He draws no lines
American illustrator Robert Crumb is as unapologetic and whimsical as his graphic novels. Nivriti Butalia recently met him at Comic Con in Delhi where he spoke about his inspirations, life in the ’60s and his obsession with Bugs Bunny
There's no way you can muster up the gumption to ask the iconic underground comic artist Robert Crumb, 68, whether he actually pinched Janis Joplin's tit. And whether she actually replied, "Oh, honey!"
I would have loved to ask, but there wasn't enough spine in me to form a coherent sentence. If I had just asked, he might even have answered straight up.
The story goes that Crumb — lover of album art, collector of old 78 rpm records, and creator of Fritz the Cat and Keep on Truckin' — was asked to do the cover for Cheap Thrills, an album by Big Brother & The Holding Company, a band that Janis Joplin was associated with then. "I'll do your album cover," he told them back then. "But when I meet Janis, I want to be able to pinch her tit."
It's a pity how unverified this precious nugget remains. But there are stories, such as the one about his obsession with Bugs Bunny that tend to make you think his little Janis encounter might just be true.
From the sixties
Last week, Crumb attended a press conference in Delhi with his second wife Aline — a comic artist herself, and dressed in a shiny pink salwar kameez. They came here not so much for the second Comic Con India, an annual comic festival, as much as for a chance to see the country. Even so, Crumb's trip to India will result in a "two-page-long" comic strip.
Both husband and wife were taken aback that so many people knew of them. "How do you get to know about our work", he asks the audience. The internet, someone answers. Then, predictably, Crumb is asked about his inspiration and he says, "As part of a hippie generation, a lot of us were attracted by Yogananda Maharishi — that was a part of the inspiration." Also stuff like Farmer Grey, Aline added, and really bad Saturday morning cartoons. Crumb's character, Mr Natural, is apparently "a mix of history and psychedelia." MAD magazine's founding editor Harvey Kurtzman and Carl Banks of Disney comics inspired Crumb, too.
Though Crumb was born in 1943, he is a man from the sixties. It was the time when Bob Dylan released his first album, Bob Dylan, and Jack Kerouac had just published On The Road — both releases that defined a generation of writers and poets. Amid this, Crumb took a shine to LSD. Once, he even scored from a psychiatrist. It's apparent to any fan who's lingered over Crumb's work that the drugs play no small role there. "I wouldn't recommend LSD to anyone, but it does liberate the imagination". His only recurring gripe is having a long but not-very-nice association with "that Sandoz stuff".
Life on paper
When it came to work, Crumb wasn't as interested in storytelling as he was in the drawing. "I was a worthless piece of shit if I didn't draw. I lived my life on paper, by drawing," he says. Though he claims it was a crazy thing to take on —"hundreds of pages all that" — Crumb came out with an illustrated adaptation of The Book of Genesis in 2009 (the original is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament). "It is so damned important in the Western world," he says. Crumb needed to revisit some parts that, he feels, didn't fit. "Why does Abraham try to push his wife to the Pharoah? It's crazy, doesn't make sense. Those things are so old, stuff got lost, it changed." Crumb claims he's remained as faithful to the story as he possibly could, that he didn't want to ridicule it. "I wanted to make it as straight as possible," he says. The research was a challenge, adds Aline. "So many drawings, camels drinking water; he'd never drawn a battle scene before, or all those animals on Noah's ark," she says.
Ladies’ man
Maybe not battle scenes, but Crumb has done other things, like dabble in journalism. He was sent to Bulgaria to draw the essence of the place, and realised that he wanted to move there bag and baggage. "The people were relaxed, and it didn't have the hustle bustle, break-your-ass repressive atmosphere," he says. He hates New York ('too tough, too competitive'). The pace in the south of France suits him, which is where he lives now with Aline. He says little about her, apart from how she is a natural, born Jewish comedian. Crumb's affection for Aline peeps out from that one line, and he adds, "She's easy to work with".
Crumb is constantly asked about the women he drew, the giant breasts, the rounded thighs, and the rest of the heavy graphics. "I had a compulsion to reveal that part of myself." He says he has no idea why. "Perhaps, I'll figure it out after 20 years of psychoanalysis. But I'm kind of old and over that." Most artistes, says Crumb, don't know why they do the work they do. He admits he is embarrassed by some of the sexually explicit work he did in the '70s. He didn't think of how it would affect his child or grandchildren.
Then, somewhere in the middle of it all, Crumb confesses his obsession with Bugs Bunny. And no, it wasn't the ears. Crumb doesn't know what it really was. Now if only a similar clarification was sought for Janis, one wouldn't have to settle for his take on Indian women. "Shapely", he describes them. "The aesthetic is not skinny, no bones sticking out — unlike France." Pinch-worthy, then?
American illustrator Robert Crumb is as unapologetic and whimsical as his graphic novels. Nivriti Butalia recently met him at Comic Con in Delhi where he spoke about his inspirations, life in the ’60s and his obsession with Bugs Bunny
There's no way you can muster up the gumption to ask the iconic underground comic artist Robert Crumb, 68, whether he actually pinched Janis Joplin's tit. And whether she actually replied, "Oh, honey!"
I would have loved to ask, but there wasn't enough spine in me to form a coherent sentence. If I had just asked, he might even have answered straight up.
The story goes that Crumb — lover of album art, collector of old 78 rpm records, and creator of Fritz the Cat and Keep on Truckin' — was asked to do the cover for Cheap Thrills, an album by Big Brother & The Holding Company, a band that Janis Joplin was associated with then. "I'll do your album cover," he told them back then. "But when I meet Janis, I want to be able to pinch her tit."
It's a pity how unverified this precious nugget remains. But there are stories, such as the one about his obsession with Bugs Bunny that tend to make you think his little Janis encounter might just be true.
From the sixties
Last week, Crumb attended a press conference in Delhi with his second wife Aline — a comic artist herself, and dressed in a shiny pink salwar kameez. They came here not so much for the second Comic Con India, an annual comic festival, as much as for a chance to see the country. Even so, Crumb's trip to India will result in a "two-page-long" comic strip.
Both husband and wife were taken aback that so many people knew of them. "How do you get to know about our work", he asks the audience. The internet, someone answers. Then, predictably, Crumb is asked about his inspiration and he says, "As part of a hippie generation, a lot of us were attracted by Yogananda Maharishi — that was a part of the inspiration." Also stuff like Farmer Grey, Aline added, and really bad Saturday morning cartoons. Crumb's character, Mr Natural, is apparently "a mix of history and psychedelia." MAD magazine's founding editor Harvey Kurtzman and Carl Banks of Disney comics inspired Crumb, too.
Though Crumb was born in 1943, he is a man from the sixties. It was the time when Bob Dylan released his first album, Bob Dylan, and Jack Kerouac had just published On The Road — both releases that defined a generation of writers and poets. Amid this, Crumb took a shine to LSD. Once, he even scored from a psychiatrist. It's apparent to any fan who's lingered over Crumb's work that the drugs play no small role there. "I wouldn't recommend LSD to anyone, but it does liberate the imagination". His only recurring gripe is having a long but not-very-nice association with "that Sandoz stuff".
Life on paper
When it came to work, Crumb wasn't as interested in storytelling as he was in the drawing. "I was a worthless piece of shit if I didn't draw. I lived my life on paper, by drawing," he says. Though he claims it was a crazy thing to take on —"hundreds of pages all that" — Crumb came out with an illustrated adaptation of The Book of Genesis in 2009 (the original is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament). "It is so damned important in the Western world," he says. Crumb needed to revisit some parts that, he feels, didn't fit. "Why does Abraham try to push his wife to the Pharoah? It's crazy, doesn't make sense. Those things are so old, stuff got lost, it changed." Crumb claims he's remained as faithful to the story as he possibly could, that he didn't want to ridicule it. "I wanted to make it as straight as possible," he says. The research was a challenge, adds Aline. "So many drawings, camels drinking water; he'd never drawn a battle scene before, or all those animals on Noah's ark," she says.
Ladies’ man
Maybe not battle scenes, but Crumb has done other things, like dabble in journalism. He was sent to Bulgaria to draw the essence of the place, and realised that he wanted to move there bag and baggage. "The people were relaxed, and it didn't have the hustle bustle, break-your-ass repressive atmosphere," he says. He hates New York ('too tough, too competitive'). The pace in the south of France suits him, which is where he lives now with Aline. He says little about her, apart from how she is a natural, born Jewish comedian. Crumb's affection for Aline peeps out from that one line, and he adds, "She's easy to work with".
Crumb is constantly asked about the women he drew, the giant breasts, the rounded thighs, and the rest of the heavy graphics. "I had a compulsion to reveal that part of myself." He says he has no idea why. "Perhaps, I'll figure it out after 20 years of psychoanalysis. But I'm kind of old and over that." Most artistes, says Crumb, don't know why they do the work they do. He admits he is embarrassed by some of the sexually explicit work he did in the '70s. He didn't think of how it would affect his child or grandchildren.
Then, somewhere in the middle of it all, Crumb confesses his obsession with Bugs Bunny. And no, it wasn't the ears. Crumb doesn't know what it really was. Now if only a similar clarification was sought for Janis, one wouldn't have to settle for his take on Indian women. "Shapely", he describes them. "The aesthetic is not skinny, no bones sticking out — unlike France." Pinch-worthy, then?
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