The Anti-Rockwell

R. Crumb’ comics dredged the depths of his own subconscious—and tapped into something collectively screwy in America.

- By Gal Beckerman

Certain great artists are synonymous with their kinks. Egon Schiele had his thing for gaunt girls and their undergarments. Robert Mapplethorpe was partial to bulging muscles wrapped in leather. And then there is the legendary cartoonist R. Crumb—lover of solid legs, worshipper of meaty thighs, champion of the ample backside. To truly know his art is to know what turns him on.

For the man who effectively invented underground comics in the 1960s, rubbing his readers’ faces in his sexual proclivities was always the point. If Crumb, now 81, was helpless against his own desires—and there he was on the page, quivering and sweating behind his thick glasses as he beheld one of his zaf-tig goddesses—he suspected that, somehow, everyone else was also helpless against theirs. His comix, as he renamed them, epitomized the hippie turn of the decade because he dove to the depths not just of his own subconscious, but of something collectively screwy, bringing up all the American muck.

He made art out of the kinds of insecurities and brutal fantasies that today might live on a subreddit for incels.

He was the anti-Norman Rockwell the culture was craving. But this was also the gamble of his art. Div-ing down like that, he risked derision—being called a sicko, a misogynist, a racist (all labels he indeed could not escape).

In a loving biography,