'A little while ago there'd be no boos,' Passmore responded. The room erupted with both 'ooohs' and booing. You gotta keep on being annoying about it.…A while ago someone like R. While presenting the award for Outstanding Artist, the cartoonist Ben Passmore, who is black, asserted that 'comics is changing…and it's not an accident.' He lamented the continued industry presence of 'creeps' and 'apologists,' then called out the godfather by name: 'Shit's not going to change on its own. In September, at the Small Press Expo's Ignatz Awards ceremony in Bethesda, Maryland, Crumb's successor generation of alt artists let the 75-year-old have it with both barrels. It was as versatile a medium as film or television.' Similar praise from other creators for Crumb's mind-blowing importance to them could go on for pages anyone making noncorporate, nongenre, self-expressive comics occupies a space he created.īut events in the comics world last year served notice that the social-justice re-evaluation currently sweeping comedy, film, and literature has arrived at the doorstep of free-thinking comics. You could write any kind of story in comics. Along the way, it opened the form to social criticism, history, outrageous satire, and the full range of deeply personal human experience, including the both lightly and darkly sexual.Ĭrumb's occasional collaborator Harvey Pekar, one of the major innovators of quotidian comic autobiography, says his partner demonstrated that 'comics were as good an art form as any that existed. With his first issue of Zap in 1968, Crumb singlehandedly invented a format and sensibility, under the broad label of 'underground comix,' that permanently changed how printed cartoon stories are perceived. Nearly every milestone on the long road comics have crawled from derided trash to treasured American art form was inspired either directly or secondhand by Crumb's choices and achievements. The legendary art critic Robert Hughes has favorably compared his portrayals of the human grotesque to Pieter Bruegel and William Hogarth, declaring Crumb 'the one and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, either in America or Europe.' His work has appeared in museums across the world, from the Venice Biennale to New York's Museum of Modern Art he was the subject of Terry Zwigoff's acclaimed documentary Crumb (Gene Siskel's favorite film of 1994) his drawings are so coveted by collectors that a sale of some sketchbooks in the early 1990s bought him a centuries-old chateau in southeast France. Crumb lives and works in a small village near Sauve in southern France.Robert Crumb is the undisputed godfather of alternative comics.

Some of his most famous and recognizable characters and series, including Fritz the Cat, Keep on Truckin’, and Weirdo, have garnered serious critical acclaim, resulting in honors and awards including a major retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2008, reception of a Harvey Special Award for Humor in 1990, and induction into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1991. Crumb's oeuvre is extensive, and his work is recognized as a major cultural zeitgeist spanning over half a century. He spent his youth producing illustrations for comic books, greeting cards, and bubblegum cards, finally finding creative success in the late 1960s. A major figure in the underground comix movement of the late 20th century, the artist was born on Augin Philadelphia, PA to a poverty-stricken and troubled family life.

He is frequently described as a misanthrope and a perpetual malcontent, with his work being humorously irreverent, often sexually explicit, and admittedly influenced and inspired by hallucinations and drug use. Best known for his expressive and highly stylized pen-and-ink drawings, Crumb unapologetically skewers sex, religion, race, and contemporary American culture. Robert Crumb is a contemporary American satirist, comic artist, and illustrator.

Robert crumb drawings