…But 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. Like a monastic scribe, he pursued his vision in a desolate shelter in the mountains outside town, working for weeks without human contact. These mountains have harbored many heretics over the centuries, but Crumb’s Genesis was an act of textual devotion, precise to the last “begat.”

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. Crumb is equally jaundiced toward the media, and remains distrustful of many aspects of contemporary life, including e-mail and the Internet. But modernity is not much of a threat inside his 17^th-century home. Books are packed in everywhere, and in his collections the centuries begin to crowd each other out—a Bruegel print from the 1500s hangs on the wall next to a racy ad from the 1940s. When the tape was not rolling, we listened to many of Crumb’s favorites from a library of more than 5,000 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.

Crumb: Well, the truth is kind of dumb, actually. I did it for the money and I quickly began to regret it. It was an enormous amount of work—4 years of work and barely worth it. I was too compulsive about the detail. With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail, it interferes with the flow of the reading process. But I just can’t help myself—obsessive-compulsive disorder.

…In my mid-teens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual. My brother Charles admired Saint Francis, he’d walk around with stones in his shoes. But soon we started to see through it, my brother and I started questioning the church and it fell apart very quickly for us.

…I had to argue with them to let me call it “illustrated.” They wanted to call it The Book of Genesis According to R. Crumb but I preferred “illustrated by.” I wanted a humbler position. It’s an illustration job, OK? Illustration has a bad name in modern culture because for decades artists who were “mere illustrators” were considered inferior to fine artists. Being an illustrator was looked down upon. It meant you were not really a creative person, you just had the technical skills that you were lending to someone else’s ideas. It’s all bulls—t though—the fine-art world, the myth of the creative genius artist.

I made the drawings nice, and the people who like that kind of thing, the esthetics, are impressed, but the most important thing is actually illustrating everything that’s in there. That’s the most important contribution I made.

…My brother [Charles] got me drawing comic books at a really young age and I never thought of doing anything else. It’s all I ever could do.

…I was so eccentric when I was 17, 18, I used to walk around town wearing an Abe Lincoln frock coat and a stovepipe hat that I’d found in some junk store, defying people to ridicule me or think me eccentric. I was a teenage social outcast. At the time it made me feel very depressed, and rejected by girls. Later I realized I was actually quite lucky because it freed me. I was free to develop and explore on my own all these byways of the culture that, if you’re accepted, you just don’t do. I was free to explore the things that interested me.

…I was drawing prolifically. I lived out my youth on paper, basically. I am a bookmaker. I see blank books, I want to fill them—notebooks, sketchbooks, blank pages. I never conceived of any of it being published, it was totally for my own edification. I had ideas for comic strips that I had sketched down. And later it all got published, much to my amazement.

Crumb: Well, the hippie revolution happened. In 1964 I first got laid, I met my first wife, Dana, and all these proto-hippies in Cleveland. A lot of them were Jews from Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights. They started taking LSD and urged me to try it, so Dana got some LSD from a psychiatrist, it was still legal in 1965. We took it and that was totally a road-to-Damascus experience. It knocked you off your horse, taking LSD. I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality. It didn’t seem real to me anymore. Seemed completely fake, only a paper-moon kind of world. My coworkers, they were like, Crumb, what’s the matter with you, what happened to you? Because I was just staring at everything like I had never seen it before. And then it changed the whole direction of my artwork. Other people who had taken LSD understood right away what was going on, but the people who hadn’t, my coworkers, they didn’t get it.

Crumb: I had been working along in this modern adult cartoon trend, very influenced by the modern, expressionistic, arty quality of work by Jules Feiffer, Ronald Searle, Ralph Steadman. Then, on LSD, I got flung back into this cruder forties style, that suddenly became very powerful to me. It was a kind of grotesque interpretation of this 1940s thing, Popeye kind of stuff. I started drawing like that again. It was bizarre to people who had known my work before. Even Kurtzman said, What the hell are you doing? You’re regressing!…I stayed there [in NYC] 9 months and tried to make it as a commercial artist. It was too competitive for me. There were just too many really driven, ambitious career-oriented artists there. I couldn’t handle it. I went back to Cleveland after 9 months. I was still taking LSD and I just wasn’t up for the rat race at all.

Crumb: I was taking LSD periodically, every couple of months. I was in a strange state of mind, influenced by these visions.

Crumb: I was trying to draw it in my sketchbook, and that began to coalesce into these comic strips that were stylistically based on grotesque, vulgar humor comics of the 1930s and 1940s.

Interviewer: How did you come up with ideas for major figures like Mr. Natural?

Crumb: All of those characters came out of that crazy visionary period that I couldn’t shut off. It was spontaneous, but I was so crazy, I was really out of my mind, it was like schizophrenia. It was like what produces art by crazy people in a madhouse. Anything could be an influence, anything I heard. I was in Chicago in early 1966 and the radio was on, there was some tune playing, it was a black station, and this announcer said, “That was Mr. Natural”. I just started drawing Mr. Natural, this bearded guru-type character in my sketchbook, it just came out. I said, Hey, that’s kind of good, and then played around with that some more, this faux-guru character.

Crumb: Fritz the Cat was earlier, that was from the pre-psychedelic period going back to my late teens. I started drawing some comic strips with Fritz the Cat in those homemade notebooks.

Crumb: When the Fritz the Cat movie came out I got a check for $46,779.79^$10,000₁₉₇₂ [the first of many given its enormous success & Crumb’s 5–10% royalty] from Steve Krantz Productions and Dana immediately wanted to go and look for a house to buy out in the country, and we found this place that was 3 hours from San Francisco, in Potter Valley, California. But I was spending a lot of time in San Francisco still. I had a girlfriend by that time. I was living a really crazy life in those days and I was running around a lot. It’s amazing that I got any artwork done. I was still very prolific in the early 1970s.

Interviewer: That is a signature of your career—no matter the ups and downs, you were always cranking it out.

Crumb: I finally ground to a halt in 1973. My life was such a mess, such a chaos, what with the girlfriends, and the first wife, I kind of had a breakdown. I never went back to that pace again. The rest of the 1970s I was very confused and lost. The inspiration of the LSD wore off. A lot of people were left adrift then, washed up on the beach.

Crumb: I never saw it as turning a corner. I just kept working and I was never sure what I was doing. I was never as cocksure again after that first LSD inspiration. Especially with fame and reputation. You become very uncertain, you have to follow your own act. I never did get that kind of spontaneous cock-sureness back again. It’s like going from being the observer to the observed. I had been used to being invisible when I was young. After I became well-known, it was very hard to be anonymous in the world. Of course, at first I liked all the attention. Suddenly, good-looking girls were interested in me! Wow! I couldn’t believe it.

Interviewer: The film about you, Crumb, was the pinnacle of being observed.

Crumb: Terry Zwigoff was my friend for 20 years already. Terry is sympathetic and shares some of my interests. Also, he is a 78 collector, a lover of old music and old comics. He is sharp and a good editor, and shares my vision and shares my negativity. He understood me and knew my world pretty well.

Crumb: Happy is not the right word. I thought he did a good job, but it’s excruciating to watch. It’s a very intimate movie, because I just opened up to him. Opened up my life to him, because he’s my friend. I never thought the film would be a big success. I thought maybe a few people would see it in art theaters. Who knew it would be so widely seen? Who knew that Aline’s mother would see it? Or my relatives in Minnesota? They all hated me after they saw that.

Crumb: Very bizarre sexual fantasies. I had the compulsion to draw my sex fantasies and foist them on the public.

Crumb: Yeah, I guess. When I first started doing it in 1968 or 1969, the people who had loved my work before that, some of them were shocked and alienated by it—especially the women, of course. I lost all the women. I’m not anti-feminist. I like strong, independent women, like the matriarchs of Genesis—they ordered the men around.

The sex-fantasy thing was a whole other side of myself, and when that started coming out, I could no longer be America’s best-loved hippie cartoonist. Also the racial stuff: the racist images that I used. That also shut a lot of people off about my work. The feminists despised me. I had a couple of defenders among them whose defense of my work was: He’s just being totally honest about the male mentality. He’s revealing the thoughts that most men are walking around harboring about women all the time. I have to agree with that. I just revealed myself.

Crumb: Well, maybe it was the LSD that inspired me to use comics to reveal my inner self, but along with this spiritual or positive side, there was a dark side, which I kept hidden until a certain moment. Seeing S. Clay Wilson’s work was a big breakthrough, because he just drew anything that came into his head, any violent, crazy, sexual thing. I saw that and I said, OK, anything goes, I’m just going to show it all, and reveal the dark side, everything.

Sometimes I try to psychoanalyze those old comics, like the Big Ass Comics that I did in 1969 or 1970, those sex-fantasy stories, and figure out what they’re really about. There are these big, powerful female bird monsters that have predatory heads with big sharp beaks and powerful female bodies and the hero, the protagonist, is a little funny cartoon guy and he’s got to deal with this whole society of these big female bird monsters. There are no males, they’re all female, there’s attraction and yet also fear. They’re powerful and predatory.

Give me 20 years on the couch with Freud and I’ll figure it out. I don’t know. You could even see how it’s a larger metaphor, the story of the struggle of the little guy with these big, powerful, attractive, predatory creatures. A whole society of them and they are there in power, and they’re organized, and they’re of one mind.

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