R. Crumb: Interviews

Few cartoonists have affected our world the way Robert Crumb has. From busting cultural and sexual taboos for artists everywhere with his pioneering underground comix to his never-ending drive to improve his art, he has rightly drawn comparisons to Brueghel by Time magazine's Robert Hughes.

Collecting four long out-of-print interviews from the Utne Independent Press Award-winning Comics Journal's archive in a oversized, art-book format, this third volume in The Comics Journal Library provides an absorbing oral history of comics in the latter half of the 20th century from the point of view of an artist who single-handedly shaped it to great extent. As the acknowledged father of underground comix, virtually every comic that has been drawn over the last 30 years and aspires to anything beyond puerile kiddie entertainment owes a debt to his groundbreaking efforts.

These are the finest, longest, and most comprehensive interviews ever conducted with the man--if you thought the Crumb film was intimate, than this collection, spanning his life and career, covering his peers and family, his views on sex, politics, art, racism and culture, his flirtations with success on America's terms and his later rejections of those terms, and his view of the world around him will surely impress. The book also boasts of a handful of probing essays on Crumb's oeuvre by the Journal's sharpest critics and a stunning color gallery of the artist's art and ephemera.