ODDS & ENDS
by R. Crumb
Bloomsbury Publishing
"Chuck you Farley!"
"Fark you Chuckley!" Two goofy characters pass each other on a downtown street, their big-booted strut carries an unmistakable provenance. They are but a snip of a largely unpublished (until now) collection of cartoon drawings by the most famous of America’s 1960s underground comix artists, Robert Crumb, the subject of Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 biography, Crumb. The artist once created a similarly styled power-walker paired with the line "Keep on Truckin'." Uncopyrighted, the piece was stolen and reproduced millions of times over on T-shirts and the like, with not a dime going to its maker. This seemingly inconsequential work became a part of popular phraseology and is still the artist’s most well known image.
That drawing does not appear here. Suitable to this collection of personal and commercial works are pieces like "Farley and Chuckley," a take on the famous image, drawn for a comic fan’s wife. One of Crumb’s best known characters, Mr. Natural, also makes an appearance, but on the cover of a ’60s university fanzine and in a much more recent bike shop advertisement. For those unfamiliar with this wry cultural commentator, fetishist of muscular calves and big, healthy girls, it’s a delightful square one.
Wedding and birth announcements, Crumb family Christmas cards, portraits of friends and anthropomorphized food and tableware are placed in chronological order alongside trademark perv-outs. A poster for a 1970 gallery showing of his work features the artist in an aroused, feel-copping self-portrait with hairy, nude sasquatch girls. A drawing years later for a script co-written by Zwigoff features a similar girl, "Sassy," naked and dragging a Robert Crumb lookalike off into the woods.
Crumb’s sexual fixations and his struggle with self-censorship (as in, he doesn’t do it but still feels kind of guilty about some of the things he commits to paper) are evident here as in the main body of his work. For an unpublished comic book cover, he illustrates himself as a broken man kneeling on shredded "Big Ass" and "Yet Another Jerk Off" comics. He promises, "Alright, it’s stupid and boring... I’m sorry... I’ll never draw my sex fantasies in a comic again!... Do some more, y’know, social commentary kind a’ stuff...."
That’s here, too. Cheeky comments on the state of media and the environment adorn covers of Yolo County California’s Winds of Change. Illustrations for The Monkey Wrench Gang, a 1986 book about a fictional group of eco-warriors, appear alongside autobiographical strips done for The New Yorker.
Crumb’s output is prodigious if tough to follow. Odds & Ends provides a thorough sampling of a diverse body of work and is a nice complement to other Crumb collections published in recent years.
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