Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life

The irony of Robert Crumb, per this alternately rollicking and perceptive biography, is that the cartoonist most identified with 1960s counterculture was no hippie. The man portrayed by comics historian Nadel (It’s Life as I See It) is a gawky fedora-wearing nostalgic who thought most hippies were bourgeois fakes and that culture essentially ended in the 1930s. Born in 1943 and raised in a chaotic family, Crumb had little schooling beyond “a headful of comics and records.” He found work as a commercial artist in the 1960s just as new, alternative newspapers were looking for the kind of taboo-busting comics he was churning out. Nadel renders Crumb’s late-1960s San Francisco period as a drug-frazzled, creatively productive whirlwind during which he essentially created underground comics, along with characters like Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat that became staples of hippie culture, but soon felt like shtick to the restless Crumb, who later did everything from playing banjo to illustrating the Book of Genesis. As Nadel tracks the ups and downs of Crumb’s life—though the cartoonist has relentlessly scoped his neuroses in his comics, there are still fraught corners to explore—he drops in thumbnail histories of the cultural moments Crumb intersected with. Frank and incisive, it’s a revealing portrait of a little understood American artist and an excellent companion to Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary, Crumb. (Apr.)