R. Crumb<\/a> market. He has often been exploited in this way and always counted on Aline to set things straight.\u00a0<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tCrumb in San Francisco in 1969. He describes himself as \u201ca nerd with thick glasses\u201d at the time who was \u201ctongue-tied\u201d in front women.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\taron Wolman Collection\/Rock & Roll Hall of Fame\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\tCrumb says he agreed to the job chiefly because he needed the money at the time. (Yet when Mick Jagger tried to hire him for a Stones album, he refused. \u201cI didn\u2019t like him.\u201d Simple as that.) He was also seduced to the gig because of Big Brother band member Janis Joplin, whose singing he admired, and who later became a friend. In the early Sixties, in Texas, he\u2019d heard some private tapes of her, made before she mutated into a rock & roll artist.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cShe was singing like Bessie Smith, old-time blues, and it was great. And later I saw some old films of her from the early Sixties, singing with a country bluegrass-type band, and she was like a hillbilly shouter. That\u2019s what came naturally to her. Then she got involved in rock & roll, and she really got lost. Got lost.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tLater, in the Haight-Ashbury, they linked up. \u201cShe liked the underground comics,\u201d Crumb says. \u201cShe would come and hang out and smoke pot and stuff.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tCrumb, at the time, would be dressed unremarkably casually, in banal pants and sweater, with thick glasses, looking more or less like a geek. And, essentially, terrified of women. Janis attempted to intervene.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cShe gave me advice to say, \u2018Crumb, you know, there\u2019s all these beautiful girls out there. Come on. What\u2019s your problem? Just let your hair grow long. Get these billowy satin shirts and some bell-bottoms. You\u2019ll do fine.\u2019 I said, \u2018I don\u2019t fit in with those hippies.\u2019 I couldn\u2019t do that. I would feel like a clown if I did that. I\u2019d feel like I was faking it completely.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile conservative in his fashion tastes, Crumb is fanatical about music. He sits and listens to 78 rpm records every day. His treasured collection, gathered over decades, personally packed and transported across the Atlantic, now numbers 9,000 discs. Each single one, individually, methodically, lovingly placed in its own cardboard sleeve after meticulous washing with liquid soap and a toothbrush to get all the dust out of the grooves. Which can have unforeseen consequences.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI got a Louis Armstrong record from an auction, with his name written in white ink on the label. He autographed it. Autographed by Louis! There\u2019s his signature on there. So I was going to wash it because it was dirty, and the autograph completely washed off. But who cares? It\u2019s the music that counts.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd just what is the advantage of listening to 78 records?<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe strongest presence of any recorded technology. There\u2019s a lot going on in those grooves. If you transfer to any other technology, CD or whatever, the presence is not as strong.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOK,\u201d he concedes, \u201cthey\u2019re cumbersome, they\u2019re fragile. They take up a lot of room. They\u2019re heavy.\u201d But: \u201cThere\u2019s the ritual that every time you want to hear something, you got to go and fetch it. Put it on the machine, put the needle on it. When it\u2019s over, you got to get up. Take it off, put it away. Get another one out. And that focuses your attention on what you\u2019re listening to. Before 78s, if you wanted to hear music, you had to hear it live.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tCrumb at home circa 2010. He has been living in the same medieval village in France for more than 30 years \u2014 and still doesn\u2019t speak French.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEamonn McCabe\/Popperfoto\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\tAs a devout collector, he also admires these objects as artifacts in themselves. (\u201cThere\u2019s ancient objects from the Egyptian tombs made out of shellac or coated with shellac, and they\u2019re still perfectly intact,\u201d he marvels.) And he won\u2019t tolerate the idea of remastering those old discs.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s two or three things they\u2019re trying to do. One is, they\u2019re trying to eliminate all surface noise as much as possible. The other thing is to keep the range in order \u2014 that is, the bass, treble, and mid-range \u2014 as they should sound, because with modern equipment, the stuff\u2019s so sensitive that you can lose the warmth of the old recording quality. It gets too high-endy sounding and it can become shrill. Modern recording engineers don\u2019t have the ear tuned to the old sound. They\u2019ve got a different ear.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWHEN I GOT MY CONTRACT for the Kafka book, I thought it would be tough bringing the legendary Crumb on board. But it turns out he felt a \u201cmystical\u201d connection to the writer.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cKafka was a very alienated person,\u201d he says. \u201cLike me. Sort of passive, kinda shy, obviously neurotic about sex and women and all that. A part of Kafka that I felt a soulmate with, it\u2019s that aspect of alienation and self-loathing \u2026 At some point he compares himself to a worm.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThis fusion went so far that, for his conception of Kafka\u2019s short story \u201cA Hunger Artist,\u201d Crumb drew the skinny self-starving, self-abusing circus performer with his own (younger) face. But it\u2019s probably Kafka\u2019s famous human-transformed-overnight-into-insect from The Metamorphosis, which mostly appealed to the weirdo drawingboard of R. Crumb.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cFor me, the bug was not particularly horrifying,\u201d he says, \u201calthough people are repulsed by this giant insect. But he\u2019s not a menacing insect. He doesn\u2019t want to hurt anybody. So then, to me, he becomes almost a lovable bug. So I made him a kind of big, fat beetle. It\u2019s a very Jewish self-hatred kind of humor. Which you find in Lenny Bruce and other types of Jewish humor, where they paint themselves as something really repulsive. That all comes out of alienation. The pain of alienation. You can turn it into humor, but it\u2019s a dark humor.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIt was definitely an existential love affair.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cSomeone has reached out and touched you from the grave,\u201d as he puts it. \u201cKafka\u2019s been dead since 1924. That you can feel so close with someone who\u2019s been dead for a couple generations back. Before you were born. And touch something universal, this alienation \u2014 that there\u2019s something loathsome about you, and it\u2019s a social thing. Part of you knows that you\u2019re not loathsome, but part of you feels loathsome in relation to society, to other people.\u201c<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat basically links them is this strong streak of self-denigration. Self-loathing for Robert Crumb is definitely intertwined with his ambiguous (to understate!) lifelong take on women. He has been vilified for his notorious drawings of oversized women with ample rumps and thick, powerful legs, definitely objectified and more or less turned into meat-at-the-ready. (One of the most famous of these is his irreverent Clinton-era poster Monica Delivers the Pizza, with its derisive caption, \u201cThat Bill\u2019s a lucky guy!\u201d) He rides on the backs of his big women figures, contorts their bodies, distends their thighs into pliable shapes. Yet what makes Crumb unique in this world of crypto-porno is his own ferocious self-deprecation in the shadows of these Amazonian figures. The subtitle of his tome Sex Obsessions is Absurd Hi-Jinx With Big Beautiful Girls \u2018n\u2019 Creepy Little Guys. And sure enough, the \u201ccreepy little guys\u201d are often gnome-sized self-portraits, clinging like ugly trolls to the vast architecture of female limbs, terrified and sweating guiltily. And sometimes ending in mea culpa like the 1988 cartoon Memories Are Made of This. After pages of gross sexual abuse, the klutzy Crumb lookalike hero states, \u201cI know I\u2019m cutting my own throat as far as th\u2019 opposite sex is concerned \u2026. They\u2019ll despise me now\u2026. I\u2019ll never get laid again!\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s quite obvious that this all comes from a deep measure of physical insecurity, clearly what Janis Joplin spotted in his comportment. His early dread of contact with women drove his fantasies, and, luckily, he was able to channel this into drawing rather than something more physically dangerous. According to Crumb, women took virtually no notice of him or avoided him like the plague until around 1968. Then suddenly fame intervened.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tCrumb clinging to one of his Amazon women. The image covered the 2007 book Robert Crumb\u2019s Sex Obsessions.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9 Lora Fountain<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWhen Zap Comix came out and I started getting recognized, all of a sudden I became interesting to girls. Before that, I was tongue-tied in front of any woman that I was attracted to. I couldn\u2019t talk, couldn\u2019t speak. After I was famous, I didn\u2019t have to say anything. Wow. Suddenly, night and day. The difference? Just fame in this little, cockamamie hippie culture. It wasn\u2019t, you know, international movie-star fame. It was petty fame.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tMalgorzata is meeting him for the first time, and her X-chromosome vibrations easily win the day with the old bearded geezer. She asks him if he ever wrote love letters.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI wrote love letters to my first wife when I was young. And she sold them! I wrote to the auction house in Texas that bought them and I said, \u2018Please just let me have those love letters back, please.\u2019 And so they said, \u2018OK, we\u2019ll sell them to you.\u2019 I said, \u2018Fuck you, fucking mercenary bastards!\u2019 It was mushy stuff. I didn\u2019t want those out there, but somebody bought them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWith Malgorzata recording every word on our riverside trek, inevitably the subject comes up: How does this veteran of the sex wars look at all of that now? \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI was ruled by my dick. I cringe with embarrassment to think of the foolish behavior, the nonsense. Oh my God, chasing women. What a bad boy I was. I was bad, selfish, selfish, selfish, selfish. You know, I was lying to this one and running to another one and, you know, lying to that one and running back to the other one. Oh, terrible, terrible. What on Earth did I think I was doing? I was just ruled by the libido, you know, just couldn\u2019t help myself\u2026 But, you know, my whole thing with women was always very odd and quirky and strange. Always, always.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWhich brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Politically, Crumb has no doubts about who she is: \u201cThe most low-level, sleazy, opportunistic politics of playing on the ignorance of her constituency, which is some remote mountain county of Georgia.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tNevertheless\u2026<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI saw her on TV, where she was talking. I thought, \u2018Oh, she\u2019s kind of good-looking.\u2019 And she\u2019s athletic. She goes to the gym, and she\u2019s just looking terrific. Wow. So a kind of tough-looking blonde, you know? A shiksa from the South. Wow. I started getting the hots for her. Wow. And I thought I could change Marjorie Taylor Greene. I could, you know, if I was involved, I could raise her consciousness and convert her to something more like an ethical state of mind and become a better person as well as, you know, having a good time with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tI thought for a moment, on hearing this astonishing news, that we might be lucky enough to expect a new Reactionary Girl comic starring MTG following in the sleazy footsteps of Lenore Goldberg: Girl Commando, Honeybunch Kaminski, Devil Girl, and the other Crumb Amazons.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI thought about that, but I don\u2019t want to get in trouble,\u201d he says. \u201cWho knows what kind of nasty shit she\u2019d be capable of? Who knows? Nasty. She\u2019s nasty. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Great-looking, though. Boy, what a body! Wow. Tough. Tough body.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tCRUMB IS SURPRISINGLY au fait with the tempestuous political events of the last few years, despite his resistance to electronic input. Still, from all indications in our recent discussions, I can see he\u2019s moved close to the danger zone of right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theory. This is a personal dilemma for me, never having lost an ounce of my lifelong political combat against the reactionary steamroller. Crumb and I have often been at odds politically. I remember, many years back, his giving ear to a moronic Holocaust-denier who had turned up on his doorstep (although RC later renounced this). He can be annoyingly gullible sometimes. Yet, in his favor, he seems to harbor a healthy natural skepticism that has often manifested itself in his artwork and which gnaws at him in his seclusion. Having virtually no one to argue with, he finds himself in natural dialogue with his own private, darker side, one that questions almost everything. On Ukraine:<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cEverybody\u2019s always talking about what a terrible guy Putin is. He\u2019s a terrible monster like Hitler. Na da da da da. But I\u2019m not sure the Americans are much better. So what do we know about what\u2019s really going on? We just hear the Western propaganda \u2014 United States, Western Europe. And it has its program, its agenda, its interests. What do we really know?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tCrumb is also not vaccinated. He says he would have voted for RFK Jr. if the latter hadn\u2019t gone over to Trump. Moreover, he powerfully backs the health secretary\u2019s \u201cmedical\u201d views.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThey\u2019re not legally required to test vaccines the way they do other medicines,\u201d Crumb says. \u201cIt\u2019s a commercial enterprise for money. And as Kennedy points out, why does anybody trust Pfizer or any other large pharmaceutical company when they\u2019ve repeatedly been indicted and convicted of fraud and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines? Why do you think they\u2019d be clean about vaccination? So just to be critical or even open to suspicion of hanky-panky or shenanigans around vaccination is immediately shut down by The New York Times or anybody. That\u2019s very suspicious. Something\u2019s not right about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tA page from What Is Paranoia?, a book of new work by Crumb released in November.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9 Lora Fountain<\/p>\n
\n\tI can\u2019t accuse him yet of having gone over to the enemy, but I\u2019m compelled to point out to him that he\u2019s flirting with positions taken by reactionaries. In response, he strongly defends his stand from what he sees as a common anti-authoritarian viewpoint.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s nice to hear, to some degree, mistrust of anything coming from \u2018authoritative\u2019 sources, coming from the government, coming from the so-called liberal intellectual elite. I have friends who are still part of that liberal elite who don\u2019t question anything that comes from what they think [are] authoritative science sources. To question it means you\u2019re a crazy, right-wing nut. The problem with people on the right is that their thinking is just sloppy. They don\u2019t develop deep powers of discrimination. That or their paranoia is just out of control. You know, they\u2019re just so paranoid that their imagination can take them anywhere immediately.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tYet he sees himself as integrated into that landscape. In his studio, on the drawing-board, is his latest brew of \u201cparanoia\u201d comics, published in November 2025, amounting to page after page of raw ranting \u2014 predominantly text \u2014 by the central self-portrait figure, all of it hand-lettered in Crumb\u2019s inimitable all-caps block script:<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cLARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE NOW HARBOR SUSPICIONS THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING PHONY OR RIGGED ABOUT THE WHOLE PANDEMIC NARRATIVE \u2026. THANKS TO THE \u2018PLANDEMIC\u2019 THERE IS NOW A SEVERELY PARANOID BELIEF GOING AROUND THAT THE EVIL CABAL WHICH RULES THE PLANET IS SCHEMING TO KILL OFF SOME UNSPECIFIED NUMBER OF THE \u2018USELESS EATERS\u2019! \u2026. I HOPE IT\u2019S NOT TRUE!\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAll of this ending in a bold black 72-point spot-on exhortation to \u201cQUESTION AUTHORITY.\u201d And it\u2019s the old geezer Crumb himself doling out these \u201clessons\u201d which have to be taken with a grain of comic relief to avoid taking them as potential nutcase fodder.<\/p>\n
\n\tSo, for a famous partaker of the Sixties\u2019 let\u2019s-redo-the-planet mentality, where did it all get us?<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOh, oh, oh. Very dangerous moment. It doesn\u2019t look too good, because these dictators, they betray the trust of the common people. And that leads to bitterness, anger, confusion, violence, and could lead to large-scale organized violence. I hope things go in a positive direction because, you know, I have grandchildren.\u201d<\/p>\n
Being so cut off from the \u201csidetrackings\u201d of city life, stuck within these dreary fortress walls, which, in winter, can seem like stage sets for a dark depression drama, there\u2019s plenty of time for cogitation. Crumb acknowledges he\u2019s \u201cdeeply, deeply immersed in conspiracies,\u201d and struggling to find the humor in our current troubled times. A sign, perhaps, that the end is near?<\/p>\n
DESPITE BEING A \u2018TOTAL FOREIGNER,\u2019 Crumb is content to spend his final days in his adopted homeland rather than return to America. \u201cThis medieval village suits my sensibilities just fine,\u201d he says. \u201cYou know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.\u201d And ironically, since the passing of Aline, he manages to live like a sultan here, despite his isolation. His daughter Sophie helps to look after him, alongside a cadre of local caretakers.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI\u2019m very lucky. I got this big support group of women. I don\u2019t have to cook for myself that often. They cook, they help me. Like Maggie helps me sort out my business stuff and the tax stuff and all that crap. And Julie takes me shopping. I got Rekha, who helps me clean the house, who lives right next door. It\u2019s a funny thing, wow, when you get to be an old man, women run the world. When you\u2019re young, men are out there messing everything up, always constantly causing turbulence and bullshit going on all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn this chastened state, Crumb is acutely aware of his mortality, and facing it with more clarity each day.
\u201cYeah, I\u2019m ready for the box,\u201d he tells us. \u201cI\u2019m ready to be put in a box, so to speak. You know, I\u2019m not as creatively hot as I was in the old days. I don\u2019t know how much longer I\u2019ll be around. Who knows? Could drop dead tomorrow, have a stroke or something. You know, if I stand up too quickly and I feel woozy, I think maybe this is it, huh?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThis is when Malgorzata asks him if he believes in \u201clife after life.\u201d Knowing him as well as I do after 30 years, his response takes me by surprise.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cYes, I do. All I can tell you is a few months ago, I was wondering if Aline\u2019s spirit is out there somewhere, still out there. And her voice came into my head. Suddenly her voice said, \u2018Stop doubting, don\u2019t doubt.\u2019 And I stopped doubting instantly. Stopped doubting immediately at that moment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tUntil then, does he feel lost? \u201cLost? I\u2019m never lost! I\u2019m perfectly at home in my own world, my own little world, which I just carry around with me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I t\u2019s F\u00eate M\u00e9di\u00e9vale time in this tiny, sweltering southern French backwater, not far from where Robert Louis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[24122,88,58335,48534,13409,179920,179921],"class_list":{"0":"post-365844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-cartoon","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-janis-joplin","11":"tag-long-reads","12":"tag-marjorie-taylor-greene","13":"tag-r-crumb","14":"tag-sixties"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}