The compulsive artist became the best known figure of the underground comix movement. Robert Crumb's work is controversial, but fans love the way he targets corporate America — including Donald Trump.
Image: imago/United Archives
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Transgressive irony: Robert Crumb's best known characters
As underground cartoonist Robert Crumb turns 75, DW revisits some of his famously shameless characters.
Image: imago/United Archives
Robert Crumb
Cartoonist Robert Crumb is the father of the underground comix movement of the 1960s. Born on August 30, 1943, Crumb's first job was drawing greeting cards. He grew tired of the gig but for a long time wasn't successful selling his cartoons to comic book companies.
Image: imago/United Archives
Fritz the Cat
Crumb's first successful character was created in 1959. Fritz the Cat was a horny, self-centered cat. The comic was adapted into a hit movie by Ralph Bakshi in 1972 and became the first animated feature film to be rated X in the US. Crumb didn't like the film project and published a story in which Fritz was murdered by an ex-girlfriend that same year.
Image: imago/United Archives
Mr. Natural
Crumb took a lot of LSD and the drug inspired his comics. Introduced in 1967, Mr. Natural became Crumb's most famous character, with his image appearing on different merchandising products. A mystic guru/charlatan who likes to share his cosmic insight on the evils of the modern world, Mr. Natural is moody, cynical and has various strange sexual obsessions.
Image: imago/United Archives
Whiteman
Introduced in 1967, Whiteman symbolized the repressed big-city businessman, always on the verge of a nervous breakdown and constipated. But Crumb didn't promote a progressive and idealistic anti-capitalist worldview. He was purely transgressive. His work was provocatively filled with demeaning depictions of women and ethnic minorities, to put it mildly.
Image: imago/United Archives
Devil Girl
The character above is Cheryl Borck, aka Devil Girl; she had a tempestuous affair with Mr. Natural. Incest, necrophilia, scatology, assault: The cartoonist was never afraid to reveal his erotic fantasies and sexual obsessions in his work, breaking taboos and crossing lines that would certainly bar him from any form of mainstream success today.
Image: imago/United Archives
Keep on Truckin'
The one-page comic strip "Keep on Truckin'" was published in the first issue of Zap Comix in 1968. The three simple words of encouragement became extremely popular among hippies and the strip, an icon of optimism. Instead of enjoying the popularity, Crumb later described the cartoon as "the curse of my life," because "I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture!"
Image: imago/United Archives
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"I'm not here to be polite," declares Robert Crumb in a famous cartoon depiction of himself.
Extensive LSD use contributed to the unique style he developed. The artist found release from his tormented, sexually obsessed psyche by creating notoriously politically incorrect and misogynistic cartoons. Despite criticism, Crumb, born on August 30, 1943, remains one of the most influential figures of US counterculture.
"My comics appealed to the hard-drinking, hard-fucking end of the hippie spectrum as opposed to the spiritual, Eastern-religious, lighter-than-air type hippie," said the cartoonist who also created the artwork for Janis Joplin's Big Brother & The Holding Company Cheap Thrills album.
Image: Columbia Records
The cartoonist, who often signs R. Crumb, expressed his disgust with America throughout his career, including in his Point the Finger series.
In the 1989 series, Crumb targeted different people, including a real estate mogul who'd decades later become the president of the United States.
The cartoonist portrayed himself meeting Donald Trump. In the cartoon, he described the multimillionaire as "one of the more visible big time predators who feed on society," a "slime-ball," as well as "one of the most evil men alive."
Click through the gallery above to rediscover some of Crumb's most famous — and shameless — characters.