Robert Crumb has been picking up a rich harvest from the discards on the trash heap of American pop culture, recycling old material into new modes of comic art…. These books, notably "Zap Comix," "Despair" and "Fritz the Cat," have doubtless been some of the most outrageous and controversial works ever drawn in the history of the art, largely because of their free-wheeling and uninhibited treatment of sex. His work has been scorned as filthy and obscene, and indeed on the surface one finds a Boschian world of raunchy cartoon characters who curse, cavort and fornicate as if they inhabited an X-rated Disneyland. And yet, his work has been praised by others as comparable to the genius of Toulouse-Lautrec or Picasso. Whatever the verdict, Crumb's work has nevertheless established him as the most important underground cartoonist—and, by extension, social satirist—in America today. What Jules Feiffer was to the neurotic fifties, Crumb has been to the cultural radicalism of the late sixties. (p. 13)
Many of Crumb's comic antiheroes—Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, BoBo Belinski, Schuman the Human, Mr. Snoid—have become recognized as archetypal American grotesques, figures as representative as Dagwood and Blondie. And Crumb's work has had a revolutionary effect on the comic-book industry as a whole by inspiring "straight" comics to become more "relevant," more attuned to social and political issues….
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