Pops Read a Book: CRUMB: A CARTOONIST'S LIFE

I finished CRUMB: A CARTOONIST’S LIFE (Scribner, 2025), Dan Nadel’s intensive (and intense) biography of arguably the most iconic underground cartoonist of all time, and one of the most polarizing, complicated figures in not just comics, but culture. I’ve always had a tangential relationship with Crumb, recognizing his genius, but often put off by the ugliness that his work at times displays (there’s also beauty, for sure). CRUMB (even more than Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary) spends an awful lot of time trying to parse the artist’s misogynistic and racist works as sociological studies of human nature, and I’m sure that’s true to some extent. But as this book often lays bare, Crumb is also frequently just a raging id, both on the page and in real life, and I’ve never been comfortable with people who justify selfish, harmful behavior as artistic expression (being when separating the artist from the art is as impossible as removing their flesh). Then again, my relationship with much of the most important work of the 1960s is cultural appreciation more than subjective enjoyment. 

CRUMB is riveting (although the extended family becomes a bit tough to keep track of, making me wish for a family tree for reference), alternately enlightening, aggravating, inspiring, and heartbreaking. But I didn’t come out of it with a burning desire to add more of the man’s work to my library. I’m good with what I have already (a few collections, some anthologies of underground work, and oh yeah, every issue of WEIRDO), as well as the arm’s length at which I keep it.