Comic Genius

As a comic strip artist, Robert Crumb has created some of the most recognizable images of the last twenty-five years: "Keep on Truckin'," Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural. His work is miles away from the bright day-glo colors and heroic poses of Marvel or DC, depicting a world of corrupt and decaying values in stark black-and-white drawings. His characters often have a physical ugliness to match the ugliness in their souls, and are tormented as much by their own neuroses as by outside forces. Terry Zwigloff's two hour documentary, culled from footage shot over a six-year period, could have been content to praise Crumb for his genius and vision; instead, it offers us a much more unsettling, even disturbing portrait of the artist and his environment.

On one level, there's the illustrative work itself. Zwigloff obtains testimonials from Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, and Time art critic Robert Hughes, as to the magnitude of Crumb's talent (Hughes, in one clip, manages to compare Crumb's work favorably to both Breughel and Goya). But he also gets interviews with cartoonist Trina Robbins and author Deirdre Smith, the latter of whom argues that Crumb's portrayal of women and blacks is the product of an "arrested juvenile vision". The images themselves don't provide easy solutions to the debate. An extended tour through a Mr. Natural story, in which the bearded guru presents a headless woman as a gift to a young nebbish, never resolves whether the cartoon is a twisted male fantasy, a critique of such fantasies, or a mixture of the two. Other examples of Crumb's work offer conflicting evidence: images of strong, defiant women are contrasted with hideous beasts with cawing birdlike heads.

But the film digs beyond the work and into the life, including visits with Crumb's brothers, Charles and Maxon. It's these visits, particularly the one with the elder brother, Charles, which are the emotional core of the film. They mirror Crumb in a disturbing way: all three boys (and two sisters who declined to participate in the film) grew up in the same stifling environment, and at Charles' insistence turned to drawing, especially comics, as a way to channel their frustration. But only Robert was able to use his talent successfully. Max ekes out a living as a painter and beggar, while Charles never left the house, retreated into himself, and admits to his brother that he is as much as dead: "I need external stimulation," he tells Robert at least twice. And Robert spends nearly as much time leafing through Charles' old drawings for the camera, and explaining Charles' artistic development, as he does on his own work.

Zwigoff assembles this difficult material skillfully. The editing is superb, particularly in montages which produce subtle links in the style and thematic content of drawings taken from the breadth of his career. The revelations of his work and life are balanced neatly against each other and the narrative arc around which Zwigoff chooses to frame his portrait: Crumb's decision to trade his old notebooks in exchange for a French villa. Oddly, the viewer watches Crumb confront the emotional truths of his life just as he is preparing to leave the location of that life for good. His work has always pointed to his distaste for the society built on 1950s suburban values, whether he probes his own sexual fantasies or records the appearance of people around him. "Words fail me," he writes in the margins of one drawing, "pictures aren't much better." The pictures in Crumb, however, make an eloquent and compelling statement.

-- Jesse Garon