Frank M. Young | April 29, 2025
Biographies of artists, writers, film stars, politicians, teachers, sports heroes and business tycoons are a mainstay of the publishing world. A biography of a cartoonist, given the same serious, level-headed treatment, is still a rare event. Despite the increased popularity of comics in America, as our culture becomes more visually literate, such books are a tiny slice of the publishing pie.
This reasoned, calm and well-researched book may help balance that inequality. It tells the life story of a 20th-century American artist who changed the course of cultural events. Robert Crumb is the equal of a Louis Armstrong, Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley or Rachel Carson — five people who, among many others, reinvented the notions of their abiding passions in the 20th century. They brought attention to elements of life and art that had gone unnoticed or were considered outside cultural norms. Their work altered the way we think and perceive things. They inspired many others to follow in their footsteps — to absorb their example and break from conventional wisdom. (Rachel Carson may seem the odd person out on this list, but her writings on nature and mankind’s threat to ecology had a similar ability to influence the reader’s perceptions and see what everyday life has instructed them to filter out.) They left their mark on our shared consciousness and made us take a different look at our world.
The general story of Robert Crumb’s life is well-known to most comics-literate people. Nadel’s book expands far beyond what has been known or rumored. It debunks legends (e.g. the iconic image of Crumb peddling Zap Comix from a baby carriage) and renders Crumb, his friends, partners and family as real people. They aren’t glamorized or exaggerated — they are who they are. This was the artist’s expressed hope: that he be depicted without filters. In achieving this, Nadel relates a powerful, absorbing story of an American family in deep dysfunction, a young man’s transcendence as he finds a life of his own, his efforts to fit into the mainstream as the world becomes aware of his gift, and his mental and spiritual transformation, via psychedelic drugs, which inspire a keener vision of the world’s absurdity, biases and foibles and inspire him to push the low stakes of comics publishing into uncharted territory. Confronting taboos of racism, sexism, capitalism, religion and social graces, Robert Crumb unified the concept of underground comics with the publication of Zap #1 in 1967.
This was a point-of-no-return moment, akin to the release of Elvis Presley’s five singles for Memphis’ Sun Records in 1954 and ‘55: something new, built on a collage of historical influences but filtered through the prism of its creator’s eye. The world had not seen the likes of Zap Comix — just as Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad (as radical in 1952 as Crumb’s work in ’67) jolted America out of its post-war complacency and made bare the flaws of society, consumerism and high/low culture.
Without Mad, there would have been no Zap. Without Zap, the world of comics we know in the 21st century would be lesser. Both creators continue to inspire stylistic apostles. In-your-face satire and blunt, graphic adult themes seeped into mainstream popular culture; they’re now enmeshed in our societal vision. This is the lasting aftershock of the efforts of these two men with epiphanic inspirations. (Mad may have been created by Kurtzman to boost his income, but he found himself in its pages and emerged as a champion of finger-pointing, throat-clearing commentary on American life and culture. That’s an epiphany in my book.)
Behind this “big bang” moment of underground comix is the life story of an artist who continued to create, explore and challenge society with his work. Crumb weathered lean years, suffered unwelcome advances from big business, broke past impassés and took major risks — from the launch of Weirdo magazine in 1981 to his relocation to France with his partner Aline Kominsky in the 1990s. He made himself vulnerable to the public eye — in his autobiographical stories and in Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary Crumb, and suffered a few (profitable) commercial intrusions, such as Ralph Bakshi’s ground-breaking 1972 animated Fritz the Cat feature. Neither film project pleased him, but he abided them.
I don’t wish to regurgitate a bullet-point list of highlights. There are many in this gripping account. Crumb’s disturbing family life is told without melodrama. Nadel lets the relationships and incidents speak for themselves. The bleakness of those formative years — Crumb’s family was the epitome of the post-war, trauma-based, suppression-fueled “nuclear family” — is conveyed to chilling effect. The reader feels for the Crumb children, who bore the brunt of their parents’ errant behavior. None of them escaped trauma.
Crumb’s older brother Charles, who urged his siblings to create comic books in their childhood, was a talented, tormented soul who let himself be consumed by the family's darkness. His insistent encouragement helped his younger brother recognize and develop his artistic skill. Without Charles, Robert might not have become “R. Crumb.” He might have remained at American Greetings in Cleveland, Ohio, and been the anonymous creator of birthday cards for his adult life. Charles Crumb’s story, as told by Nadel, carries enormous emotional weight. One gets a sense of a sensitive, intense and unusual person — one who found no safe berth in the world outside his bedroom. The elder brother’s tragic life casts a shadow over the younger’s celebrity and notoriety. Both were misfits in the social pecking order of grade school and ill-equipped to enter adulthood without painful episodes of trial and error.
Crumb’s relationship with Aline Kominsky, his wife and partner from the 1970s until her passing in 2022, is the other significant deep connection in this biography. They gave one another a sense of belonging, and Robert’s encouragement of his wife’s cartooning helped another strong, unique voice enter the comics scene. Nadel writes about the ups and downs of their relationship with clarity, and one feels two tangible, genuine personalities with practical needs, artistic ambitions and a mutually-agreed, fluid sense of fidelity that was built on a solid connection. Either partner might wander, but both felt the relationship was their harbor and safe space.
The third act of Crumb’s life, in this book, comprises his graphic novel The Book of Genesis — a daunting work and a high mark of modern comics art — and the loss of his wife to cancer. We also see him reckon with his two adult children, Jesse (son of Crumb’s first wife, Dana Morgan) and Sophie, who has settled in Sauve, the French village where the Crumbs moved in the 1990s. Crumb is the first to admit his shortcomings as a parent, but we see him come to terms with his past behavior and do what he can to reconnect with his son, whose troubled life and eventual passing are another haunting element of this narrative.
Nadel faces the good and bad with a tempered, stable eye as he tells this multi-layered life story with clarity and quiet compassion. He discusses Crumb’s work with the same unflinching, centered approach. Crumb’s work has always shocked and provoked readers — from traditionalists to 21st-century cartoonists disturbed by his confrontational imagery. Crumb ostensibly draws (or drew) racist and sexist material to process it and purge it from his system. These images threw down a harsh gauntlet when new and they still contain the power to provoke and shock — and, perhaps, to change the reader’s attitudes or call them into question. They are a helpful laxative of the traumatic effect these two dark -isms have on us as they persist in the 21st century.
Irony is perhaps dead, and without that lens Crumb’s assaultive images can be misread. It was a risk to publish them in the 1960s and ‘70s. Crumb’s work has always been about risk — he bares his soul to the reader, and never flinches in his brutal self-assessment (or in his put-downs of people he finds offensive).
Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life takes center-stage in its reader’s life for the duration of its reading. Places, eras, people and everyday life feel palpable as each era of the biography unfolds. For those unfamiliar with the larger cultural context, Nadel offers brief explanations of social changes, the mien of the underground press, and makes clear how and why Crumb’s work differed from the norm and changed the concept of comics in general.
His historical asides about the infrastructure of underground comix — a system that led to the current-day direct-market distribution of comics — suggest a larger story that could be the basis of another book. (Patrick Rosenkranz, who has documented the history of the underground movement over several fine books, has perhaps achieved this with his writings.) They are a welcome expansion in Nadel’s book and show the largest aftershock of Crumb’s influence. None of this structure would likely exist without the impetus of Zap #1.
Nadel makes clear the bond Crumb shared with the other principal artists of Zap: Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Williams. These artists shared Crumb’s vision that comics could be everything they weren’t. Shelton remains one of comics’ great wits — the equal of a John Stanley in his vibrant slapstick and sardonic view of mankind — and few creators could equal Wilson’s still-shocking embrace of taboos and what my grandmother referred to as “things nice people don’t discuss.” Zap was one of comics' dream teams, and their work remains influential and inspirational.
These interludes, written with concision and care, further the author’s aim to normalize the events of Robert Crumb’s life. Though much of this incidental information was known to me, I appreciates the clarity of Nadel’s writing. The book will educate readers new to comics history while rewarding old goats like me who’ve spent their adult lives immersed in this culture.
Robert Crumb is a human being who has made good and bad decisions, triumphs and mis-steps; Nadel never relents from that important focus. That lens gives this biography a strong, rich foundation. I hope that, as Crumb’s work inspired others to break taboos in comics, Nadel’s work here will encourage other thorough biographies of cartoonists seen as people and as artists. Such books might have the power to strengthen the medium’s importance in our hectic culture.
English (US) · 