Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

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‘Sick humor which serves no purpose’: Whiteman,

Angelfood and the aesthetics of obscenity in the
comix of R. Crumb

Brandon Nelson

To cite this article: Brandon Nelson (2017) ‘Sick humor which serves no purpose’: Whiteman,
Angelfood and the aesthetics of obscenity in the comix of R. Crumb, Journal of Graphic Novels and
Comics, 8:2, 139-155, DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2016.1272063

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1272063

Published online: 29 Dec 2016.

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Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2017
Vol. 8, No. 2, 139–155, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1272063

‘Sick humor which serves no purpose’: Whiteman, Angelfood and the

aesthetics of obscenity in the comix of R. Crumb
Brandon Nelson*

Department of English, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

(Received 1 September 2015; Accepted 11 December 2016)

The work of Robert Crumb has generated a great deal of controversy based on its
grotesque, demeaning depictions of women and ethnic minorities. While accusations
of misogyny and racism are certainly justified by the material, perhaps more notable in
the work is an inability to identify a coherent ideology that might form a basis for these
disturbing images. Instead of adhering to – or rebelling against – the late-1960s’
pacifism and progressivism associated with early American comix production, or the
demeaning imagery found in comics earlier in the twentieth century, Crumb appears to
reject any and all ideological positions simultaneously. The result bears a strong
relation to 1930s’ Surrealism in the fine arts in its emphasis on representation and
resistance to interpretation, creating an artistic dumping ground for the author’s
fetishes and antisocial preoccupations. The result is an apolitical phantasmagoria that
permits, by resisting the social and political norms surrounding its production and
initial popularity, unrestrained depictions of a variety of sexual and low-cultural
obsessions.
Keywords: R. Crumb; comix production; Surrealism; misogyny; ideology

Introduction
R. Crumb is described in A Complete History of American Comic Books as ‘the cantan-
kerous, misogynistic godfather of underground comix’ (Rhoades 2008, 95). An iconoclast
and founding member of the comix movement, to the extent that a cohesive membership
and creative direction can be identified and encapsulated by the ‘x’ modifier, Crumb did
not stop at defining his work as that of a comics auteur, as it were. Rather, his artistic
output in the comix heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s more resembles a bizarrely
consistent catalogue of obsessions and indulgences, seemingly less concerned with
analysing or critiquing the writer-artist’s own sexual and aesthetic peculiarities than
with capturing them on the page, pinned and preserved like butterflies on cork.
There also looms over Crumb’s work the spectre of the artist’s own prurient interests,
and potentially those of whatever segment of his readership might share his fetishistic
proclivities. Paired with the possibility that Crumb’s work is merely personalised porno-
graphy writ large are the very troubling representations of women and ethnic minorities,
exemplified in characters such as Angelfood McSpade, (also referred to as Angelfood
McDevilsfood) and the countless female acolytes of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The sum effect
of Crumb’s comix is one of a totalising obscenity that seems designed to elicit outrage or
disagreement from every political ideology, aesthetic preference, and personal taste
simultaneously. The question then becomes, to what end?

*Email: brandon.nelson@ucalgary.ca

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

140 B. Nelson

Although the sexual preoccupations remain consistent and persistent throughout

Crumb’s work of this period, it is the aesthetic design through which they are represented,
and the practical means of production and distribution through which they find a respon-
sive readership, that helps define the specific brand of obscenity developed therein. After
considering first the countercultural origins and nature of comix production, before
shifting focus on to the ways in which the aesthetic and political atavism in Crumb’s
work clashed with the radical readership this burgeoning industry appealed to, the
qualities of a distinct artistic practice become apparent.
Rather than appealing to a revolutionary artistic and political mode by condemning the
social and political establishment, or scoring points at the other end of the spectrum by
propping up traditional power structures, Crumb criticises and destabilises the utopian
ideals inherent in both reactionary and radical aesthetics of his and previous eras. His
work is ‘situated artistically in the world of the vernacular 1910s-40s’ as part of an effort
at ‘recapturing childhood memories of comics art’, although reconfiguring and transmo-
grifying might better describe Crumb’s surreal appropriation of these elements (Danky
and Kitchen 2009, 42). He expresses and elicits a totalising disgust that is content to exist
without further explication, representing a borderline nihilistic assertion that all ideology
and social persuasion is ruinous and devoid of ethical value. The sum effect of this
abjuration of the predominant codified systems of the burgeoning American culture wars
is a moral vacuum in which experiences of repression and oppression can be responded to
with fetish and the intentional oversaturation of previously normalised racist and mis-
ogynist imagery. By couching obscene depictions of violence and sexuality in the style of
American comics produced earlier in the twentieth century, and by reproducing offensive
racial and sexual caricatures absent of any obvious attempt to condemn or interrogate
them, the works of R. Crumb represent an aesthetic of perpetual and apolitical obscenity
that favours the collision of discordant styles and themes as its method for ultimately
achieving ideological nullification and correspondingly unfettered indulgence and
gratification.

Comix production and ideology

Even a casual reading of Crumb’s comix invites the reader to question his use of countless
forms of deeply troubling racist and misogynist caricature in his independently distributed
work, and the lack of commentary accompanying their representation on the page. Hillary
Chute makes the point succinctly by stating that ‘Crumb’s work – especially when
occupied with race and sexuality – makes the line between satire and embodiment a
difficult or impossible one’ (Chute 2010, 16). Whether these representations function as
endorsement, augmentation, condemnation, cathartic purge or some alternative to, or
combination of, these possible interpretations, these elements are revolting by design
and strangely at odds with the means by which they were produced. On the one hand, as
the analysis in Comics & Ideology notes, mainstream comics originating from ‘for-profit
business and distributed in routinised publication outlets . . . often [produce] messages that
especially flow with dominant ideology’ (McAllister, Sewell, Jr., and Gordon 2001, 7–8).
Conversely, underground comix publications are identified in this analysis with
‘oppositional culture . . . grounded in the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s’.
Jean-Paul Gabilliet (2010, 67) notes that comix generally ‘propagated an antiestablish-
ment ideology in which many supporters of the New Left recognised themselves’. While
the presence of a market hungry for creative material that could be viewed as aligning
with countercultural ideology might have had something to do with the emergence of
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 141

comix, the method of their production and distribution also had an impact on their
aesthetic qualities and the resulting acceptance by youth culture. Comix proliferated the
marketplace by ‘taking advantage of cheap printing technology such as offset litho
printing and alternative outlets like music stores and “head shops”’ (McAllister, Sewell,
Jr., and Gordon 2001, 8).
Arriving immediately following the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury district of
San Francisco, Crumb’s work would be instrumental in creating and serving a market for
comics featuring explicit or irreverent content that could be seen as socially and politically
compatible with the burgeoning hippie movement. Although the works that predated Zap
Comix were often published pseudonymously, with the threat of social ostracism and legal
ramifications hanging over them, Crumb’s work was published under his own name and
distributed in person by the artist and his then-wife (Rhoades 2008, 95). The development
of a personalised brand, coupled with the fact that ‘Crumb’s comic book mingled
unquestionably original graphics with an incisive and non-didactic outlook that reflected
the era’s rebellious mindset’, ensured that, on a superficial level, Zap Comix would
conform to the counterculture and shape the underground comic marketplace that would
serve it for many years to follow (Gabilliet 2010, 66). Only after further analysis does the
arguable incompatibility of Crumb’s vision with the apparent ideals of the zeitgeist in
which it was produced become clear.
Although Crumb’s work certainly fits the bill as artistic expression falling outside the
norms of mainstream distribution, given its relationship with counterculture poster printer
turned publisher, Print Mint, it is surprisingly out of step with many aspects of the socially
progressive hippie subculture and its ostensible, and arguable, values of pacifism, femin-
ism and racial equality. In fact, by the early 1970s, his stories frequently position hippies
as the targets of ridicule, presenting them as gullible, disingenuous, lacking in indivi-
duality and critical discernment, and already disillusioned with the validity of their
movement less than half a decade after its inception. The previously mentioned Jumpin’
Jack Flash, a messianic, Manson-esque figure that seems to function as a more overtly and
deliberately destructive version of the comparatively harmless Mr. Natural, demonstrates
the tendency of Crumb’s work towards sexism and mockery of late-1960s and early-
1970s’ progressivism. Flash spouts nonsensical, florid pseudo-philosophy to a coterie of
female followers, all of whom display a fanatical devotion so extreme that they willingly
and enthusiastically murder one another to gain his approval (Figure 1, Crumb 2013,
40–41).
This piece can support a few conflicting readings from a feminist perspective,
although few of them would be particularly flattering to women, and none bode well
for harmonious interaction between the sexes. From one angle, the female characters are
entirely credulous and devotional, worshipping the male figure as a font of wisdom and
sexual fulfilment – somehow derived from pleasuring him exclusively – while attacking
and betraying each other in pursuit of male approval. On the other hand, the implication
may simply be that male influence is a toxic force in the lives of women, who are held
sway by men in a culture that positions males as the exclusive source of higher cognition,
even in the supposedly progressive bastion of a hippie cult.
Of course, there is the final coda, the perspective of which is unclear in a way that
forces the reader to interpret it as the voice of Crumb. Captioning the final panel, in which
Flash has sex with the corpse of one of his followers (Figure 1) amidst the bodies of the
others, is the comment, ‘. . .Which proves once again that women are no goddamn good!’
(Crumb 2013, 41). This unsubtle provocation, although perhaps in keeping with the brutal
misogyny drawn on the page, seems almost offhand and apropos of nothing in the story, a
142 B. Nelson

Figure 1. “Jumpin’ Jack flash!” The Complete Crumb Comics, Volume 8.

Note: Copyright © Robert Crumb, 1971. Used with Permission.
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 143

blanket condemnation that is nevertheless mild and ineffectual compared with the
deranged acts depicted. The dialogue in the panel – ‘I am you. . . Anything you see in
me is you. . . I am just a mirror. . .’ – makes a gesture towards implicating the reader in the
misogynistic depravity, but there is no indication of the form this mass bamboozling of
women is actually taking beyond the literalised metaphor of the story, evocative as it is of
roughly concurrent events surrounding the Tate–LaBianca murders (Crumb 2013, 41).
There can perhaps be no satisfactory answer to the ideological puzzle of the comic’s
intended message, if the extremely precarious assumption that there is an intended
message can be made, because Crumb favours representation over analysis here, as he
nearly always does. While Flash and his followers display many of the symptoms of the
failed utopian zeal that can be found in a retrospective examination of the hippie move-
ment and which saw its nadir in the Manson Family murders, Crumb’s work does not
extend beyond embodying it. There is an intellectually inert quality to Crumb’s repre-
sentation, an outrage expressed in grotesquery and surrealistic exaggeration, but with no
implied interpretation, and, perhaps thankfully, no proffered solution. The moral act of
telling this story, if there is one, resides entirely in the telling. It is a moral statement of
disgust, but one expressed in simple degrees, a message encoded using a linear scale that
allows for more or less outrage and contempt, but without the ability to modulate laterally
to accommodate any sense of ambiguity or variance in emotional tonality. The point of the
work, if it can be theorised that there is one, can only be illustrated by evaluating the
actions of its characters as a quantity, their qualities having been established too early and
too consistently in the story to register in any way besides their position on the scale in
relation to normal or mainstream behaviour.
While it may seem irrational for Crumb to condemn and deride the sorts of
individuals who had been responsible for his early success and allowed him to avoid
the day jobs mainstream society had on offer for young cartoonists, scholars suggest
that this quality may have been inherent in Crumb, his work, and the comix industry so
influenced by him. James Danky and Denis Kitchen point out the belief of Harvey
Kurtzman, whose Mad and Help! heavily influenced the new generation, that under-
ground comix ‘sowed the seeds of their own destruction by choosing to represent
rebellion and by rejecting the traditional rewards of the “free market.”’ They go on to
quote Kurtzman directly: ‘Like the Shakers who didn’t believe in sex, the underground
didn’t believe in survival. . . As Gilbert Shelton . . . put it, “If we succeed, we’ve
failed.” . . . The underground cartoonists had a suicidal philosophy, and the ones I
knew were all very frustrated guys, torn between a desire for material success and a
contempt for it’ (Danky and Kitchen 2009, 25–26).
Crumb’s relationship with, and representation of, what might be called square culture
illuminates the ideological function he is performing in his work. In some ways, rather than
embracing the posture of pure radicalism and vocal rebellion that existed around him, Crumb
carried over the combination of implied wholesomeness and racial and sexual hierarchism
from his previous jobs at American Greetings and Topps to his creative work, albeit applying
it to obscene content that would have been in stark contrast to his commercial work. As Corey
Creekmur describes it, ‘Crumb’s racial/racist comics draw upon earlier historical modes and
models once common among the sorts of cheap artifacts – mammy cookie jars, Uncle Tom
figurines, Topsy dolls – the cultural historian Patricia A. Turner has called “contemptible
collectibles”’ (29). Although Crumb’s use of such contemptible racial representations offers
far too little evidence of subversion or reconfiguration to be considered revolutionary,
‘Crumb’s defenders insist his “recovery” of these images may have functioned as a direct
144 B. Nelson

challenge to their suppression (and repression), a confrontation with the past that undermined
a naïve belief in the real power of progressive images’ (29).
Leonard Rifas counters this position to a certain extent by contrasting the various uses
of caricature along racial lines within the comics medium, rather than simply trying to
locate its political and ethical standing outside of comics. Rifas first summarises the
position of the artists who ‘defend the stereotypes in their work by saying that the art of
cartooning is based on simplification, generalization, distortion and exaggeration.’
However, he differentiates the ways that these techniques are utilised based on ethnicity:

Caricatures become racist stereotypes, though, when instead of exaggerating an individual’s

particular features to bring out his or her unique humanity, the cartoonist suppresses the
individuality of a person’s appearance to bring the portrait into conformity with a pre-existing
racial stereotype. (Rifas 2004)

As sexualised as Crumb’s female characters – and as bland as his white male

protagonists – are, they are generally distinguishable from one another.
Many of Crumb’s white protagonists would have been considered square by the
Haight-Ashbury readership, and while this market may have appreciated the satirical
and grotesque take on these characters, they are hardly used as mere ideological punching
bags. If Crumb’s lamentation, that there is no square culture left in a society increasingly
saturated by media and self-awareness, can be applied to a critical reading of his work,
then perhaps this archetype is being used to both undermine the revolutionary idealism of
leftist political ideologues while simultaneously giving it a reason to continue to exist.
Without The Man – or Whiteman, in this case – who remains to rebel against?
The perspective of the sexually repressed square – alienated despairing white men
pondering their place in a new social schema that doesn’t accept their aberrant sexual
impulses or presumed cultural supremacy, stuck out of time in a strange pastiche of
Americana that had in many cases entered the annals of history by the time the comix
themselves were published – is often what drives the work, rather than being used as a foil
or for comical support. No idealised persona representing a preferred ideology is trum-
peted or supported; rather, various archaic, oblivious, neurotic, yet pathetically hopeful
straight (in both the comedic and sexual senses of the word) men are set up for humilia-
tion and derision by a narrative that heaps misfortune and shame upon them. Often, the
straight men are granted a sexual trophy at the end, seemingly as compensation or
consolation for the humiliations they have been made to endure, provided usually in the
final panel by an inert, purely accommodating female who receives his sexual attention
with unawareness or slobbering gratitude. The act of sex is used as an aesthetic tool, so
base and animalistic that it can exist outside the realm of social hierarchies, consumerist
impulses, and political posturing. (Figure 2, Crumb 2013, 11).
This concept is literalised in ‘Whiteman Meets Big Foot’ (Figure 2), the tale of a bland
suburbanite who escapes into nature and the sexual embrace of a female so removed from
the prevailing socio-political conversation that she isn’t even human. The sexual revolu-
tion has not happened in the forest, the comic implies, because it didn’t need to happen.
The fact that ‘Big Foot gives his daughter to Whiteman as mate’, or that Whiteman’s first
sexual act towards the female Yeti begins when she is asleep, is rendered apolitical and
uncritically amoral, allowed to exist in what, in this comic at least, seems to be the only
utopia Crumb will advocate in his work: the natural realm and the uninhibited sexual
impulse that is presumed to accompany it (Crumb 2013, 13). The fact that Whiteman’s
Big Foot bride has the physical dimensions preferred by Crumb’s ‘admitted fetish’ for
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 145

Figure 2. ‘Whiteman meets big foot’. The Complete Crumb Comics, Volume 8.
Note: Copyright © Robert Crumb, 1971. Used with Permission.
146 B. Nelson

‘dominant women’ who are later subdued by male sexual conquest is, of course, purely
coincidental (Danky and Kitchen 2009, 63).
That Crumb could simultaneously alienate the readerships of both mainstream and
underground comics with his work while using it as a vehicle for conveying his personal
sexual proclivities suggests that the egalitarian mode of publication and minimal editorial
oversight inherent in the comix industry had created a culture of iconoclasts and auteurs.
This would at least seem to be true at the critical and financial apex of alternative
publishing where Crumb resided, although fellow artist Bill Griffith is quoted in
Underground Classics grousing about the tendency for ‘Print Mint [to] publish both
treasure and trash without discrimination’. As Griffith phrases it:

A cartoonist would come in with a thirty-two page story of their acid trip and they’d publish
it, and then next week they’d print the next issue of Zap or whatever. They didn’t distinguish;
they did not discriminate. And for a while that was not a bad economic sense to have, because
everything was selling. (Danky and Kitchen 2009, 24–25)

But as the market flooded and demand dropped, Crumb’s refusal to be identified with
any single ideology or aesthetic would seem to be a factor in promoting his longevity and
continued visibility relative to his artistic peers. The editor’s free hand helped foment in
Crumb’s work a combative and grotesque – yet self-consciously naïve – style so uniquely
reflective of the artist’s psyche that questions of authorial intent would extend beyond
mere ideological contrariness. Crumb’s work, perhaps more than most literary or artistic
works, including those enjoying comparable freedom from editorial and ideological
constriction, seems inextricably and notably linked with the artist. As much as the
separation of the author from the work has been emphasised in textual analysis, and as
productive as this emphasis has arguably been, Crumb uses various strategies in addition
to political contrariness and a self-determinative production model to undermine this
schism and suggest the possibility that he is his work.

Crumb as himself
Chute describes the peculiar ability of the comics medium to imply a close relationship
between work and creator by noting that:

handwriting underscores the subjective positionality of the author. . . This subjective presence
of the maker is not retranslated through type, but, rather, the bodily mark of handwriting both
provides a visual quality and texture and is also extrasemantic, a performative aspect of
comics. (Crumb 2010, 11)

As much as this argument implies a generic predisposition towards autobiography in

comics, a brief description of a self-portrait by Crumb in Underground Comics makes an
addendum to the point by claiming that, while all artists permeate their work to some
extent, including in mainstream comics, it can be said that:

comix tend to particularly lend themselves to this mode of self-expression, where the artist
can be part of the frame both visually and through his words. Crumb has chronicled his
experiences and fantasies to the extent that his life is a virtual open book to his readers.
(Danky and Kitchen 2009, 61)

While this assumption of congruity between art and creator can often be misguided in a
close reading, Crumb does seem to invite it aesthetically, which lends worth to an analysis
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 147

of his work on these terms, regardless of how true or specious the assumption might be. If
it is indeed true that ‘there is not much of a filter between Robert’s mind and pen’, even
taking into account the possibilities for self-expression offered by Print Mint, then such a
conclusion would force the question of whether content that occupies, or preoccupies, the
mind of a creator can be considered as the personal beliefs or motivations of that
individual (Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 342).
In their article, ‘Focalization in Graphic Narrative’, Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri
(2011, 331) contend that ‘optical perspectivation is only one dimension within a broader
category of focalization that also includes aspects of cognition, ideological orientation,
and judgment’. In this grouping of narratological concepts can be found a series of
guideposts for examining how Crumb structures his relationship to his narratives within
the previously established auteur-driven comix industry. This view of focalisation not
only emphasises the perspective through which the reader perceives the narrative unfold-
ing, but also is inclusive of elements such as ideology, morality and interpretation. The
latter three, in the context of focalisation, can be defined by the way they permeate or
shape the contents of the panel, rather than simply limiting or directing the reader’s view
of said content.
As noted previously, Crumb’s antipathy to popular ideological models, whether
prescribed or proscribed by contemporaneous attitudes in the comics industry, makes
any analysis of his work examine a far more individualised ideology. In terms of
focalisation, this ideology can be described as narratological perspective – not just what
is being seen and by whom, but how the elements in the frame exist to be seen. As
Horstkotte and Pedri (2011, 332) make clear, focalisation ‘includes cognitive as well as
perceptual processes’. But, importantly, the source of this cognition may not necessarily
trace to an individual character on the page:

Two distinct kinds of vantage points can be embedded in a narrative: a personal one
associated with a character and an impersonal one associated with a narrator . . .
Focalization operates at the discourse level [emphasis in original], since it is here that textual
signals cue the reader to reconstruct the storyworld under the aspectuality of a specific
fictional mind. (Horstkotte and Pedri 2011, 335)

Even before a protagonist has the chance to see and interpret the world on the page,
the world has been shaped illustratively and textually to conform to a conceptual mode.
The social and sexual singularity – and depravity – of Crumb’s world is present before
ProJunior or Flakey Foont have the chance to see it as such.
As is frequently the case with Crumb, his narratological and ideological framework is
most apparent in the treatment of the female form. Whereas analysing the text through a
visual or perspectival lens would acknowledge, for example, that many of the male
characters in Crumb’s work are visually preoccupied by female buttocks, a broader
cognitive survey of the contents of the page would consider how and why nearly all
female buttocks on the page are notably large and shapely. The gaze of the male
characters doesn’t sexualise the female body, in this case. Rather, in nearly all of these
comics, the female body is pre-sexualised, retrofitted with the physical attributes that
inspire ravenous lust before the male characters on the page have a chance to affix their
sexual gaze on a female character. Rather than merely directing the reader’s focus, the
overarching perspective, existing beyond individual characters within the narrative,
shapes and defines bodies and objects at the moment of their first existence on the page
to meet physical, tonal and, perhaps, ideological specifications that are common across
148 B. Nelson

nearly all contemporaneous works by Crumb. This creates two nearly contravening
effects: the first exculpates the male characters by presenting their sexualising and
demeaning behaviour towards women as preordained by the physicality and nature of
those women, and the second paradoxically implicates a male narratological voice, a voice
that can perhaps be viewed as some version of Crumb himself.
When looking at the focalisation methodology used in specific comics, it is helpful to
divide characterisation and narrative voice into categories nearer or farther from the
persona of Crumb, relative to one another. The farthest might be female characters,
particularly those that are anthropomorphised nonhuman characters, such as the female
Big Foot and the vulture demonesses. All such characters exist as fetish objects, albeit
occasionally given the opportunity to display agency or private thoughts, although these
are arguably included for the same sexualised reason. Likely included in this group in a
nonsexual capacity would be non-white male caricatures such as Salty Dog Sam, who are
simply densely compressed alloys of multiple decades of stereotypes animated and given
a narrative task.
Closer than these individuals to the focal core would be the white, male characters not
named Crumb. These men, exemplified by Whiteman, Eggs Ackley, Flakey Foont,
ProJunior, and arguably the anthropomorphised Fritz the Cat, are usually the central
focus of the narrative. Within this group there is variation too, notably from characters
such as Stinko the Clown, Misters Natural and Snoid, and Jumpin’ Jack Flash who are
intractable, unreflective beings designed to be foils, often for the aforementioned straight
men, who illustrate narrative concepts by eliciting reactions and receiving feedback to
which they are impervious.
The final two categories are more difficult in terms of navigating the tricky divide
between art and creator. Second nearest to the artist himself are the men on the page
named after him. For instance, in the eighth volume of his collected works, these various
Crumb avatars appear in four separate stories: ‘The Truth!’, ‘A Word to You Feminist
Women’, ‘The Confessions of R. Crumb’ and ‘The R. Crumb $uck$e$$ Story’. All four
of these narratives feature Crumb as a character addressing the reader directly, with
specific reference to the ‘fans’, ‘folks’ and ‘girls’ that are presumed to be reading, as
well as eye contact, notwithstanding Crumb’s reflective glasses (Crumb 2013, 118,
114, 73).
The last and most uncanny impersonations of the artist on the page are the
captions, framing techniques and devices, and the actual credits. The latter element
in particular is thought by a conventional comics reading to exist outside the narrative,
concerned only with the business of conveying information from the ‘actual’ world
without disrupting the aesthetic flow either just established or just concluding. When
the narrative intrudes on the commercial, seemingly non- or extradiegetic elements on
the page, the focalisation is not only forced to the extradiegetic plane, but directed
towards the author because of the location of this narrative breach. This effect is
enunciated by Horstkotte and Perdi (2011, 351) when they note ‘the introduction of
uncommon symbols and framing devices that are incongruent in their sequential
context. The latter encode a more broadly conceived aspectuality that is not reducible
to sense perception but includes aspects of cognition and judgment’. Is it safe to
assume that the artist’s signature, and whichever gleefully inflammatory or defensive
statements may be contained therein, represent the actual artist? Is it safe to assume
this of other related elements?
Crumb, as his own avatar on the page, at times makes the claim that there is no
purpose to the vast and multitudinous offense his work causes. In ‘Anal Antics’, the blurb
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 149

next to the title proclaims that the story is comprised of ‘MORE SICK HUMOR WHICH
SERVES NO PURPOSE’. Interpolated into the artist’s signature is the phrase ‘What-
Does-It-All-Mean?’, hyphenated as if it were such a defining quality of his work that it
became the basis for a sobriquet (Crumb 2013, 63). Is the question reflexive and meant to
express the doubt and conflicted thoughts residing in the artist, or are the words being
placed ironically in the mouths of perplexed, outraged readers who are defining Crumb
the artist by their inability to discern meaning or merit in his work? While both are
plausible, the latter seems more likely given the context of Crumb’s other nods to what he
seems to view and relish as a moralising, combative readership, in the title panels and
signatures of other works.
For instance, ‘Eggs Escapes’ is written and drawn by R. ‘Excuse Me For Living’
Crumb (2013, 44). Crumb displays more contempt for his crossover successes by signing
the comic titled ‘ProJunior’ with R. ‘Mr. Keep on Truckin’ Crumb (2013, 104). Another
formal interjection from the artist appears to take place in ‘A Gurl’, the loving ode to and
exploitation of a shapely female whom Crumb affectionately but exactingly puppeteers
through various physical rigours and bizarre poses. The title panel of this story is notable
for having two hearts joined with an arrow, which is interesting considering that there is
only one character in the story, and no other character eligible to receive the Gurl’s love is
even mentioned, unless her abusive father, who is only mentioned and never appears, is
counted. Thus, the second heart would seem to be an extradiegetic representation of the
artist’s view of his own character. This is arguably confirmed by the closing phrase ‘The
End’ being couched in a heart (Crumb 2013, 57, 62).
‘A Word to You Feminist Women’ is ‘from that ol’ male-chauvinist pig, R. Crumb
himself!!’ (Crumb 2013, 73). This story makes more use of the artist’s reflexive repre-
sentation by using Crumb himself as the central character, as a means of delivering what
seems to be a personal repudiation of feminist criticisms of his work. His message is given
vocal support by Mr. Snoid from what appears to be an entirely different location in the
last panel, indicating that the author’s voice permeates all conceivable realms that could
be represented on the page, and is not just limited to the character called Crumb. This is of
a kind with the previously established permeation of contrarian politics and sexual
perversion throughout all perspectives, locations and characters in these comics.
Unlike in ‘A Word to You Feminist Women’ and other stories in which Crumb appears
under his own name in the narrative, ‘Confessions’ is unique in that Crumb also takes
several distinct forms visually. He first appears under the title as a more stylised cartoon
figure in no way resembling his actual body, proclaiming ‘My life is an open book . . . to a
point!’ as if to play with the reader’s uncertainty over whether the author is actually being
represented with any accuracy. This is followed by a reasonable approximation of the real
Crumb, shown working as a cartoonist. Next, the story depicts a showman Crumb vaguely
reminiscent of Groucho Marx. Finally arrives the infant Crumb, emerging from the womb
replete with trademark glasses and facial hair just in time to engage in one of the more
literal and revolting Oedipal indulgences to be found in comics (Crumb 2013, 114–117).
This embrace of the artist-as-character occupying shifting, frequently oppositional
forms on the page mimics the juxtaposition and incongruity that marks Crumb’s work
as a whole, and is exemplified in 1972’s ‘The Many Faces of R. Crumb’. In this piece,
Crumb appears in various forms described by the captions as ‘Crumb the long-suffering,
patient artist-saint’, ‘ . . . cruel, calculating, cold-hearted, fascist creep’, ‘ . . . passionate
revolutionary and friend of the little guy’, ‘ . . . sex-crazed fiend and pervert’ and so on
(Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 186–187). Perhaps no other work by this artist directly
enunciates his process of interjecting himself to create a multifarious, contradictory
150 B. Nelson

cognitive and ideological void in which only representation and juxtaposition exist, all as
a means of displaying contemptible and immoral human behaviour that might otherwise
only be insidiously implied in media and culture.
Working under a tolerant editorial process, Crumb has been able to explore what he
refers to as ‘my own inner demons to deal with. Drawing is a way for me to articulate things
inside myself that I can’t otherwise grasp’ (Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 393). Psychological
articulation, rather than analysis, is the central process of Crumb comix, and his character-
isation of a collection of art by his daughter as ‘a sort of clinical study, a psychological
textbook’ suggests that this view of the function and purpose of art extends beyond his own
(S. Crumb, A. Crumb, and R. Crumb 2011, 8). Afforded the freedoms of independent
comix production, Crumb as an artist and persona is driven to quite simply, in his words,

draw grotesque, lurid, or absurd pictures, and I especially enjoy depicting my fevered sexual
obsessions . . . Ugly, weird little guys doing bizarre, twisted things to buxom women. This
part of my work repels a lot of people. But as fate would have it, I became famous anyway.
(Crumb and Poplaski 2005, 393)

The reconfiguration of ‘gurls’ in Crumb

In ‘Fritz the Cat “Superstar”’, another of Crumb’s possible stand-ins is killed off after
reaching the height of his fame and success – a fitting conclusion to commercial success
and celebrity in the comix milieu. In this story, Fritz, a ‘third-level’ approximation of
Crumb, interacts with non-human female characters in several ways that illuminate other
such interactions in the collection. As is so often the case with Crumb, the females are
fetishised – in the words of Fritz: ‘Strictly an aristocratic cunt, man!! No shit!! That’s how
I like ’em, y’know? Tall ‘n’ proud . . .it’ s more fun to cut ‘em down ta size!!’ (Crumb
2013, 125). Even as the females offer Fritz unbridled devotion and sexual enthusiasm, he
derides them and their adoration of him as ‘pathetic’. This view of sexuality as inherently
contemptible, combative and characterised by violence and degradation towards women
in particular seems to be echoed in Crumb’s own comments on the subject, in which he
laments that ‘sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his
dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her’ (Crumb and
Poplaski 2005, 386). In the same story featuring Fritz, another recurrent image makes an
appearance: the female form in some way twisted, stretched or strained by the male
characters into impossible, cartoony, yet horrifying positions. In this case, Fritz hides from
an accountant in the mouth and throat of his paramour, a sexualised female alligator, who
stands inert with her mouth grotesquely distended for several panels when Fritz decides to
emerge and converse with a besuited bear (Crumb 2013, 124). This distension of the
female body is usually presented as an act of conquest or simple reverie at the freedom
from physics afforded to the cartoonist.
This device proves its versatility when it is used to embody – quite literally – the
practice of males seeking comfort in the bodies of women in the two-page comic entitled
‘Anal Antics’, in which the pint-sized, anthropomorphised id known as Mr. Snoid features
alongside an unnamed female character in whose anus he permanently resides. Eggs
Ackley also escapes from the vulture demonesses by forcing the head of the queen into
her own rectum before commandeering her body, using her breasts as a steering mechan-
ism (Figure 3). Angelfood McDevilsfood is placed upside down in a body of water, also
by Mr. Snoid, and used as a stand or foundation for a treehouse, the pole of which is
lodged in her vagina. She later sits inside the same treehouse that a panel earlier she was
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 151

Figure 3. ‘Eggs Ackley in eggs escapes’. The Complete Crumb Comics, Volume 8.
Note: Copyright © Robert Crumb, 1971. Used with Permission.
152 B. Nelson

large enough to support, further confounding physics along with even the faintest feminist
leanings of Crumb’s readership (2013, 63, 52, 7). Notably, the female protagonist in ‘A
Gurl’ is repositioned and sexualised without any visible male figure present, because no
male avatar is required for the narratological perspective unique to Crumb’s work to enact
itself on the female form. Critically, it is not actions (committed by male characters) which
most clearly delineate this focalised perspective, but the effects of those actions (on their
object, the female body), regardless of who perpetrates them.
This use of rubbery body morphism and its relationship to representations of
deeply buried misogynistic or racist imagery excavated, and perhaps extirpated, from
the artist’s mind is reminiscent of Surrealism in the visual arts. A movement or style
known to make use of ‘images of the female body dismantled, dismembered,
aggressed, turned inside out, recomposed to please men’s wildest erotic fantasies’
(Cottenet-Hage 1991, 76), Surrealism would seem to bear some claim on Crumb’s
bizarre, sordid reconfiguring of supposedly wholesome early-twentieth-century
Americana, much of which would have been published concurrently with the work
produced by the founding Surrealists. And, as Susan Laxton notes of the methodology
of Surrealism, it is defined as:

a capacity for producing unforeseeable juxtapositions whose effects [are] shared by collage
and montage, [mimicking] the structures of the unconscious in order to mirror the ‘ready-
made’ mental images of secondary revision. . . It must always embody this tension between
the familiar and the unrecognizable. (Laxton, 2012, 156)

In much the same way, the fetishised female bodies that so preoccupy Crumb by his
own admission are turned over and around, folded and twisted and bent, not for the
purposes of inspection or reflection, but for a kind of sexual decontextualisation and
gratification unavailable in the physical world. (Figure 3, Crumb 2013, 51).
Salvador Dalí is a highly visible precursor to Crumb’s use of the female form, as
seen in works such as Le Rêve, which represents the passive, automatic state of
dreaming via a wavy, undulating female form on which ‘the eyes and lips have
been sealed, the figure turned completely in on herself’ (Harris 2004, 195). The fact
that Dali would use the term ‘stray breasts’ as a visual category threading through
many of his works illustrates the prevalent use of the female body as a disordered
symbolic object in his work. These free-floating breasts are ‘object fragments that
have been released from the larger structure from which they had once functioned as a
meaningful part. Stray breasts were but one of a long list of little things that Dalí
sought to deterritorialize’ (Rothman 2012, 34).
Dalí is hardly unique among the Surrealists, considering the contorted feminine figure
and gaping vagina in André Masson’s Gradiva, the disembodied female legs and buttocks
of Dora Maar, and the headless, nude torsos of Roland Penrose (Remy 1999, 187).
Crumb’s work adapts these fetishised, protean female forms to his peculiar ends by
contextualising them in the tradition of racist and sexist imagery in American comics
and cartooning. Spanning decades and continents, Crumb’s work and that of his Surrealist
forebears form a continuum that seeks to confront and oppose in bourgeois, realistic
traditions ‘the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable’, as
enunciated in André Breton’s original 1924 Surrealist Manifesto (1969, 9). In the same
text, the method by which the observed feminine body is conceptually deployed in this
effort is further explicated in the following passage:
 Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 153

[the waking mind] confines itself to verifying that such and such an idea, or such and such a
woman, has made an impression on it . . . This idea, this woman, disturb it . . . Who can say to
me that the angle by which that idea which affects it is offered, that what it likes in the eye of
that woman, is not precisely what links it to its dream. (Breton 1969, 13)

The metaphysical woman limned by the Surrealists and by Crumb does not live in
their respective dreams, because she does not live at all on the canvas or the page; rather,
their dreams live and are expressed artistically in her inert form, which they reshape at
will to accommodate those dreams. Female bodies are in this way the centre of Crumb’s
narratological voice, and the extremity and unrealism of their reshaping divorce such
action from any coherent sociological perspective and the value judgements that would
accompany it.
As with the Surrealists, extreme female bodies unmoored from prevailing standards of
propriety and physical integrity are found in the work of Aline Kominsky-Crumb. A
contemporaneous comix artist and Crumb’s eventual wife, her material faced criticism
from feminist critics for many of the same reasons as that of her husband. However, her
work achieves very different ends than that of Crumb; it is preoccupied with ‘“excessive”
bodies . . . which [disrupt] a masculinist economy of knowledge production.’ Nonetheless,
it has been met with resistance for the ways that it ‘depicts the character Aline’s body –
excrement, blood, and vaginal discharge’, and also in response to ‘uninhibited representa-
tions of her own forceful sexuality in a light that is not always palatable, or favorable’
(Chute 2010, 30). But Chute calls attention to countless dissenting opinions, including
fellow artist Mary Fleener, for whom ‘the constantly morphing and shifting, satirically
disproportionate physical figure of Goldie was both painful and funny – Fleener specifi-
cally mentions a panel depicting Goldie, with a tiny head, enormous nose, and gigantic
lower body’ (36). The elastic female form presented in the context of the difficulties and
loathing inherent in self-representation – rather than as a demonstration of the unlimited
possibilities of aesthetic fetishism and objectification – lends the same technique poign-
ancy in place of revulsion and moral uncertainty. It should also be noted that by the 1980s,
Crumb would create female characters such as Mode O’Day, who notably appears in
publications edited by Kominsky-Crumb, that are less overtly sexualised and present a
domineering persona and towering stature for cultural and satirical reasons that extend
beyond their eroticised challenge to a neutered male seeking vindication through physical
conquest.

Conclusion
Notwithstanding Crumb’s willingness to be ‘savage in the face of his own physical and
moral shortcomings’, Crumb’s own body and that of other male figures maintain their
shape and integrity on the page, although this may partly owe to the vocal and focal
mutability of the Crumb persona as it is effected in its various male stand-ins and formal
interventions (El Refaie 2012, 37). Crumb is not interested in reconfiguring male bodies,
even as he filters aspects of his personality through various metonymical doubles. In his
use of the female form in his early work, Crumb creates a surreal intertwining of body
horror and talking animals, cartoonish amiability and depraved sexual violence, radical
antiauthoritarianism and reactionary misogyny and racism. His is a world built from
material plumbed from the depths of a conflicted mind terminally unwilling to abandon
the irreconcilable chasm of juxtaposed opposites for the sturdy but apparently banal perch
of a moral stand.
154 B. Nelson

Unbound by the rigours of any ideological or ethical establishment – paralleled by a

surreal detachment from even the laws of physics and physiology – as a benefit of the
comix medium, his iconoclasm and unconventional publishing history within it, and a
readership with an appetite for unbridled irreverence, Crumb is able to gesture, sometimes
perfunctorily, towards satire and subversion of patriarchal xenophobia in his early work
while also veering towards doubling down on these power structures. However, the
ambiguity on this point, which relates to an inability or refusal to convey a coherent
refutation or confirmation of any single perspective on such imagery, besides its ability to
provoke, creates a thematic void that can be occupied uncritically with depictions of
sexual and cultural obscenity tailored to the artist’s personal, explicitly focalised bent.
That this process serves an autoerotic purpose on behalf of the author seems, by his own
words, fairly likely, but it may also, in spite of the motivations behind it, yield value to the
less viscerally engaged reader. This is achieved not by considering the natural end of self-
gratification, which produces nothing of consequence and requires no further explication,
but by, in Crumb’s case, retracing his course through American grotesquery, subjugation,
depredation and debasement along which his self-gratification is found.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Brandon Nelson is a second-year Master of Arts student in the graduate English programme at the
University of Calgary, specialising in creative writing. He would like to thank Dr Bart Beaty for his
guidance in researching and writing this paper.

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