There is a vigorous avant garde cartoonists' movement in America today. Most of the artists involved in it are unknown to the general public but one of them, Robert Crumb, has developed a following that extends beyond the hippie subculture into a variety of social classes. (p. 677) By now a number of underground comics have been published…. Perhaps the best known of them is Zap, out of San Francisco, which was created by Crumb in 1967. It was one of the first underground comics to be published...

There are many parodies in the underground comics, and comic strip and comic book heroes are frequently ridiculed. But the underground comics also ridicule the absurdities of the counterculture as well as those of bourgeois culture. For example, one of the most interesting underground heroes is Robert Crumb's fake guru, Mr. Natural, a horny old man with a bald head and long flowing whiskers. His cohort is a seeker-after-knowledge named Flakey Foont, who never gains any satisfaction from Mr. Natural, ...

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 ...

Crumb loves to use his satirical touch to strip … people naked. He gets them all—from the spiritualist who would give it all up for a good lay to the inept politico who spouts off about revolution while using his girlfriend as a footstool. He goes after hucksters who prey on the frightened and confused, the self-righteous leaders who claim they have The Only Answer or hold the secret to The True Way. For Crumb, there is no true way, no simple all purpose solution. He sends his characters looki...

Zap #1 and #0 are 100 percent Crumb, as are several Rip Off numbers, like Big Ass Comix ("Weird Sex Fantasies with the Behind in Mind"). Motor City Comix (featuring Lenore Goldberg, a kind of feminist Trashman) and the magnificent Despair. Having assimilated, it seems, the entire history of comics (with perhaps special emphasis on Barney Google, Orphan Annie, early Popeye, Dick Tracy, Pogo and the Katzenjammers), Crumb is by now a one-man band of cartooning…. Crumb's preoccupatio...

[The] best young comics-makers, Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bodé, aren't sick and dirty; they're gross and funny. Their grossness takes the form of four-letter words and more or less naked women … or animals. So what's new? The grossness is new. In our day, gentlemen of the jury, those words and that nakedness were dirty; they generated sniggers and sidelong looks. Grossness is better. Laughing is better than leering. As for the humor, well, it's television humor, I sup...

Downhome Dadaism in a cheap suit, but this time around it's a double-knit. Crumb becomes cartoonist-cum-crooner [in R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders], ripe but two decades late for Spike Jones…. Even in the year of Moog Synthesizer Ragtime it is unlikely that this release will capture the imagination of the greater public. But if the climate were any healthier—or becomes more desperate—these tunes should have all America singing and dancing. Besides the definitive country b...

[In a sense, the future of George Herriman's character Krazy Kat] may be taken care of by R. Crumb's "Fritz the Cat." Mr. Crumb … seems to have consumed and digested the whole history of comic-book art. His first book was last year's "Head Comix." His new one contains three stories about his cat hero…. Since the language and the action are on the raunchy side, the stories are not for children. But anyone else will find them trenchant satires on ...