R. Crumb
speaker
89 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
R. Crumb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Different from this perspective of nowadays?
Well, they're kind of timeless, you know, because they looked out of time then. When I did them in the beginning in 66, 67, 68, people looked at them and said, hey, these look like old comics from the 30s, you know what? And some people, when they met me, were surprised that I was a young man at the time. They thought I would be some old guy.
So they already looked out of time then, and so they just kind of still look like their own thing. And I think a lot of young people that pick them up, when they first see them, don't realize how old they are. They just don't seem to be part of the 60s as it's known stylistically to such stuff as Peter Max or psychedelic posters and all that stuff. It doesn't fit in with that.
It's kind of its own thing.
Whoa. That's a tough question. What were the images on LSD? What did they look like? Well, I don't know. For some reason, I don't know why or how it happened. I just, on this one really strange LSD trip that I took, there was something wrong with the drug. I got trapped in some level of the mental collective consciousness that was very tawdry and carnival-like in a kind of a cheap, gaudy way.
It just stuck there. I was stuck there for months until I actually what cleared it up was taking another dose of LSD made it go away.
It was changed vastly.
Well, before that, I was trying to be, you know, in order to get work as an artist and a cartoonist, I was trying to be contemporary and with it, and I looked at the work of people like Jules Feiffer, and the LSD just blew all that away completely, and I was always drawing in my sketchbooks all the time, and I was just drawing these images that were coming from my brain all the time in that two months uncontrollably just,
completely changed my whole approach to what I was doing, to cartooning, and took on this older 30s, 40s kind of... And I started looking more closely at these kind of brand X, third-rate comics from the 40s that were drawn in that style by these artists that never achieved, you know, renown even among comics people.
They were a third-rate artist, but they had this working-class, proletarian, funky... crude, vulgar. These comics were very vulgar, violent.
That was my first two-month period when my ego was completely fragmented by that bad LSD. I drew Mr. Natural, Flaky Funt, Angel Food McSpade, the Snoids, the Vulture Goddesses, Vulture Demonesses, whatever you want to call them. I know lots of characters. The old Pooperoo.
It was actually more or less a combination of the mysticism of LSD experiences combined with this old cartoon stereotype of the little old man with the long beard. There's several of these kind of like standard cartoon figure and old comic strips going back to the 20s, even earlier probably, that little old funny little old man with the long beard. I didn't invent anything out of whole cloth.
It all has antecedents in the popular culture, all of it.
Yeah, exactly. Precisely.
Because they were there, and they were part of the whole experience of all that tawdry, low-class imagery that was boiling in my brain. That was part of it, is that jungle bunny image. That was there. It was part of it. It wasn't there before, but it boiled up. So it was obviously in the collective subconscious, and I just didn't have any control. I just had to draw what was there.
And I don't think Angel Flew McSpade can really legitimately be called an African-American woman. It's a cartoon stereotype, crazy image of something that's in the imaginations of people. It's not actually a representation of an African-American woman.
Yes, they did. A lot of people just took it at face value. And, you know, I can't let that stop me. It has to come out. What's in there had to come out. I really couldn't stop it. If I worried about how it was going to be construed too much, obviously I had some concern of that, but I didn't want to be too hurtful, but at the same time I had to... I had to put on the paper.
I had this direct line from the brain stem to the paper. There was no super ego, the socialized self. All that was just swept away.
You betcha, yeah. So, you know, I have no secrets. I'm probably one of the few human beings on the planet that I have no secrets. Everybody who looks at my comics knows exactly what I'm about. It's all there.
The darkest side of me, it's all on paper. So that allows me to be a pretty nice guy in real life. It's all out there on paper, foisted on the public.
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