R. Crumb
Appearances
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
It was only for myself. I had no motive to turn other people on to my sexual fantasies or my sexual preferences at all. It was just expressing what was inside myself in some way that...
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
that revealed, hopefully, the metaphor that it was, you know, in many variations of that, you know, the Angel Food 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, say, these aren't real women, these are Crumb's fantasies, they're absolutely right. Right.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I got no argument with that. Yeah, that's what it is. It all comes out of my mind.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Right, right. 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 is I'm not and everything I am he's not you know it's almost how I see myself maybe not a hundred percent but you know I'm like the person of the night he's a guy of the day you know blah etc etc you know
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Horrible guilt. Horrible guilt, of course. Praying desperately. Please, God, what is this about? Yeah.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
You know, it's a funny thing. At the same time, the thoughts were, those 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Well, just, you know, in... Opened the the gates for other young boys who had these who probably were also comic nerds when they grew up 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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 him. I went, Crumbs, he's cool and he's doing it. So, you know, I guess I can draw stuff that puts women in this position too. But, you know, of having violent acts committed against women.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
But I don't think, I can't think of any artist offhand who was like totally obsessed with just drawing brutal violence against women. I don't know. I think this is, you know, but, you know, feminists and other people that are involved in any kind of, you know, political obsession like that, and you can't blame them for it. There's no, they're looking for that.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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, they're looking for that. And yeah, I'm sure you can find it. It's there. Yeah. Yeah. But 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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 that someone would want to emulate, right?
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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. I got up at 6 o'clock in the morning and took the rapid transit to work every day. I went to the bar after work and drank with the guys and then went home and asked myself, is this my life?
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
No, they had this department that, in the late 50s, they started making these kind of more hip-looking greeting cards. They were tall and thin, you know?
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
They were funny. Yeah, they were 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 because they were alcoholics or whatever. But they wrote very funny cards.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Right, right. Well... As a kid in the 50s, the comics were in decline. The TV wasn't that great. So I started looking for older stuff. And the first older stuff that peaked my interest was older comic books that you could find in Salvation Army stores and also old stuff on the kiddie shows on television. On TV, on these kiddie shows, they showed old cartoons from the 30s.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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, this Our Gang, Little Rascals stuff.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I loved that stuff when I was a kid. And as I got into my later teens, I... 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 because I loved...
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
hearing it in those TV runs 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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. I could actually tune it and play it, so I learned to play that. And then I graduated to the banjo later.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I was attracted to old music, you know. I was kind of out of it, nerd. I wasn't really much into rock and roll or things of my contemporaries. I don't know. Like I said, I'm not going to go negative.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Well, they're kind of timeless, you know, because 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 what? And some people, when they met me, were surprised that I was a young man at the time. They thought I would be some old guy.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Kind of exaggeration of who we really are, but not that far. It doesn't deviate that far from who we really are.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
But also you're flamboyant. You're gaudy. You're crass, Jewish Long Island thing that you have, and you're bold, and I'm more kind of gray and goyish.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
So they already looked out of time then, and so they just kind of still look like their own thing. And I think a lot of young people that pick them up, 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 to such stuff as Peter Max or psychedelic posters and all that stuff. It doesn't fit in with that.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I was drawn to her strongly, yeah. She had all the requirements. But, yeah, my initial interest in her was strictly, you know, oh, here's a cute hippie Jewish slut.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Shortly after I met her, because she had just started drawing comics at that time, and she showed me this stuff that she had done and this 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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's 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 Willie Mendez was doing that's very sweet with unicorns and stuff like that. And here's Aileen.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
It's like ugly. It's self-deprecating. It was... It was just 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 Reese of comics there.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Very, very few women thought they were great. Very few women thought they were great.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I'm much more fearful and feel more victimized than Aileen does.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
At that time, I was only really known in the hippie subculture.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
So, yeah, when Aileen fled from it in 74, I went after her because I realized that she's like the life raft. And, I mean, I've said it in interviews and stuff before that sometimes I think if I hadn't, you know, grabbed onto Aileen, I might be dead now because I... I was involved with all these crazy women. They were all crazy. Aileen seemed to have her feet on the ground somehow.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Whoa. That's a tough question. What were the images on LSD? What did they look like? 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, 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I needed someone like that. She was the only one that cared enough about me or was willing to take me on. I needed someone like that.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
No, no, no, it's not like that. Not like she's the sane one, but that she is better at handling people. She can think on her feet quicker. If a journalist comes to the door unannounced and wants to talk to me, I'll throw them out. Eileen will throw them out. I just, well, okay. Yeah. And like this last week in France, some journalists came there to talk to me.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
And I let them in and I'm sitting at the kitchen table. Eileen comes downstairs. She looks at us. What is this? Who are these people? How'd you get in here? And Robert told me he didn't want to talk to any more journalists. I said, Robert, what are you doing? So I was so embarrassed. I got up and fled the room. And Eileen just told those people, dégagé, you should kick them out.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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,
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
completely changed my whole approach to what I was doing, to cartooning, and took on this older 30s, 40s kind of... And I started looking more closely at these kind of brand X, third-rate comics from the 40s that were drawn in that style by these artists that never achieved, you know, renown even among comics people.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
They were a third-rate artist, but they had this working-class, proletarian, funky... crude, vulgar. These comics were very vulgar, violent.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
That was my first two-month period when my ego was completely fragmented by that bad LSD. I drew Mr. Natural, Flaky Funt, Angel Food McSpade, the Snoids, the Vulture Goddesses, Vulture Demonesses, whatever you want to call them. I know lots of characters. The old Pooperoo.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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. There's several of these kind of like standard cartoon figure and 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
It all has antecedents in the popular culture, all of it.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Because 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, is that jungle bunny image. That was there. It was part of it. It wasn't there before, but it boiled up. So it was obviously in the collective subconscious, and I just didn't have any control. I just had to draw what was there.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
And I don't think Angel Flew McSpade can really legitimately be called an African-American woman. It's a cartoon stereotype, crazy image of something that's in the imaginations of people. It's not actually a representation of an African-American woman.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Yes, they did. A lot of people just took it at face value. And, you know, I can't let that stop me. It has to come out. What's in there had to come out. I really couldn't stop it. If I worried about how it was going to be construed too much, obviously I had some concern of that, but I didn't want to be too hurtful, but at the same time I had to... I had to put on the paper.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I had this direct line from the brain stem to the paper. There was no super ego, the socialized self. All that was just swept away.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
You betcha, yeah. So, you know, I have no secrets. I'm probably one of the few human beings on the planet that I have no secrets. Everybody who looks at my comics knows exactly what I'm about. It's all there.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
The darkest side of me, it's all on paper. So that allows me to be a pretty nice guy in real life. It's all out there on paper, foisted on the public.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Of course. Yeah, sure. I'm a normal person that way. 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? Why, you know? And also the... As I started doing it for publication, then the floodgates opened.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
The crack just got wider and wider until I just let it all out. Let it all out there, all the dark side of myself. It's all out there. I have less of that impulse now. I think I got out of my system a lot of it.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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...
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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, everything. Sign me to a five-year exclusive contract, da-da-da-da. These people are trying to cash in on the hippie culture and the youth movement and make money off it. I was so young, I didn't know how to deal with all that.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
But at the same time, it made me more attractive to women, so that part of it was nice. Yeah. 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 our crumb. You know, suddenly they were interested and that was nice.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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 was attracted to that. And, you know, the drug thing, the psychedelic drugs, I was into that part of it.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
And 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Oh, especially Howdy Doody. Howdy Doody was really grotesque. Hi, kids. And Clarabelle the Clown and all. It was all very, very sinister and scary. And Buffalo Bob Smith. Did you ever see that stuff?
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R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
My wife, Aileen, 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. She said it was a defining moment in her life.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
She was like eight years old or something, seven 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. She said the seat of the pants of Bob Smith's outfit was kind of frayed. And he was like real mean to the kids when it was off camera. Kukla Farinalli was cuter, though.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Kukla Farinalli, 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, a little hand puppet. And Fran, the woman, she was like talking to the puppets. So it was a little more reassuring. It was cuter.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
It was just creepy and weird. What the heck? What does that have to do with anything? He 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. There's some underlying thing you can't quite define that was just disturbing and sinister and scary about it all, all that stuff.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Well, yeah, but I guess... Not for children, of course. I mean, it wasn't for children. 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.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
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, in LSD, I would catch out of the corner of my eye sneaking around and giggling in the background of my life. You know, I had to show that.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
I wanted to show that sinister aspect, that noir, dark side of things, and how it's almost like making fun of the veneer of cuteness or whatever it is that they think covers that. 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. The whole mass media thing...
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
We're all, growing up in America, you're a child of the mass media, the pop culture, unless your parents guard you and protect you from that very conscientiously. My parents didn't. They shoved this in front of the TV. It's products of pop culture. So that's what you have to work with.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
Yeah, unfortunately the LSD didn't really change much in my sexual fantasies, but I found a way to express them. made them metaphorical to me. I could solve them more metaphorically. On LSD, you see that life, everything in our world is a metaphor. Or as Allen Ginsberg said, things are symbols of themselves.
Fresh Air
R. Crumb, King Of Underground Comics
And so I saw my own sexual fantasies that way and tried to understand what they meant metaphorically. You know, otherwise, we just feel helpless in the face that 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? I don't understand or express that somehow in some way. I got off drawing those things.