Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life
Dan Nadel
Scribner
Dan Nadel’s biography of cartoonist Robert Crumb is unlikely to be equaled or surpassed anytime soon. Having Crumb’s full cooperation with writing the biography meant access to the diaries, sketchbooks, letters (sent and received), and drawings Crumb has been keeping since he was 15—thousands of pages of archival material, supplemented with Nadel’s interviews with the living members of Crumb’s family and circle of acquaintances. It is entirely to Nadel’s credit that he sustains a clear through-line throughout the 400+ pages of narrative—describing Crumb’s peripatetic life as a child and adult and, as a successful artist, a densely populated love life comprised of a wife, two longstanding girlfriends, and countless one-offs.
Robert Crumb’s family was seriously dysfunctional: various levels and types of mental illness, violence (parent on child, parent on parent), dependency on prescription pills and alcohol, and general inability to socially cope. (For instance, Sandra, the youngest of the clan, routinely drank herself to sleep by age 13.) Although Crumb’s father, Chuck, was in the marines for over 20 years, he never rose above the rank of sergeant. Chuck’s frequent reassignments was one cause of the family’s frequent moves. The other factor, leading to just about as many moves, was noise complaints from neighbors about the yelling between Chuck and his wife, Bea, a prescription Valium addict since the early 1950s, accompanied by occasional bouts of electroshock therapy.
In the chaos of their childhood, the five Crumb children (Robert was the second oldest) took salvation in comic books, reading them and creating them, herded by the oldest brother, Charles. Under Charles’s strict command, the five kids produced a month comic book for a couple of years, just for their own entertainment. Eventually, the command performance came to an end, but the brothers Robert and Charles continued cartooning individually and together, producing a couple dozen pages a month of their own stories. By the time Robert Crumb, fresh out of high school, applied to draw cards for American Greetings, he already had thousands of hours of cartooning under his belt.
At American Greetings, his talent was quickly recognized, and he was promoted to draw the company’s more expensive line of cards. (His boss was Tom Wilson, would go on to create the successful syndicated comic strip, “Ziggy.”) Still, this kind of life was, um, not in the cards for Crumb, a job that provided anodyne images to illustrate a small range of human conditions, moods, and rites, for commercial profit. Hearing the call of San Francisco, he left American Greetings and moved out there. (However, for years afterward, Crumb continued take anonymous assignments for American Greetings, wherever he lived, to supplement his meager income.) He was introduced to marijuana and, more critically, LSD, which he credits for creative and emotional breakthroughs and whose after-effects encouraged him to cultivate the visual style that immediately identifies an illustration as one of his. Based on the strength of only two published pages in two separate underground newspapers, he was offered a book contract from Viking, the prestigious mainstream publisher. At the same time, bootleggers around the world were illegally reproducing “Keep On Truckin’” logo and images, as they were his character, Mr. Natural. Attorneys were hired, and Crumb gained a modicum of control over his creations.
By the early 1970s, he was cranking out upwards of 160 published pages a year, including work for Zap, the comic book collective he founded. By the mid-‘70s, the underground comix scene was tanking, and Crumb was burned out.
Readers already familiar with Crumb’s personal life will notice I haven’t said much about his love life, which was complex and promiscuous yet fundamentally a series of relationships among consenting adults, which usually began with Crumb getting a piggyback ride from a woman to test the strength of her thighs, calves, and buttocks. The relationships led to unconventional living arrangements among the adults and, in the case of his son, Jesse, neglect.
Although the underground comix scene peaked two generations ago, Crumb kept busy over the next 50 years, his general low profile brought him attention with the release of a documentary film (which won numerous awards) and, at age 66, with the release of his illustrated Book of Genesis, in which every verse is given its own picture, in a straight-up, sober-minded presentation of Genesis, internal contradictions and all (with some of the Bible’s many sex scenes presented implicitly rather than explicitly). Low profile or not, by this time in his life, Crumb was able to fetch a $250,000 advance for his efforts.
Anybody interested in Crumb’s art or in cultural figures from the ‘60s and ‘70s will do well to read Dan Nadel’s Crumb. For that matter, any young person interested in what dissent used to look like before it was coopted by capitalism as just another lifestyle choice, as well as the DIY spirit that animated much of the punk energy of the late 1970s should put Crumb at the top of their TBR pile.
Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus
Elaine Pagels
Doubleday
Elaine Pagels has been writing for decades on the religious and historical significance of early Christianity, up to and around the First Council of Nicaea, 325 C.E. Her method in tackling a figure, theme, or issue (such as why women continue to be treated as second-class citizens, largely based on interpretations of the fall of humanity in Eden in her study Adam, Eve, and the Serpent), see what the relevant canonical books of the Bible say, compare those verses with verses found in some of the alternative gospels in wide circulation up to the First Council, and supplement her readings with evidence from the archeological record and from contemporary accounts of the time. This method allows her to separate historical fact from metaphysical principle, the time-bound from the eternal, to see what spiritually is actually at stake. The Nag Hammadi library, discovered in 1945 in Upper Egypt, consists of scrolls attributed to various early followers of Christ and used by various Christian sects before The Nicene Council codified the gospels that would make up the formal canon of Biblical scripture. However, the Council did not keep records of the criteria used to determine the canon, and it is not possible to determine from reading the alternative gospels why they might have been rejected.
In Miracles and Wonder, Pagels finally tackles the subject behind her spiritual interests all along: Jesus Christ himself. Pagels separates from each other the different phases of Jesus’s life—his parentage, life, crucifixion, resurrection, and after-life as a force who still attracts converts—and the chronology of gospels about him, confronting head-on the contradictions among the first three gospels about Jesus’s purported lineage. As with the other gospels and other contradictions found there, Pagels provides prosaic and transcendent interpretations of the evidence. Her allowance for, in the case of Jesus’s birth, possibilities running from Mary’s rape by a Roman soldier (whose grave is in Germany) to God’s spirit impregnating may satisfy atheists and believers alike, although some readers may feel, as I do, that Pagels is hedging her bets here in a way that she doesn’t in her previous books. That urge seems aimed more toward satisfying her own faith than out of fear of provoking anger from fundamentalists.
Still, an agnostic like me can come away from the book much more knowledgeable about the history and culture Jesus was born into, agree with and embrace the morality of doing unto the least of them, and reject his resurrection while still being amazed that the birth of a low-status Jew whose body was more than likely thrown in a mass grave (as the Roman’s commonly did after the crucified died) and whose family and community saw him as more of a mentally disturbed trouble maker than world historical transformer, would be remembered and exulted for bringing paradisical eternity to everyone, not just royalty.
Elephant Herd
Zhang Guixing / Carlos Rojas
Columbia University Press
From the early 1960s until 1990, small insurgent bands of Maoist guerillas fought to change Malaya’s government. Living and operating in Borneo’s remote rainforests, most guerilla outfits consisted of Malaysians of Chinese descent, a minority population, whose low status was probably only increased by the unpopular revolutionary violence. Elephant Herd is a Malaysian Heart of Darkness beginning in 1973, with the protagonist, Shi Shicai, a six-year-old Malaysian Chinese living in Borneo’s rainforest.
Shicai’s home is primitive—wood, corrugated tin—and surrounded by insects, birds, domesticated and undomesticated animals (predator and prey), and, in the nearby waters, fish and crocodiles. The author, Zhang Guixing, himself a Malaysian Chinese, captures the density of inhabitation by these creatures, their sounds, and smells—nature’s perils for life in a rainforest. After Shicai’s grandfather disappears and his grandmother’s corpse discovered floating in one of the family’s well, he decides to seek out his uncle, Yu Jiatong, the Marxist/Maoist revolutionary of the family. All four of Shicai’s older brothers died in service to their uncle’s ideological furor.
Shicai’s family once had intellectual pretenses, including a home library stocked with books of Chinese and Western literature and Marxist political analysis. Their father’s addiction to opium ended whatever chances they may have had for a better life. His addiction was supported by cheating at cards, and when his cheating was discovered, he was beaten lame and lost his mind so that his addiction transferred from smoking opium to eating paper—his library. Only Shicai is left to preserve the library, to try to pass on his education to the local youth.
After a long and dangerous trek through the rainforest, Shicai finally finds his uncle, Yu Jiatong, who has been in hiding for years, wanted by the government for insurgency. During the months Shicai spends with Jiatong, Jiatong confesses that, although he has spent ten years leading revolutionary forces, within the first few months of guerilla activities he realized the guerillas would never win. During one battle against Borneo’s anti-revolutionary forces, while his comrades were being killed, he hid with a woman co-revolutionary, then raped her while shots fired around them. He kept up his revolutionary pretenses, however, tracking down and killing elephants to finance his operations and—in conjunction with a former comrade (who may have tried to kill him for bounty money) with whom he established a crocodile farm developed as a tourist attraction—selling items made from crocodile skin and meat. Rather than fresh livestock for the locals to eat, the livestock is used to feed the crocodiles, whose by-products are sold to further finance Jiatong’s unwinnable war. Jiatong seems to be waiting for someone—quite possibly his nephew, Shicai—to kill him: He is as addicted to power as his uncle was to opium.
In the end, Shicai realizes that both sides of his family have, for decades, been complicit in crimes against the state and its natural environment, both knowingly and unknowingly contributing to the erasure of their world and culture.
My Brother
Laura Djupvik and Øyvind Torseter / Martin Aiken
Elsewhere Editions
A beautiful and gentle story for children ages 5-9 about the brief return home of a young girl’s older brother. In the children’s books I’ve read by European authors dealing with emotionally charged issues, I’ve noticed a stoic matter-of-factness so often missing works by Americans, which tend to be infantilizing and full of false cheer. Norwegian author Laura Djupvik’s narrative here trusts her audience’s ability to figure out what has kept the girl’s brother away from home and why his visit must necessarily be brief. Øyvind Torseter’s scratchy, childlike illustrations capture the essence of the story and help establish it’s mood of uncertainty with lines that feel tentative.
The story begins with the girl and her father sitting at breakfast (there is no mother). The girl tells us but not her father that she had a dream last night that makes her eager to go fishing in the fjord. Her father reluctantly agrees. We know only that he hasn’t gone fishing in the boat for some time, and that when his daughter scuttles about in the rowboat he becomes anxious and tells her to sit. At last, the girl’s fishing rod catches something and, after great difficulty, her father reels in . . . her brother.
We come to realize that the death of her brother is the source of her father’s dispirited behavior, his distrust of the water, and the girl’s dream the night before. Together, the girl and her father take in the boy—who remains silent—wash him and give him a change of clothes and watch him play on land again . . . then return to the fjord. The girl and father sense contentment in the boy, and allow him to return unhampered, knowing that his soul is well, granting consolation to themselves as well.
The Dedalus Book of Faroese Literature
Malan Marnersdóttir (Ed.), Lyn Falk van Rooyen, Marita Thomsen, and Paul Russell Garret (trans.)
Dedalus
The Faroe Islands form an autonomous region of Denmark in the north Atlantic. The islands’ occupation by Britain during WWII, while Denmark was occupied by Nazis, helped advance the islanders’ advocacy for linguistic primacy of the Faroese language. Still, with a population of 50,000+ souls, Faroese literature remains largely overlooked by the world literature community. The Dedalus Book of Faroese Literature collects 29 stories by 29 Faroese writers spanning late 19th to late 20th centuries, rendered into English by three translators.
Beginning with transcriptions of oral lore and leading to encounters with the rest of the world and contemporary social problems, from legends about selkies (humans who have turned into seals), religious hypocrites, and secret pacts with the devil, to calamities caused by drugs, alcohol, and migrations of desperation (climate, war), the outlook of the Faroese and their tales, like Jon Fosse’s Norwegians, is shaped by the harsh climate and the brutal, unforgiving ways of nature. The conversation is as sparse as the population—people live in their heads until their nerves are frayed. After that, God help them and those around them.
The Hashish Films of Customs Officer Henri Rousseau and Tatyana Joukof Shuffles the Cards (A Novel Against Psicho-Analise)
Emil Szittya / W. C. Bamberger
Wakefield Press
Friend to Blaise Cendrars, Hugo Ball, and other writers and artists of early 20th-century Europe, and writer and publisher of literary and anarchist magazines, Emil Szittya has remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. Hashihish Films, first published in 1916, anticipates the Surrealist and Dada movements, although its influence on the movements it precedes may be difficult to trace. Perhaps better thought of as an anti-novel, Hashhish is short (55 pages), lacks continuity of incident and character, and has chapters/sections comprised of numbered epigrams and anecdotes themselves made of non-sequiturs strung together into paragraphs whose cumulative effect is one of emotional rather than logical sense. A few examples:
During a hashish high I once, at 4 o’clock in the morning, painted a dead piano, and with a dirty smile sent all the children that I found beautiful, and all the children that had toys, and all the children that I used sinfully in my dreams, to the devil for a feast.
You are still only twelve, those who never returned from the cemetery suddenly smirked. Something like a snake coiled around us on the floor.
And I will wither away from thirst, and I envy those who celebrate a cheerful spring. And it hurts me that you will pray once at my gravesite, where, next to old books, you even consume blood.
Now we have arrived at the night.
The book’s parenthesized subtitle, which deliberately misspells “Psicho-Analise,” derives from Szittya’s general hostility toward psychoanalysis, which he felt revealed too much of the psyche, which would be better left mysterious. Surrealists, in contrast, wanted to lift the psyche to the surface and plumb the depths of desire and irrationality. For students of early 20th-century literature, Decadence, Surrealism, and Dada, Hashhish fills an important gap, one that stands on its own merits and encourages hopes for additional translations into English of Szittya’s works.
frozengirl
Iku Kawaguchi
2dcloud
Iku Kawaguchi is a Japanese artist from Tokyo whose drawings of women—in pen, watercolor, and pencil—are here sampled from 15 years of work. Kawaguchi’s lines are spare, simple, and scratchy, but their faux-naivete is belied by the proper dimensions given the women’s bodies and their vibrancy, and the individual personalities imbuing each portrait, from moody to erotic, based on their postures, gestures, and eyes.
Beat It, Rufus
Noah Van Sciver, Fanatagraphics
Noah Van Sciver returns, with another graphic novel about a has-been-never-was ne’er-do-well, this time about a rock guitarist named Rufus. For a taste of the life of a glorified rock star, Rufus will betray any friend or lover, sure as he is that adulation of him is only right, proper, and fated. Well, maybe not fated, which is what galls Rufus, his delusion-steeped anger propelling him through years of sleeping rough, hoping and assuming that his break is just around the corner.
We catch him towards the end of his life’s trajectory, homeless and with only a few bucks left. The story ends on an ambiguous note—will Rufus turn his life around or will he once again betray a friendship for selfish ends? Non-superhero comics are rife with artist/writers who have the art of self-abasement down, a self-abasement projected onto loser characters with zero social skills, zero conflict resolution skills, inability to sustain long-term relationships, including employment. Here, I’m thinking of artists such as Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Peter Bagge, as well as Van Sciver. The irony, of course, is that these artists, unlike their protagonists, have developed successful careers, but they can’t figure out how to get their protagonists there, too, in a way that feels authentic.
My sense is that Van Sciver, unlike the other artists mentioned, is a natural optimist who would prefer that his characters do well and find some semblance of contentment. After all, he also includes in Beat It, Rufus a former lover of Rufus’s, named Becky, whose embrace of Christianity is generous hearted rather than obnoxiously self-righteous. Becky does Rufus some good turns, despite his earlier abandonment of her. Van Sciver gives her a husband who suffers from burns across his entire body, requiring constant care from her. That he is bandaged from head to toe like a mummy is the one comic element given her situation, but the care Becky gives her mummy-like husband is presented so matter-of-factly that we feel for her a sympathy that dulls the edge of any uncertainty toward her readers might have created by the sincerity of her faith.
That level of complexity Van Sciver gives Becky he withholds from Rufus, which requires an ambiguity Van Sciver may not continue to pursue. Instead, I think underlying Van Sciver’s storytelling skills is a narrative sensibility more akin to writers like William Maxwell and Sherwood Anderson and their understated descriptions of everyday life (not that I would call Anderson an optimist). In the meantime, Beat It, Rufus is an enjoyable step in Van Sciver’s development as a storyteller.
Parc
Jul Gordon
2dcloud
A weird little story about four groups of people who lead interconnected lives. At the center of the story—literally and figuratively—is the eponymous park, a large, penned in lozenge of property with two mansions at either long end, each inhabited by a brother in one and a sister in the other. The brother is broke and has five sons he forces to clean house and exercise every day; his sister refuses to financially help him and has five talking dog-like critters she allows to run free.
Into their lives are characters from the other two groups, also symmetrical in number (three and three) and opposition (related and unrelated). The three related characters consist of Sophie, her unnamed brother, and father, Mr. Nargle. Sophie acts as her father and brother’s caretaker. Mr. Nargle spends his waking hours shooting pistols into the backyard’s empty cement pool from the confines of his wheelchair. His gamer son grows ever-large as he thumbs his days away on a console. Sophie provides him with an endless stream of glorp so he never has to leave his couch, and feeds her father and collects the bodies of animals he has killed.
The third group consists of two roommates, a physical therapist and a feline-woman, and a nameless subtenant they take in. Every day, the PT runs Mr. Nargle through a battery of exercises. The subtenant spends his time on the grounds of the Parc by an abandoned washing machine, waiting to meet the love of his life.
Henry James once wrote that the basis for his novels consisted in inventing a set of characters with their various goals and tics, set them in a room, and see what happens. While nobody is likely to confuse Parc with Portrait of a Lady, the simple narrative mechanism that sets the drama in motion succeeds in producing weird, funny, and, in its delirious way, plausible behavior.
Drawn using a spare, thin line reminiscent of CF, including occasional blocked out corrections, which lend the images a tentativeness, as if all could suddenly change in a new direction.