I don't know. I just - like I said, I'm not going to go negative. I'm kind of an oddball character.
BIANCULLI: R. Crumb speaking to Terry Gross in 2005. Let's listen to the 1929 song "Singing In The Bathtub," covered by R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders from the album of the same name.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SINGING IN THE BATHTUB")
R CRUMB AND HIS CHEAP SUIT SERENADERS: (Singing) Singing in the bathtub, sitting all alone. Tearing out a tonsil just like a baritone.
BIANCULLI: When we return, we'll listen to another of their conversations from 2007 in which the cartoonist is joined by his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who was a cartoonist also. This is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. In 2007, Terry spoke with R. Crumb and his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb. She was one of the first women to create autobiographical comics back in the 1960s. They married in 1978 and moved to the south of France in the early '90s. R. Crumb created Zap Comix in the 1960s. Aline first became known for her contributions to women's comics and Twisted Sisters. She died in 2022. The Crumbs sometimes worked together on joint autobiographical cartoons for The New Yorker. When Terry spoke with them, she asked if their personas in those New Yorker cartoons were much different from who they really were.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
CRUMB: It's kind of an exaggeration of who we really are, but not that far. It doesn't deviate that far from who we really are.
ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Well, I think we get into our George and Gracie bit when we're doing that. I mean, I feel like I'm, you know, playing my role somewhat. And you kind of feed me lines, and I react in a way that, you know, I don't necessarily do in our real life.
GROSS: So what are your personas like in the cartoons?
CRUMB: (Laughter)
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: He's the straight man. He's George. He feeds the lines, and I, like, take them up and run with them. And I'm like the fool, you know?
CRUMB: But also, you're flamboyant, you're gaudy.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Yeah.
CRUMB: Your crass, you know, Jewish Long Island thing that you have. And you're bold, and you're - and I'm more kind of gray and goyish. And, you know...
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Yeah, the Jew and the goy.
CRUMB: Right (laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: You know, he's, like, from a Minnesota farm family. And I'm from, like, a long line of shmatte salesman people, you know? So yeah.
GROSS: Would you tell the story of how you both met?
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Who wants to - who tells it, me or you, Robert?
CRUMB: You tell your version, I'll tell my version (laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: OK. Well, I was, like, being a Jewish cowgirl in Arizona at the time, and I thought I was completely unique.
CRUMB: What year is this?
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: This was, like, in the late '60s, maybe around '69, '70. And I thought I was the only Jewish girl being a cowgirl at the time. I thought I was really being a wild adventuress. And then I saw a comic book called "Dale Steinberger: The Jewish Cowgirl," done by an artist named R. Crumb. And I thought, this guy has, like, stolen my life here. How can this be, you know? And at the same time, I also saw a character called Honey Bunch Kaminski, and my last name is Kaminski. And I thought, now, wait a minute. This is really weird.
And then I met a bunch of other cartoonists who met me and said you look just like an R. Crumb character. We have to introduce you to him. So after I finished art school in Arizona, I moved to San Francisco, and then two weeks later, I met Robert. And I had a strange sinking feeling that my destiny was sort of going to be forever...
CRUMB: Oy (laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: ...Entwined with his. And he looked at me and said, you have cute knees, and all he felt was lust and didn't think anything more. That's my version (laughter).
CRUMB: Well, that's pretty much how it was, yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: Robert, when you met Aline, did you think that she looked like one of your comic characters?
CRUMB: I was drawn to her strongly, yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
CRUMB: She had all the requirements, and - you know? But, yeah, my initial interest in her was strictly, you know, oh, here's a cute, hippie, Jewish slut. She's probably easy, yeah.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: (Laughter).
GROSS: Robert, when did you first see her work, and what did you think of it?
CRUMB: Shortly after I met her, she - because she had just started drawing comics at that time. And she showed me the stuff that she had done and the first comics, and they were so crazy and expressionistic. I immediately found them very interesting and compelling and so deeply personal. And I'd never seen any comics like that drawn by a woman before, deeply personal. There was a few women at that time, Trina Robbins and others, who were drawing kind of feminist comics.
But to me, there was two kinds. There was Trina stuff, which was like feminist, fighting hero types, you know, girl detectives and things. And then there was the hippie, flowery stuff that someone like Willy Mendes was doing that's very sweet with unicorns and stuff like that. And here's Aline. It's, like, ugly. It's self-deprecating. It was very confessional. That was the first time I ever saw a woman do that ever. And it probably was the first time a woman ever did that in comics. She's like the Jean Rhys of comics there.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Donna Rickles.
CRUMB: Donna Rickles, right.
(LAUGHTER)
GROSS: You know, as we talked about, Robert, the last time you were on FRESH AIR, you know, when you were doing your comics in the '60s...
CRUMB: Yeah.
GROSS: They were kind of very controversial among women. I mean, some women thought they were great, but a lot of women thought that they were really, you know, kind of sexist. And very few...
CRUMB: Ooh, very few women thought they were great.
GROSS: (Laughter).
CRUMB: Very few women thought they were great. It was mostly for boys.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: I got a hard time from the other feminist cartoonists for going out with Robert.
CRUMB: Ooh, ooh.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: That was, like, a disaster.
GROSS: Yeah, tell us what that was like. What kind of comments did you get about that?
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Ooh.
GROSS: And what did you think of the way he drew women? Were you ever, you know, offended by his emphasis on large breasts and behinds and the kind of, you know, sexual obsessions that were, you know, described in the comics?
CRUMB: Tell the truth, Aline.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Well, I was really happy that somebody liked my physical type, finally. I was really flattered that was his, like, ideal woman.
CRUMB: What about all the sick sadism and all that stuff?
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Well, it corresponded with my own sick...
CRUMB: Ooh.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: ...Masochism (laughter). But aside from that, you know, I thought that feminists had...
CRUMB: (Laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: A cartoonist had no right to tell me who to go out with and how to conduct my personal life. And in real life, Robert, like, was my best fan, the most supportive person I could have ever been with in terms of my work. And even though being with him may have affected the public's perception of my work, it didn't affect my desire to work at all because he was such a supportive...
CRUMB: Aw.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: ...Person to live with always. Like, he laughs at my stories more than anybody and harder. He falls on the ground laughing so hard. Anyway...
CRUMB: I do. It's true. She makes me fall on the ground (laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: It's true. But the feminist cartoonists...
CRUMB: I'll be falling on the ground, she'll say, what, what's wrong with you? Get up.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: (Laughter).
CRUMB: Get off the ground. What are you doing down there?
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: But in the early women comics, there were some very angry women. And they really hated and resented Robert's work. And when I started going out with him, they started to ice me out. And then they started to reject my comics from their books, saying that they weren't, like, feminist enough. My feminist consciousness was not evolved enough.
CRUMB: (Laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: And Diane Noomin was also in that group. I brought her into that early group also. We met and I really liked her, and I liked her work. And then she started going out with Bill Griffith, so she was also iced out. They called us camp (ph) followers, as a matter of fact, in an article in the Berkeley Barb. So Diane and I then broke off from the group and started Twisted Sisters. And we saw ourselves as feminists. But we were more like bad girl feminists that wanted to, like, have sex with men and dress in sexy clothes and play it for all we could get out of it and still be totally in control of ourselves. We thought of ourselves more as sexy Amazons, which also went along with the way Robert saw women.
CRUMB: (Laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: So, you know, when he drew things like vulture demonesses, I said, yeah, I could go with that.
CRUMB: (Laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: I kind of feel like that. Or, you know, a devil girl. Yeah, I'm devil girl, you know? There's a part of me that really likes that. I'm really strong. I like to show my strength. I was always like that. I never felt victimized. I never felt afraid of anything, you know, so...
CRUMB: I'm much more fearful...
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Yeah.
CRUMB: ...And feel more victimized than Aline does (laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Absolutely. You know, so there was something that really appealed to me in his depiction of women. He was kind of the wimpy guy that was, like, you know, idolized and was tortured by and fearful of women, all those things wrapped up into one, you know? And I could relate to it.
GROSS: Well, Aline, you write about how when you met Robert, he was, like, really famous. And...
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: At that time, I was only really known in the hippie subculture.
GROSS: Well, then eventually, maybe. Eventually, he became famous. But you say he didn't handle it well, and you saw what fame did to him. What did it do?
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Well, you know, since he was a reject all through high school, and when he was younger, was missing his front teeth - and he was kind of funny-looking, and no woman would ever look at him.
CRUMB: (Laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: And then all of a sudden, when he got famous, like, all these women wanted to have sex with him. He was, like, completely overwhelmed. And he just wanted it all, and he couldn't handle any of it. And he said yes to everybody. So there would be, like, tons of people around who had - you know, didn't know what they were supposed to be doing and were just sort of, like, hanging around him. And it created a terrible kind of chaos. And some of those people were, like, actually mentally unbalanced, you know? And it was the '60s, and everybody was taking drugs, too. So it was just a complete chaotic scene. And plus there was a certain amount of money coming in, and then rock stars were hanging around him.
CRUMB: The money was completely mismanaged.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: It was a very decadent, very chaotic, disgusting, unclear, you know - for me, it was an uncomfortable scene. I actually fled from that, you know, at one point. And then Robert came and sought me out afterwards because I think that, you know, he realized he had to get out of that. It was, like, some kind of survival thing. But I felt that he was sinking in that, and I felt that it was going to destroy him. And it was a very sad thing.
GROSS: Robert, is that an accurate picture?
CRUMB: Afraid so (laughter). So, yeah, when Aline fled from it in '74, I went after her because I realized that she's, like, the life raft. And, I mean, I said it in interviews and stuff before that sometimes I think if I hadn't, you know, grabbed onto Aline, I might be dead now, because I was involved with all these crazy women. They were all crazy, you know, and Aline seemed to have her feet on the ground somehow. And I needed someone like that. She was the only one that cared enough about me or was willing to, you know, take me on. And I needed someone like that.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Aw.
CRUMB: Yeah.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: So cute.
CRUMB: I almost had to bathe in the woods.
GROSS: Aline, is that ever a burden because, Aline, like, you have all these, like, kind of, like, demons and craziness of your own, but it sounds like in the relationship, you have to, like, be the sane one?
CRUMB: No, no. No, no, it's not like that. She just has the...
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: No.
GROSS: No, it's not like that? OK.
CRUMB: Not like she's the sane one but that she is better at handling, you know, people. She can think on her feet quicker. Like, you know, if a journalist comes to the door unannounced and wants to talk to me, which just happened...
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: I'll throw them out (laughter).
CRUMB: Aline will throw them out. I just, well, OK, yeah. And like this last week in France, some journalist came there to talk to me. And I let him in, and I'm sitting at the kitchen table. Aline comes downstairs, she looks around and says, what is this? Who are these people? How'd you get in here?
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: (Laughter).
CRUMB: Robert told me he didn't want to talk to any more journalists. And, Robert, what are you doing? So I was so embarrassed, I got up and fled the room. And Aline just told those people degage she'd kick them out. And I couldn't do that. I can't do it. I'm weak.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: But going back to the beginning, I have to say that I think that, you know, I was 23 when I met Robert, and he was in his late 20s. And I think that we both came from very dysfunctional - hate to use that word - families. And I think we parented each other. I think that, you know...
CRUMB: That's true, yeah.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: We both completed each other's childhoods in a positive way so that then we functioned much better as adults as time went on. And I think that we did that for each other so...
CRUMB: We did, yeah. We parented each other, yeah.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: You were my life raft, too. You were that kind father that I never had.
CRUMB: Oh.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: And you were my best fan.
CRUMB: Oh, I'm going to cry (laughter).
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: And you really supported me as an artist, too. So I feel it was completely mutual. Thank you, dear.
CRUMB: You're welcome.
GROSS: Well, I want to thank you both so much for talking with us. Thank you.
CRUMB: Loved the laughs.
KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Thanks, Terry. It was fun.
BIANCULLI: Cartoonist R. Crumb and his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, speaking to Terry Gross in 2007. A new biography of R. Crumb is out by Dan Nadel called "Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life." And many of Crumb's original comics, drawings and scrapbooks have been published by Taschen. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the latest Marvel superhero movie "Thunderbolts*." This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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