Fred and Loathing on The Internet

You're Crumb-believable!

2025-Sep-27

R. Crumb has been brewing in my mind for many, many, artistically prodigious years. However, that could be said about a lot of artists. There are tons of artists’ names marinating in my brain. Even among just the comic book creators, that is a long list. Hell, even narrowing that down to just Marvel pencillers from the 90s would be a few dozen. There is just not enough time among the staff at fredlambuth.com to write a blog post about every venerable comic book creator worth commemorating. This blog series is in the low 100s right now… perhaps in the future. Some indie comics have had thousands of issues. This blog could be the next Cerebus!

Extensive futures of blog post possibilities aside, lately Crumb has gotten more attention in my thoughts. Reached up near the top of the stack. Guess he ought to have a blog post. The dude is pretty important. The name definitely gets me more dinner party cred when I mention it. Much more than, say, Marc Silvestri, an artist just as technically gifted with pencil and ink, but definitely unknown outside middle-aged X-Men comic book nerds. Who also, based on what I see on his Instagram, is doing some impressive pencil and/or ink stuff lately. DC stuff! Silvestri doing Batman! Qué idea!

I’ll tell you, blog readers. Were it not for social media, I would not have ever had a conversation about the artists that sparked my desire to be an artist — 90s comic books. The more “extreme,” the better. Having an artist being able to have an open channel to their fans is the internet working how it should be. Jim Lee’s video livestream of his process has been incredible in learning about why he makes his artistic decisions. So much more valuable than me copying pages out of a comic book. Or is it?

Anyway, R. Crumb has a recent biography published, which I read, and has a pretty famous documentary made about him released in the early 90s. I am not aware of him having any internet outreach to his fans or for publishing his work. This bio and documentary were how I recently absorbed this creator’s life into my thoughts.

Unlike a lot of artists I mimic, or have mimicked their techniques heavily in the past, R. Crumb’s career spans decades. With marked distinction between his eras. Each decade of his work brings in its own characters, visual flourishes, and topics to choose from. These decades extend up to now (2025). If Robert Crumb is breathing, I would wager he is putting pen to paper, recording his thoughts until he cannot. Somewhere in that nice little French village he absconded to in the 1990s.

There is a strong mantra of Robert Crumb in me at the moment. Something like this needs to be recorded while the artistic juices are hot! Crumb has been an artistic homeboy of mine since my nascent adulthood. I hope I can do that magnificent bastard the justice he deserves. That mantra in me lately, and what I hope to spray upon this blog post, is the man himself. Robert Crumb the octogenarian. The mantra is Crumb the creator, not the creations of Crumb. His creations are more famous than the man himself, and they are what I learned of first.

Unlike most people who would have read this biography or watched the documentary, I have a second layer to thinking about R. Crumb. I fancy myself an artist. (That should be painfully obvious to the faithful readers of the blog.) I definitely did think of myself as a fledgling artist when R. Crumb’s work officially bumped into my life. R. Crumb’s work speaks for itself and it immediately spoke to me. I did not feel any need for curated assistance understanding him. Or at least, understanding his work. It would be great if he used the internet more prodigiously though, but maybe he’s not that type of communicator.

After recently watching the documentary and finishing the biography, in no certain order, Robert Crumb the artist has been on my mind, much more than his creations. Things about his life and mine that are grander than just how skilled the guy is at capturing anything with pen, pencil, and paper.

He’s old. Prolific too. A whole lot of creations, illustrations, and doodling to his name. At any age, that means every passing year for him is a statistical breakthrough. Not many Americans from his generation make it to their 80s. Even the clean-living ones. I was not that surprised to learn from the book that Crumb dabbled heavily in drugs in the 60s. I was mildly surprised to learn he put them down by the end of the decade and never touched them again. All the work of his after the first big batch of 60s stuff is Crumb with no chemical assistance.

R. Crumb may have lived free of substance abuse. Not free of vice. His vice, the one that would dictate the biggest decisions in his life, was his particular taste in women, and what he wanted to do to them. Nothing diabolical! Geez, take it easy. Just some psycho-sexual stuff. Also he was terrible at breaking up with them, so there was a lot of fallout to his amorous adventures.

Prior to reading the biography, I think I had a firm grasp on most of his thoughts about women, and their role in all walks of his life. (This bio would tell me he didn’t record his more boring mistakes. White collar crime stuff, like how to spread tax burden among his mistresses.) I recall a very well crafted series of autobiographical comics of his explaining it quite eloquently. Crumb may not have had an Instagram, but each page of his work in the 80s could be an IG post. His later work is starkly autobiographical.

As far as I could recall, I had not read an interview or made any attempt to get a look into his life other than how he presented himself in his work. Not until the past year or so. Thanks to some clickbait ads from some museum in Europe that published video interviews of him and his long-time suffering wife, Aline Kominsky. The fires of curiosity I had for this man burned brightly again thanks to the internet, once again, working in a good way. Also the recently published biography of his was in the “new” section, conveniently located next to the checkout section of the library I frequent.

This biography has taught me much more than I wanted to know about Robert Crumb. This book I keep mentioning is Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life by Dan Nadel. Published in 2025. The moment I picked it up, I knew Robert Crumb was the type of person who I would likely want to read hundreds of pages about.

After a few dozen pages into the chapters describing the life and time of young Robert Crumb, I knew this book was deeper into the ins and outs of one man’s life than I needed. Those hundreds of pages would have interested me more had they been about Crumb’s creations, rather than his actual life. I am interested in the dude, but only so much into the nitty gritty of each year, month, or day of his life. The staff here at the blog glossed over a lot of parts where Dan Nadel took the time to write the physical movements of Crumb, or people in his cohort, down to the time of day. Knowing just how many days were spent in each town in Europe each time Crumb went on a book tour became exhausting to my senses.

A big chunk of the first half of the biography deals with the artist’s early family life. He comes from a big Catholic family that bounced around a few places in the post-war USA. Quite predictably for such a perturbed artist, Crumb suffered all sorts of abuse while growing up. The father was a stern combat veteran. Her mother seemed to be a religious doormat that tolerated whatever the father dictated. From the sounds of it, his brothers received more of the abuse than Robert. None of his four (five?) siblings came out well adjusted. Robert did not either, but at least he came out with a world famous artistic career out of that domestic strife.

Crumb’s most interesting exploits to me were the lengths he took to please so many women and to keep them as regular parts of his life. That is, with the women aware of each other, yet being cool about it. A confederated harem with diplomatic ties. Crumb, in the worst of times, was just stepping out on his wife or steady girlfriend with groupies. A boring and predictable story for a young artist enjoying sudden fame.

In the best of times, he was a spindly art nerd being passed around by a wide variety of women. A wide variety in their dispositions. They were all generally shaped the same: powerful. Strong, sturdy women that Crumb could use for those psycho-sexual kinks. Crumb just could not get enough of these women. I think there were a lot of kinks bouncing around in his head. So many that they required either a very good actress or several women to assume all the possible roles. Crumb seemed to enjoy bossy women, submissive women, artsy women, and women outside of the art world.

Interesting as all that was to read, Crumb packed it up with one woman, left for a French pastoral town to finish out his days. Perhaps the harem confederacy continued in France. The big change is Aline Kominsky’s passing. She passed away a few years before the book was published. That leaves Crumb on his own. Something he has not been in a long time.

That’s the real reason why he’s on my mind. What is Crumb to do now? Keep on creating? Ink on paper? Give it to somebody so they can publish it? He had a great life. Still could be having it now, if you can enjoy creating for the sake of creating. I hope.