Everything has to be black and white! Everything has to be old-fashioned!

Howdy, Schlubs

I hope everyone had a pleasant summer! I accidentally took a vacation from the newsletter, so I’m excited to be back with such a doozy. For general housekeeping, I’m going to hold off on editing trailers for each essay. I’m still wary of Adobe after it ate my entire Best of 2024 video. I’ll also be back next week with a Schlub Shot recapping what I’ve been up to these last few months, as well as some comic book recommendations to pair with this week’s essay.

Enjoy! 

Robert Crumb

TW: This essay discusses sexual assault and contains images that are NSFW (sexual and racist imagery).

During an early scene in Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb (1994), famed underground comix artist Robert Crumb sits together with his older brother, Charles. They’re in Charles’ childhood bedroom, where he still lives, surrounded by dusty 18th- and 19th-century literature. Charles sits cross-legged on the bed and sweats profusely. There is a beautiful, amber glow radiating from behind the sheets and pillowcases that cover the windows.

In the commentary track, Zwigoff notes that the autumnal color comes from 25 years of Charles smoking cigarettes in that room. It stained the windows.

Shot over the course of nearly a decade, Zwigoff’s documentary examines Robert Crumb’s relationships and how they influence his art (and vice versa)—his relationship with his brothers, his parents, his estranged son, his young daughter, his ex-girlfriends, and his still-consuming high school crushes. His relationship to Black people, to music, to women’s bodies, to the art world, to sexual compulsion, and to the fans he seems to pity at best. It’s a bleak knot of discourse that feels impossibly both cynical and earnest—all stemming from comics about freaks and giant asses.

For those not in the know, Robert Crumb is a founding figure in the underground comix scene of the 1960s. Crumb’s crass, self-published books featured cartoonish and horned-up characters like Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat. His comics lampooned American culture with animalistic women, racist imagery, sexual violence, and incest. As the alternative comix scene rose and fell, these filthy rags would pave the way for the punk-led zine movement, as well as more mainstream works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor.

A beanpole garbed in a weathered tawny suit, a straw hat, and dinner plate-sized glasses, Crumb looks like a midcentury tramp—riding the rails and selling his smut from town to town. He is a man completely outside of time, constantly bitching to whoever will listen about the idiocy and evil of modern culture, while wishing he were at home listening to his crackling ’20s and ’30s blues records. Crumb doesn’t belong to any time or place, mostly due to his own acidic persona. He jokes that he tried to join the hippie movement to “get some of that free love action,” but everyone thought he was a narc. His modern fans annoy him with parasocial relationships and fanfic rumors of him mingling with other counterculture heroes. “There was a rumor that I lived in Haight-Ashbury with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead,” he says, “but I hated their music.” Even his contemporaries (including many ex-girlfriends) are divided.

Robert Crumb

Zwigoff does his best Ken Burns impression with a wide range of talking heads—each voicing a different take on Crumb’s divisive work. Having been a friend and bandmate of Crumb’s before the film, it’s admirable that Zwigoff’s own relation doesn’t sway the work. There’s clearly admiration for Crumb’s art, with plenty of montages of Crumb’s beautifully gnarly pages, and quite a few talking heads who heap him with praise—including women who laud his depiction of the fairer sex as powerful beings with large thighs and big butts.1 Regardless of how the reader feels about the content, Crumb’s comics are his id spilled out on the page—an aspirational goal for any artist. Yet, Zwigoff thankfully doesn’t shy away from the darker side of his friend’s work.

Wisely, he starts by letting the art speak for itself. Crumb recounts a feeling of aimlessness and anger after achieving mainstream success, leading him to produce darker material. He then shows off a horrifying comic in which Mr. Natural gifts a headless, remote-controlled woman to a friend, who proceeds to rape the mindless body. In another, a picture-perfect ’50s family dines on canned “N-word” hearts, complete with a minstrel show-esque mascot. “Not everything is for everyone,” Crumb tells a young reporter. It’s a sentiment I strongly agree with, but Zwigoff’s sober direction highlights a side of Crumb’s work that is so far beyond the pale that it’s hard to imagine it being for anyone.

Sex is the looming theme of both Crumb’s work and Zwigoff’s documentary. I’m not here to kink shame—and for the record, more artists should be perverts, but it is funny just how singular Crumb’s sexual proclivities are. Per his ex (and Taschen Sexy Book editor) Dian Hanson, sex was mostly piggyback rides, wrestling, and him sitting on her shoe. Even without delving into Crumb’s own fetishes, it’d be impossible not to include sex in the documentary. All you need to do is open a page of Crumb’s books and you’ll be treated to bird-headed women with thighs the circumference of a truck tire, or hideous worm-like men (often self-inserts for Crumb himself) with raging hard-ons. Deirdre English, the former EIC of Mother Jones and one of Zwigoff’s talking heads, calls Crumb’s comics masturbatory, only for Dian to flat-out confirm it later in the film. “He masturbates compulsively,” she says. “Four or five times a day, even to his own work.”

Even with such a potent brew of comedy, sex, and controversy, Zwigoff’s most important ingredient is his non-judgmental filmmaking—letting the viewer make sense of what’s on the page. Case and point are Crumb’s brothers, Maxon (youngest) and Charles (oldest). Maxon, a ghoulishly thin ascetic living in San Francisco, seeks some form of spiritual atonement for his history of sexual assault. Sitting on the floor of his empty motel room, Maxon recounts his years of “molesting.” In subway cars and department stores, he would compulsively grab women or rip off their clothing. It’s a chilling scene, made even worse by Crumb and Zwigoff nervously laughing in the background. Now, plagued by seizures triggered by sexual arousal, Maxon’s days are spent sitting cross-legged on a board of nails on street corners, meditating for hours on end in front of his begging bowl. He chews on a tapeworm-like string that will clean out his insides. It takes three days to pass through his body.

Charles, once the ringleader of the three boys, has not left his mother’s house in decades. A soft-spoken and sunken-in man, he speaks in the same complaining-lilt his brothers do, albeit with an erudite flavor—using hundred-dollar words and referring to men as “chaps.” Even while heavily medicated on tranquilizers, Charles still cracks jokes, leaving Robert and his mother in stitches in her rotting living room. It’s through Charles that we learn of the Crumb family nightmare—an ex-army father who would beat his sons mercilessly and an amphetamine addicted mother who coddled them in retaliation. Crumb attributes his brother Charles as the catalyst for his own art career, as Charles (an artist in his own right) corralled the brothers into making their own comic series at a young age—often focusing on Charles' childhood obsession, Treasure Island (1950). Like most obsessions in Crumb, there is a dark root. Charles has harbored a pedophilic obsession since childhood with the young boy lead of the film, Bobby Driscoll. Crumb states that Charles has never acted upon the desires, but has instead sedated himself and secluded himself in his boyhood home.

Maxon Crumb

Just as Crumb’s art depicts beautiful repulsion, Zwigoff’s documentary maintains its painterly autumnal grace while plumbing the depths of depravity. A calming blues score carries us from Crumb’s pages to chilly redbrick buildings along the East Coast. During one of the film’s most heated segments, Crumb’s ex-girlfriend Kathy Goodell berates him atop an apartment roof for how he treated her. An orange sunset drapes the rooftop world in warm purples, shining off both of their sunglasses. The skyline is grey, save for these pockets of brilliant color. Kathy recounts the days spent crying, reading Crumb’s love notes while he flagrantly cheated on her. Crumb laughs it off, firmly grabbing her wrist, her arm, even her face. She kicks him in the leg, and he shrivels up—still chuckling.

Crumb’s chilly atmosphere explodes into a rainy green bloom in the film’s final scene. Crumb, his second wife Aline, and his young daughter Sophie pack their belongings as they wait for movers to arrive. They are moving to France, a country “slightly less evil than the United States,” per Crumb.

Zwigoff asks Crumb, “How do you feel about leaving your family?”

“What do I care?” Crumb scoffs.

Rain beats down on the thick California foliage. The screen is vibrant with life for the first time in two hours. It’s hard to tell if buxom Mother Nature is wishing Crumb a fond farewell or blossoming as he leaves.

Maxon, Robert, and Charles Crumb

Crumb is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.

Special thanks to Max Seifert. For any movie suggestions or letters to the editor, reach out to schlubcinema@gmail.com