Dan Nadel’s knowledge of, and immersion in, the world of comics is staggering—and very much present in Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life (Scribner), Nadel’s new biography of Robert Crumb. In telling the story of Crumb’s life and art, Nadel tracks the evolution of a medium and the personal and ethical dilemmas that the comics industry has faced over the decades.
Nadel, who previously served as editor of the Comics Journal and founded Picturebox Comics, now works as a curator-at-large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The collection of Crumb’s work that he edited—R. Crumb: Existential Comics, Selected Stories 1979–2004 (David Zwirner Books)—will be published to coincide with the biography. In his introduction to Existential Comics, Nadel calls the work contained within “a selection of Crumb’s most ambitious and profound work” while also noting that they “were made for the smallest audience of Crumb’s career.” It’s an excellent companion piece to Nadel’s comprehensive, often moving biography.
How long has Crumb been in the works?
In early 2018, more or less, is when I started really thinking about it. I wrote to Robert in the late spring of 2018 to ask him if he was game. At that moment, it felt like there'd been a bunch of interesting biographies that had come out. I mean, I guess the [Charles] Schulz bio had been out a while by then, but [Michael Tisserand’s] George Harriman book came out somewhere in there. And there was Bill Schelley's [Harvey] Kurtzman biography.
I love biographies in general, but also it seemed like an underutilized way of taking in both the cartoonist's life as well as the history of comics, which has always been interesting to me. And I've always been interested in artists’ personal canons and what they are into, and what they have absorbed in order to create their own language. So Crumb just seemed like an ideal subject to give myself a chance to write longform about the medium. But also, he’s had such a fascinating life.
What was your first exposure to Crumb's work? Was there a book of his that you’d say started you down the path to writing a biography of him?
My first exposure was the very first collection of American Splendor comics. That blew my mind. I think I was 13 or 14. And then after that, the Fireside reprint of Head Comix with his incredibly long introduction. That book, more than anything else, kind of turned me on my head. That turned me into an obsessive.
In writing this book, you covered the ways that the authorities tried to ban and otherwise suppress different underground comics. Did you anticipate that that history would start to feel a lot more relevant to the present moment when you began working on Crumb?
These days it seems like comics in the counterculture are almost too small for anybody to do that except Maus. Something like Maus is a much more dangerous book to people than any issue of Zap because it is so much more historically, politically, socially coherent in its message and in its meaning. Zap, I would imagine, would be almost irrelevant to what people now are dealing with or going after.
Because he lives in a small village in the south of France, I'm not worried about Crumb getting banned. There are much larger things to worry about than that. Somebody like [Art] Spiegelman is a much greater concern to me in the sense, in the sense that he's a much more present threat.
And also, try and find Crumb in a bookstore these days. You’ll find The Book of Genesis and that's pretty much it. He's not part of that literary dialogue in the way that other artists are. It's interesting. Robert is an amazing custodian of his own legacy in his home, but he has not put a lot of effort into his published legacy of comics. That’s why a lot of his books are out of print in America. Things just aren't that readily available, but that should be changing.
Early in your book, you mention that Crumb asked you to be honest about reckoning with some of the ways that race and gender have come up in his work in troubling ways. How did you decide how best to reckon with that?
That was a very unexpected thing for him to say to me at his kitchen table. It was the day after my wife and I had arrived, and so we were staying with them. We'd had this really fun evening the night before listening to records, doing everything but talking about why I was there, which was to get him to agree to let me write this thing. And so around noon, he brought that condition out, which was a great thing.
I can't say that I knew that this was something that I was going to be addressing. I also had a story to tell and a narrative to maintain. I knew that I needed to address it when it occurred first in the narrative, and then to give it space, but not to slow down the book. I try to keep the narrative moving; I want people to finish the book. Not just hardcore fans, but also civilians.
So the conversations with Robert were actually not a huge part of how I dealt with that material. He is very open about it, he's still figuring it out. If you catch him on one day, he might say one thing that may be just to provoke you; catch him on another day, and he's a little more thoughtful about it. For me, I had conversations with colleagues, mostly interesting conversations with museum colleagues. You know, there's a history of well-meaning, but now racially insensitive, satire and art of that time.
I was looking at that kind of work when thinking about it. I think I understand Robert pretty well at this stage. I have the privilege of knowing that he's not a racist. He made racist work, but that doesn't equate. For the book, I talked to Dewey Crumpler, who's an amazing painter who worked with the Black Panthers in the 1960s and knew Crumb’s work very well. I talked to Black artists and writers of that time, who could shed light on what it was like to encounter it. And then I read somebody like Gerald Early, who's a little younger than those guys, who wrote beautifully about comics and about Crumb’s issues with race. And then I also talked to curators who are dealing with this all the time in museums, because that's the world I’m in. And then I talked to my friends, and also my editor, Kathy, who helped a huge amount, and my wife. Those were just conversations to suss it out.
The misogyny was interesting. I talked to women who were there, who could help me understand what the environment was like. And I talked to women my age and younger women, and it was about remembering that this stuff is art, and being generous of spirit with it. We all want generosity to be extended to each other. It happens very rarely. But I felt like there needed to be an antidote to this reactionary online conversation about Crumb, which I find mostly really counterproductive to thinking in general, but also to understanding any cartoonist’s work. It's just not useful.
Late in the biography, you bring up the fact that Robert Crumb is—the polite phrase might be “a vaccine skeptic.” And he’s engaged with some conspiracy theories over the years. Was that something you were reckoning with throughout the whole process?
It came up mostly in the end. His engagement with that kind of material kind of started after the late eighties and early nineties. It wasn't really something I needed to address early on. That is mostly a very private thing for him. It's not something that’s in the work that much, although it’s been a little bit lately.
I don't care really if Robert's a vaccine skeptic or a conspiracy theorist or any of that. Lots of people are into lots of things and he's not running for political office. There's no harm, I guess. And there are things where if I were him and had gone through what he's gone through with the medical establishment his whole life, I'd be skeptical too. And, as I said in the book, given what we've seen from pharmaceutical companies, we should all be a little skeptical of them.
I didn't make it a big part of the book because it wasn't a big part of my interactions with him, nor is it a big part of his work. And for me, the balance was following him and following the work and following our interactions. The medical material is an interest of his, but I don’t think it's a defining interest.
In the process of researching and writing this book, were there any particular works of Crumb’s that you came across and felt that they were underrated and deserved more of a spotlight?
The nice and extremely gratifying thing about working on this book is that my appreciation of his work just grew and grew and grew. I never got sick of it. That was one reason I didn't want it to end. Not that I have to stop looking at the work now, but I found it so profoundly rich.
Works in particular? Don’t Tempt Fate, which I think is an under-sung masterpiece. I think Walkin’ the Streets, which was his final short-form comic until soon, may be his greatest work. I think his later work is really under-appreciated. He was really at the height of his powers and drawing comics at the highest possible level—arguably, some of the best comics ever made—for a teeny tiny dwindling audience in comic books that haven't even been reprinted.
I think that some of the early work has gotten lost in the shuffle of being in anthologies and being reprinted with other stuff. Some of the early tabloid pages for the East Village Other are just unbelievable. I think the work in Yarrowstalks #3 in 1967 is some of the best comics ever made. And you just don't see that material anymore because it was tabloid format. If you see it, it's chopped up or shrunk down. That's something I'm looking to fix down the line. It’s funny the way for an artist that strong, people tend to focus so much on the really extreme work. But I think in many ways that Crumb’s best material are meditative deep dives.
