Hero of the counter-culture

Robert Crumb (born Philadelphia 1943) is variously hailed as a ‘virtuoso weirdo’, the ‘father of underground comics’ and ‘the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century’. Robert Hughes is responsible for that final appellation and one can see his point, though Nicholas Garland has called this assessment ‘just silly’, and Crumb himself has refuted it in a cartoon ‘Broigul I ain’t…’ What he is, indisputably, is a draughtsman touched by genius and a no-holds-barred autobiographer of such whackiness as to require the invention of a new category. (Crumby? Crumbist? Crumbonic?) A hero of the counter-culture, he is self-taught, an obsessive cartoonist who began to draw his own home comics (at the instigation of his intimidating elder brother Charles) before he was ten. He is responsible for such unforgettable creations as Mr Natural, Fritz the Cat, Schuman the Human and Angelfood McSpade. Rather to his irritation, his ‘Keep on Truckin’ image/slogan hit a nerve, which has kept jerking ever since.