Robert Crumb's Roving Art and Life

IN THE SPRING of 1962, an 18-year-old Robert Crumb was beaned in the forehead by a solid glass ashtray. His mother, Bea, had hurled it at his father, Chuck, who ducked. Robert was bloodied and dazed, once again a silent and enraged witness to his family's chaos.”

- JAY KINNEY

So begins Dan Nadel's Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life. What follows is an engrossing blow-by-blow account of Robert Crumb's peripatetic life, during which the artist almost single-handedly inspired the underground comix movement. At times, his work was called sexist, racist, and obscene, but even his critics often acknowledged that he was hilarious and original.

Crumb played a major role in inspiring and encouraging the anarchic crew of young underground press cartoonists of the mid-to-late 1960s, a group that included me. We learned to rid ourselves of internal inhibitions and external censors (including the often-fussy leftists who typically staffed the underground papers) and go for broke—sometimes literally.

I had the good fortune to meet Crumb in Chicago in the summer of 1968. He was on one of his cross-country trips, crashing on the couch of Jay Lynch, a local underground cartoonist and mutual friend. I was fresh out of high school and eager to learn the craft of cartooning.

I pored over Robert's jam-packed sketchbook of ink drawings of goofy characters and sketches of gritty urban life. It changed my life: His bolt of inspiration fed my creative work for years to come. He had that effect on other artists too.

His childhood was often traumatic. Crumb and his four siblings were military brats, at the mercy of their Marine father's rotation from post to post around the U.S. His parents did not get on well, to put it mildly, and their kids took solace in the world of comic books. Soon, under the tutelage of Robert's older brother, Charles, they went beyond reading and began writing and drawing their own.