The Comics of R. Crumb ed. by Daniel Worden, and: R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self by David Stephen Calonne (review)

Two radically different books about the notorious but much-revered cartoonist/satirist/confessionalist R. Crumb have been published by the University Press of Mississippi. The first is a multiauthored, critical analysis of the cartoonist's complicated work and career; the second is a single-authored tribute. As scholarly studies, both books excel in some respects and falter in others—and those contrasting qualities become especially pronounced when the books are read in tandem.

We can begin with The Comics of R. Crumb., a collection of essays edited by Daniel Worden. Steeped in current cultural studies methods and theoretical frames, this book is objective and sober, "designed to provide new perspectives on Crumb and his comics, not to defend or celebrate the artist, but to offer archival and context-based assessment of Crumb's work" (8). The origins of the book have shaped its critical tone: it was imagined as an objective response to heated online debates over Crumb's legacy after a regional comics organization—the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo—decided to retire the honorary naming of a conference venue as Crumb Hall because of the cartoonist's problematic depictions of women and ethnic minorities.

Readers familiar with Crumb's career—perhaps through Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff's film about the artist—will recall that scholars and critics have long been conflicted about his comics and place in the history of popular culture. On the one hand, he is a cartooning virtuoso (melding classical cartooning tropes with a naturalistic inking style), an occasionally brilliant satirist (targeting most powerfully the vapid aspects of a consumeristic, celebrity-worshipping culture), and a fascinating chronicler of his own life and psyche (most recently in collaboration with his wife, fellow cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb). I remember being inspired by some of his best work when I was a graduate student back in the early 1990s; I admired how his rejection of traditional syndicates and publishing venues allowed him to be honest and innovative; he expanded the narrative and visual palettes of the medium and opened doors for alternative genres and hybrid forms to emerge.

At the same time, however, I remember becoming frustrated by how often Crumb used his freedom as an underground/alternative cartoonist to create work that felt irresponsible or self-indulgent. Most notoriously, he published some ostensibly satiric pieces "When the Niggers Take Over America Moreover" and "When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America," that were confusingly ambiguous in tone and representation. Readers were left to wonder if it was some kind of ironic commentary on far-right paranoia or just a careless purging of Crumb's own racist thoughts under the banner of satire. As a result, these cartoons were widely misread and even appropriated as propaganda material by neo-Nazi groups. Crumb's autobiographical pieces also degenerated too often into creepy psychosexual confessions and reductive depictions of women as fetishized objects. Perhaps Deidre English, in an interview in Zwigoff's film, described the problem most succinctly: "Crumb appears to 'get off' on stepping 'over the line of satire' and 'just producing pornography'" (35).

The Comics of R. Crumb addresses head on the problematic aspects of Crumb's career—and the first several essays ("Towards a Reconciliation of Satire and History in Crumb," by Jason S. Polley, "Crumb Agonistes: The Passions of a Disenchanted Utopian Scatologist," by Paul Sheehan, and "Reading, Looking, Feeling: Comix after Legitimacy," by Daniel Worden) are especially strong in their theoretical framing and methodology. Together, they create a sustained dialogue that is smart, objective, and tuned in to the current political zeitgeist. More specifically, Polley lays out the challenge of understanding Crumb's work as it "occupies a precarious or disputed contentious space, one between satire and hostility, between expressing and exposing...