Crumb

Crumb takes a deeply personal look at 60's counterculture artist Robert Crumb. The film focuses upon three decades of Crumb's artwork to reconstruct his unhappy childhood, days with Zap Comix in the late 60's, `dark side' period and recent life. Interviews with him, his wife Aline, family and friends reveal the motives behind his astounding creativity. Crumb is sometimes hilarious, often depressing and always entertaining – a rare combination in a documentary film.

During childhood, Crumb and his brothers Charles and Maxon found solace from their tyrannical father in comic books and drawing cartoons. Crumb escaped the mental illness that ended both his brother's careers as artists (Charles was equally as talented), but otherwise had a perfectly miserable childhood and adolescence. Socially awkward, bullied at school and rejected by women, he decided in 1962 (at age 17) to take revenge upon society `by becoming a famous artist'.

In 1966, his chemically inspired `revelations of some seamy side of America's subconscious' caught the eye of a Haight Street publisher in San Francisco and Zap Comix was born. Zap was an outlet for his creative energy, which was rooted in his social difficulties. He was uninterested in money and once turned down a $100,000 contract – a huge sum of money in those days. Although identified with the hippie crowd, he could not relate to their culture: `My main motivation [for drawing] was to get some of that free love action'.

After a few years of fame, he retired from Zap to express the darker side of his nature. His later work frequently contained sadistic and violent themes and was sometimes labeled as pornography by friends and critics alike. Even Crumb isn't sure of his intent: `Maybe I should be locked up and my pencils taken away from me'.

Critic Robert Hughes says that in Crumb's world there are no heroes and `even the victims are comic' – ideas that don't jive with traditional American culture. But Crumb has always considered himself to be an outsider and enjoys the feeling of `being very removed or extremely separated from the rest of humanity and the world in general'. `Words fail me, pictures aren't much better' to describe his disgust with American consumerism. He now lives in France because its culture is `slightly less evil than the United States'.

The film is embarrassingly candid about unhappy details of Crumb's life, such as his brothers' mental illness, experiments with drugs and ambivalent attitudes towards women. Yet it is apparent that there is no misery or violence in this man – it's all on paper. (Rating: A)

Robert Crumb became an idol among hippies in the 1960's because of the psychedelic comics he drew at the time. In this excellent film, directed by Terry Zwigoff (who also directed the excellent, and also comic book related, "Ghost World" and "American Splendor") Crumb starts out by telling that he hates just about all the work he is most famous for. This is typical, Í think, of Crumb: he is uncompromisingly politically incorrect, completely unafraid to speak his mind openly, and above all disgusted by the idea of selling out for money.

I have been a fan of Crumb ever since I advanced beyond Donald Duck and Marvel Comics about 20 years ago (this is not to say that I don't love Donald or Marvel anymore, because I do). Crumb is probably the most talented comic book artist of the latter half of the 20t Century. Quite simply, I don't think anyone can draw as well as he does. He is not much of a storyteller, but like I pointed out above, that is more than made up by the fact that he is always totally candid about his life, sometimes painfully and embarrassingly so.

"Crumb" is an excellent portrait of an exceptionally talented artist who also happens to be a total pervert. However, as this film makes abundantly clear, Robert Crumb is practically the ideal model of a stable, well-adjusted person when compared to his mother or his brothers Charles and Maxon. We see once again that great suffering makes a great artist.

Legendary underground comic artist Robert Crumb of "Keep on Truckin" fame is transported back home--courtesy of his equally eccentric friend and cult director, Terry Zwigoff--to pay a visit to his wacky and disturbed family. Crumb, reluctantly, encounters his two bothers and mother in varying degrees of emotional collapse. The mother is a piece of work. She is in total denial about her boys. Crumb's two sisters, however, remain absent from the family's tragic downward spiral--and they don't participate (wisely) in Zwigoff's pet project (The story goes that the director threatened suicide to gain Crumb's full cooperation. Who knows the truth?) Back at the ranch--Crumb does live in the country--the artist's father is dead. His older brother lives in a single room on San Francisco's Skid Row, where he bathes sometimes and sleeps on a bed of nails. He also has dark thoughts about Asian women. Once in a while, he acts on them. His other bother lives with their crazy mother, never works, and reads and collects mountains of old, yellowed and tattered paperbacks. He refuses to read anything new. Everyone is manic depressive. On drugs. And bananas. But somehow Crumb has struck a balance between his art and personal life. He survives nicely with his wife and their daughter in a comfortable ranch house. The dwelling serves dual purposes: protection for his massive and priceless blues record collection, and personal solitude from an encroaching outside world. His next step is a permanent move to France! In the end, Crumb, the movie, is a worthwhile odyssey for anyone who wishes to feel better about their own family. You might find this movie on the bottom shelf of the video store or at a psych ward near you.

What makes Crumb such an intriguing documentary isn't the fact that man looked at through the camera is admirable or interesting or laudable, although one could make the argument that R. Crumb is all of those things. No, what makes Crumb such a great film is the way it shows the twisted nature of Crumb against the backdrop of his nearly psychotic family. Compared to the world, R. Crumb is a sexual deviant, a lunatic genius, and a perfect candidate to be taken away in a plain white van. Compared to his family, R. Crumb is completely and utterly normal. It's this juxtaposition that makes Crumb work over all two hours the movie needs to take its course.

What are the odds that an artist can survive family violence, mental illness, sexual rejection, and Big Mac culture? As far as this film can make clear, three members of the Crumb family had strong artistic temperaments and significant talent. Only one, Robert, made it out alive, and his life and work are defined by resistance to what should have been a sad fate.

To many, this documentary may be depressing, offensive to women, or just too damn ugly to sit through, but it made me as happy as anything I've ever seen on screen. Art's ability to reveal truth and promote survival is evident in every frame. I admire R. Crumb's courage to speak unpopular truths, to draw what gets him off, and to ferret out the art he loves at considerable expense and trouble (he's a blues maven; one of my favorite scenes, where's he's sitting on his floor absorbed by aching music, is echoed in Ghost World, when Enid takes home Seymour's record and gets lost in her favorite song). And like Ghost World, ratty, real American culture is railed at hilariously: another favorite scene involves R. on a park bench, disgustedly commenting on the ugliness of everything around him: logo-emblazoned clothes, graceless music, ugly plastic everything.

By the end of it all, I respected and liked him Crumb enormously. I'd take his scary-woman worship over the banal musings of a dime-store philosopher any day. And Terry Zwigoff deserves much praise for being able to pull it off (especially as a first-time filmmaker who had very little idea what he was doing). From high art and family pathos to a lovely animal appreciation of big round female asses, this is far more a "roller-coaster, I laughed/I cried" film than most others so touted.