Charles, heavily medicated and unconcerned with personal hygiene, is revealed as the major influence on Robert. Older brother Charles never strays from the side of his reclusive mother.
Younger brother Maxon speaks from a cheap hotel in San Francisco, where he meditates on a bed of nails. Though Robert’s father is dead and his two sisters refused to be interviewed, those years are evoked in hilarious and harrowing detail. It’s the house in Philadelphia where Robert grew up the third of five children born to a “sadistic bully” Marine father and a mother with an amphetamine addiction. Another residence, however, dominates the film. An exception was the notebooks he traded in 1993 to buy a house for his family in southern France. Crumb customarily turns down lucrative offers to commercialize his art. “I’d be in jail or a mental institution by now if I didn’t draw that stuff,” says Crumb, who admits he is sometimes embarrassed by his work, though he’d never dream of censoring it. Cartoonist Aline Kominsky, Crumb’s second wife and the mother of their daughter, Sophie, feels no threat from his pop-art misogyny. Crumb excuses his ethnic stereotypes as satire.
Others condemn him as a pornographer and a racist. Time art critic Robert Hughes is heard praising Crumb as the Breughel of the 20th century. In one comic strip, Foont enjoys explicit sex with his ideal Amazon - she’s headless. Famous for drawing Fritz the Cat, the KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ logo and the cover art for the Janis Joplin LP Cheap Thrills, Crumb is notorious for creating nerd characters, such as Flakey Foont, who have sex with big-bottomed, balloon-breasted women. You often laugh to keep from crying.Ī shared interest in old-time music brought Zwigoff unprecedented access to the reclusive Crumb. Through frank interviews with Crumb, his friends, lovers, wives, children, colleagues, critics and the dysfunctional Catholic family that spawned him, Zwigoff crafts a film of raucous humor and shocking gravity. Crumb, Robert to his cronies, the 51-year-old underground artist who has been using the comics to zap hypocrisy since his acidhead days in the San Francisco of the ’60s.
It took director Terry Zwigoff six years to put together this absolute stunner of a documentary about R. Crumb is a brilliant chronicle of the life and twisted times of a most unlikely bad boy, a skinny, four-eyed, sex-obsessed misanthrope with no weapons to fire back at the society that rejected him save one: The nerd can draw.
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