Review by Booklist Review
In his foreword, Nadel promises a warts-and-all biography of Robert Crumb, and he delivers, but what else would you expect when portraying a cartoonist so willing to put his basest desires and preoccupations on display? Beginning with Crumb's troubled and troubling childhood, Nadel traces the cartoonist's lifelong obsession with comics and music, his destructive relationships, the development of his distinctive art style, and the inspiration for his vast, outré output, some of which is violently misogynistic. To his credit, Nadel neither absolves nor incriminates his subject, instead revealing Crumb's sometimes contradictory thoughts alongside reactions from his contemporaries. His expansive career, from hand-stapled, underground comics to high-end galleries, encompasses many shifts in perspective, developing ideas about art and ego, and changing attitudes about his relationship to the world. Nadel capably lays it all out for us to see, creating a nuanced picture of an influential figure, whose work shaped the landscape of comics to come. Incorporating interviews with Crumb, his family, and the artists who work with or were inspired by him, this first major biography of the iconic cartoonist is unsparing in its detail, acutely aware of social and historical context, and unapologetically in awe of Crumb's artistic talent. A revealing portrait of an artist, yes, but also of an art form.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An intimate biography of legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb. Far out, era defining, and often deeply problematic, Crumb's comics captured the zeitgeist of the '60s and '70s counterculture and continue to inspire legions of artists today. Emerging from a traumatic youth with unfiltered sexual hang-ups and a love of prewar comics, Crumb grew to be an unlikely hero of the scene. His characters like Fritz the Cat and the bearded guru Mr. Natural ushered in an acid-washed wave of irreverent adult comics that, biographer Nadel (It's Life as I See It, 2011, etc.) explains, built an audience across "overlapping cultures: stoned hippies who spotted a fellow traveler, intellectuals who could see its meta-layers, and comics fans who respected the drawing and verve." A collaborative champion, Crumb published anthologies likeZap andWeirdo, in which he used his star power to support the work of other contributors. Drawn in virtuosic inky crosshatch, his brazen comics are at once stunning and troubling to read, often teeming with misogyny and sexual deviance. But Nadel explains Crumb is "willing and compelled to expose his darkest impulses to exemplify the male id; he risks being shunned to demonstrate the viciousness of racism. He demands we pay attention no matter the cost."Crumb's great success can be traced to the palpable trust between Nadel and his subject: Nadel warmly channels present-day Crumb's elder remembrances throughout the biography in a way that enlightens the text with an unsuspecting maturity. "Robert imposed just one condition on this book," Nadel writes in his foreword, "that I be honest about his faults, look closely at his compulsions, and examine the racially and sexually charged aspects of his work." A tall order, as much of Crumb's seminal oeuvre is built on his own perverted fantasies, but Nadel deftly contextualizes the artist's salacious output within a finely rendered record of the artist's private life and within an electric chronicle of the underground comics wave. Essential history for art and comics aficionados. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
