11/21/2023 0 Comments Art robert crumbBut people who believe that the Bible is the word of God, you’re not going to please them. The text itself is so compelling that merely illustrating it is enough. But I whited it out later because it distracts from the text. I decided not to make fun of the text, not to put any kind of jokey stuff in there. But I just can’t help myself-obsessive-compulsive disorder.īut it does also seem like a labor of love. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail, it interferes with the flow of the reading process. You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand. It was an enormous amount of work-four years of work and barely worth it. I did it for the money and I quickly began to regret it. Well, the truth is kind of dumb, actually. When the tape was not rolling, we listened to many of Crumb’s favorites from a library of more than five thousand 78-rpm records-including Blind Mamie Forehand, Chubby Parker, and Skip James-witnesses to a past that never ceases to exist as long as the record is intact and the turntable spins. Books are packed in everywhere, and in his collections the centuries begin to crowd each other out-a Brueghel print from the fifteen hundreds hangs on the wall next to a racy ad from the nineteen forties. But modernity is not much of a threat inside his seventeenth-century home. Crumb is equally jaundiced toward the media, and remains distrustful of many aspects of contemporary life, including e-mail and the Internet. When the weary traveler finally locates Crumb’s house, where he lives with his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, a small sign in his unmistakable hand warns the mailman, pas de pub svp-no advertisements, please. It is a remarkable achievement for someone who came of age when the comic book was the lowest form of literary life imaginable, attacked by Congress and shunned or ignored by respectable society. In all of the places he has lived, Crumb has been a creator of books on his own terms, helping to spawn a thriving DIY print culture of zines and graphic novels that has revived and reinvented the comic form. But “cartoonist” fails to convey the full scope of the Crumb oeuvre, which includes the handmade comics he created as a teenager the underground periodicals he generated by the score in the sixties and the increasingly realistic work he has produced since then, probing the lives of twenties bluesmen, authors, biblical patriarchs, and his own family. These mountains have harbored many heretics over the centuries, but Crumb’s Genesis was an act of textual devotion, precise to the last “begat.”Ĭrumb is perhaps the most influential cartoonist of his or any generation, famous for decades of work that reflect an idiosyncratic variety of fascinations-arcane twenties music, everyday street scenes, the female form-yet have proved capable of mass appeal. Like a monastic scribe, he pursued his vision in a desolate shelter in the mountains outside town, working for weeks without human contact. I mean, Albanian.īut even this tiny community was too distracting when it came time to draw and ink the extraordinarily detailed illustrations for The Book of Genesis, which was published last year. He doesn’t, but his medieval hamlet is so far from the United States in every sense that it takes some perseverance to find, and upon locating it, I discovered that the streets of his walled village are too narrow to penetrate with even the tiniest French rental car. Robert Crumb asked me to say that he lives in Albania, to discourage would-be pilgrims from beating a path to his doorstep. Interviewed by Ted Widmer Issue 193, Summer 2010
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |