Today it's creators, not cops, who want to banish R. Crumb, onetime king of the comics underground.

Brian Doherty | From the May 2019 issue

Robert Crumb is the undisputed godfather of alternative comics. His work has appeared in museums across the world, from the Venice Biennale to New York's Museum of Modern Art; he was the subject of Terry Zwigoff's acclaimed documentary Crumb (Gene Siskel's favorite film of 1994); his drawings are so coveted by collectors that a sale of some sketchbooks in the early 1990s bought him a centuries-old chateau in southeast France. The legendary art critic Robert Hughes has favorably compared his portrayals of the human grotesque to Pieter Bruegel and William Hogarth, declaring Crumb "the one and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art, either in America or Europe."

Nearly every milestone on the long road comics have crawled from derided trash to treasured American art form was inspired either directly or secondhand by Crumb's choices and achievements. With his first issue of Zap in 1968, Crumb singlehandedly invented a format and sensibility, under the broad label of "underground comix," that permanently changed how printed cartoon stories are perceived. Along the way, it opened the form to social criticism, history, outrageous satire, and the full range of deeply personal human experience, including the both lightly and darkly sexual.

Crumb's occasional collaborator Harvey Pekar, one of the major innovators of quotidian comic autobiography, says his partner demonstrated that "comics were as good an art form as any that existed. You could write any kind of story in comics. It was as versatile a medium as film or television." Similar praise from other creators for Crumb's mind-blowing importance to them could go on for pages; anyone making noncorporate, nongenre, self-expressive comics occupies a space he created.

But events in the comics world last year served notice that the social-justice re-evaluation currently sweeping comedy, film, and literature has arrived at the doorstep of free-thinking comics. In September, at the Small Press Expo's Ignatz Awards ceremony in Bethesda, Maryland, Crumb's successor generation of alt artists let the 75-year-old have it with both barrels.

While presenting the award for Outstanding Artist, the cartoonist Ben Passmore, who is black, asserted that "comics is changing…and it's not an accident." He lamented the continued industry presence of "creeps" and "apologists," then called out the godfather by name: "Shit's not going to change on its own. You gotta keep on being annoying about it.…A while ago someone like R. Crumb would be 'Outstanding.'"

The room erupted with both "ooohs" and booing. "A little while ago there'd be no boos," Passmore responded. "I wouldn't be up here, real talk, and yo—fuck that dude." The crowd burst into applause.

The brief against Crumb is both specific to his famous idiosyncrasies and generally familiar to our modern culture of outrage archeology. His art has trafficked in crude racial and anti-Semitic stereotypes, expressed an open sense of misogyny, and included depictions of incest and rape. Crumb's comics are "seriously problematic because of the pain and harm caused by perpetuating images of racial stereotypes and sexual violence," the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE) explained last year when removing Crumb's name from one of its exhibit rooms.

Such talk alarms Gary Groth, co-founder of Fantagraphics, the premiere American publisher of quality adult comics, including a 17-volume series of The Complete Crumb Comics. "The spontaneity and vehemence" of the backlash, Groth says, "surprised me—and I guess what also disheartened me was, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people booing Crumb are not familiar with his work.…This visceral dislike of him has no basis in understanding who Crumb is, his place in comics history, his contribution to the form."

Key to the misunderstanding is Crumb's willingness to probe human darkness, including his own, and his sheer maniacal delight in transgression. (Crumb's own explanation for one of his more notorious incest-related strips was, "I was just being a punk.") The Ignatz Awards crowd, Groth worries, "will not tolerate that kind of expression, and I think that's disturbing. Cartooning has a long history of being transgressive and controversial and pushing boundaries, and now we have a generation very much opposed to that, who want to censure fellow artists from doing work they don't approve of—even though they are able to do what they are doing and want to do precisely because of trailblazing on the part of artists they now abominate."

Crumb blew minds and inspired a generation with his eagerness to portray and explore "the stark reality at the bottom of life," as he put it, delivering "a psychotic manifestation of some grimy part of America's collective unconscious." In pursuit of that goal, he produced many comics, sometimes with reasonably clear comic grotesquerie, sometimes with undeniable—Crumb himself never denied it—truly dark personal expressions that would strike most people now (and many even then) as unacceptably hostile toward women.

Two of his most notorious stories were titled "When the Niggers Take Over America!" and "When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!" His fans insist they were obvious pitch-black satires of bigoted madness. But they were so outrageous that they were reprinted in actual American Nazi papers. Crumb told The New Yorker in 1994, "I just had to expose all the myths people have of blacks and Jews in the rawest way possible to tilt the scale toward truth."

Trina Robbins, the first female cartoonist in Crumb's San Francisco coterie in the late 1960s and a co-founder of Wimmen's Comix (the longest-running all-woman-made comic series), was the first prominent voice raising feminist objections to how he portrayed women and sex. She says she was written off as an annoying scold by the scene's "little boys club" for noting the violent hostility toward women expressed in some of his work.

Defenses of Crumb, who is no longer producing new comics, read as anachronistic to many in our woke age. The Massachusetts Expo's reasoning for shunning Crumb follows an all-too-recognizable one-two formula for casting problematic artists adrift: "We recognize Crumb's singular importance to the development of independent and alternative comics, the influence that he has had on many of our most respected cartoonists, and the quality and brilliance of much of his work," the organizers explained. But! "We also recognize the negative impact carried by some of the imagery and narratives that Crumb has produced, impact felt most acutely by those whose voices have not been historically respected or accommodated."

Passmore did not respond to emailed attempts to interview him for this story. But MICE-like, he seemed to imply that respect for Crumb necessarily means disrespect for black cartoonists—that the racial and gender diversity flourishing in comics today is definitionally opposed to Crumb. As he said at the Ignatz Awards, "I wouldn't be here."

His comments elicited a wave of social media support from fellow artists and fans. A white male cartoonist named Derf Backderf, who belongs to the generation between Crumb and Passmore and is best known for a gripping memoir about being childhood friends with Jeffrey Dahmer, initially came to the master's defense on Twitter. But Backderf soon deleted his pro-Crumb tweets, admitting on further contemplation that he was prepared to "box up Crumb and stick him in the attic."

In Backderf's final tweet on the episode, he said he was moved by a post from black female cartoonist and publisher C. Spike Trotman, who said, "Personally speaking, I'm pretty relieved I no longer live in a world where I walk into a comic shop and there are Angelfood McSpade chocolate bars by the register."

Angelfood McSpade was Crumb's absurdly exaggerated and sexed-up depiction of an African wild woman. It is very easy to understand why a black woman would feel uncomfortable viewing that character. And yet, as the comics historian and New Republic writer Jeet Heer commented in a post not directly responding to Trotman at The Hooded Utilitarian blog, "anyone who can't see the satirical (indeed outlandishly satirical) element of Angelfood McSpade has no business being a comics critic.…I think it is to Crumb's credit that he is willing to implicate himself in his satires on racism—that he doesn't see racism as cultural phenomenon outside of himself that needs to be condemned but as cultural legacies that pervasively shape his own sensibility and need to be confronted internally."

Today, many think that fine distinctions between racist art and art that satirizes or complicates American racism are a luxury for people who, because of color or status, don't have to personally endure bigotry or its vestiges. Whatever the intent, they say, a racist caricature is a racist caricature, and it's long past time for that sort of thing to disappear.

But those familiar with Crumb's history have reasons to be suspicious of the idea that some art is so vile and offensive that its creators, distributors, and even consumers should not be tolerated. That attitude has led to bad places, in living memory.

'Zap No. 4 Is an Exploiter'

Crumb made the first two issues of Zap by himself, but soon a murderer's row of cartoon superstars formed a collective to produce the book. One of them was Robert Williams, now a founding father of a school of "lowbrow" figurative painting valorized in galleries from New York to Japan. At a 2018 San Diego Comic-Con panel discussion, Williams cheekily said that "me and Crumb appreciated that what we did, someone would have to pay for." Meaning: "Someone at a newsstand had to sell the damn thing, and that poor clerk could be arrested."

Indeed, many clerks were. On the panel, Ron Turner of the underground publisher Last Gasp told tales of his friends at stores and galleries being dragged downtown by vice squads. Joyce Farmer, founding co-editor of one of the first underground comix entirely by women, Tits & Clits, somberly revealed that she was scared off of creating anything potentially controversial for years after seeing a bookstore that had been run by her editing partner raided because of the comics she made and enjoyed. On a separate Comic-Con panel, Robbins said that the legal heat in the early 1970s around underground comix was so severe that Ms. magazine refused to print an ad for Wimmen's Comix for fear that Ms. itself could wind up charged with marketing obscene material.

Even finding a printer was fraught; some might keep and destroy your negatives after deciding they didn't approve of the comic you'd paid them to reproduce.

Most of the arrests from this era did not result in convictions, for various reasons. At Comic-Con, Turner and Williams tag-teamed a well-honed tale of an early '70s prosecution coming a cropper after an offending comic was apparently purloined from the evidence room by a sleazy cop, leaving a judge to ask in open court, to no avail, "Where's the Felch?"

An existing network of head shops and record stores, which had first centered around the market for psychedelic concert poster art, eventually took up the wave of underground comix being made by Crumb and his pals. Although Crumb himself cares for almost no American culture past 1930, Zap and a plethora of fellow travelers became a core part of the hip revolutionary counterculture of the time.

Thus, some suspect there was more than a concern with the moral fabric of Manhattan—something more like animus toward youth culture—that led a New York undercover agent from the Morals Squad to enter two different bookstores in August and September of 1969 to buy copies of Zap issue No. 4. On the second visit, he arrested several employees for selling an obscene publication.

East Side Bookstore manager Peter Dargis admitted to having stocked and sold around 200 copies of the comic, though he said he had not read it himself. He pointed out to the court that his business stocked more than 16,000 titles and that comics such as Zap amounted to less than 1 percent of the store's gross. Charles Kirkpatrick, manager of the New Yorker Book Store, told a similar story of a huge stock, a tiny percentage of which was potentially naughty comics whose specific content he had not studied.

The case was presided over by Judge Joel Tyler, the same man who declared the movie Deep Throat to be legally obscene. The district attorney offered no evidence other than the copy of Zap 4, whose scurrilousness was supposed to speak for itself. The sellers pointed out that the material was marked "adults only" and that the undercover agent was indeed an adult.

Expert witnesses from the world of comics and art—including Whitney Museum curator Robert Doty, who had included some Crumb comics in an exhibit, "Human Concern/Personal Torment: The Grotesque in American Art"—tried to convince Tyler there was more to Crumb and Co.'s work than smut.

Sidney Jacobson, who worked for the children's comic company Harvey, home of Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost, shook things up by insisting that Archie Comics, a rival, produced cartoons "purposely written and drawn to arouse sexualities in teenagers." The publishers and creators of Archie, Jacobson maintained, "are trying within it to appeal to the sexual desires of their public," while Zap's more grotesque representations of sex, including Crumb's depiction of sex acts between family members, were designed to be less arousing than Betty and Veronica. (Jacobson offended Tyler by referring to his own company's work as aimed at the lowest age group. The judge harrumphed that he himself read Harvey comics regularly.)

Dargis and Kirkpatrick were convicted in October 1970, with Tyler deciding that Zap was "utterly unredeemed and unredeemable, save, perhaps, only by the quality of the paper upon which it is printed. It is patently offensive.…It is a part of the underworld press—the growing world of deceit in sex—and it is not reality or honesty, as they often claim it to be. It represents an emotional incapacity to view sex as a basis for establishing genuine human relationships, or as a normal part of human condition.—Zap No. 4 is an exploiter; its effect is to purvey 'filth for filth's sake.' It is hard-core pornography.…The material must fail by any legal test yet announced."

Sellers of such filth, Tyler ruled, should have known it was impermissibly obscene (even though it did not become legally obscene for sure until the judge said so). As for those eggheaded claims to artistic value, he found "these witnesses failed to particularize in understandable lay terms their generalizations that the cartoonists were 'original,' or how they were 'influencing a new generation of cartoonists,' or how they showed 'enormous vitality,' or where was the satire or parody of the sexual experiences depicted…or how do these cartoons, dealing as they do in the main with perverted sexual experiences, attempt to 'humorously outrage' the reader and place in perspective human values."

In lieu of a 90-day jail sentence, the store managers were fined $500, the equivalent of more than $3,200 today. Their appeals in the New York state system failed essentially on grounds that they couldn't prove they didn't know Zap 4 was obscene. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that outcome in October 1973, leaving in place a ruling that the then-chief of the American Booksellers Association called "frightening," since "no one can possibly know in advance what a judge will consider obscene. The effect of this decision is to make every bookseller in the state a censor."

In a blistering dissent, Justice William Brennan repeated his assertion from an earlier case that "the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit the state and federal governments from attempting wholly to suppress sexually oriented materials on the basis of their allegedly 'obscene' contents." Yet the Court seemed to have it out for Crumb and his compatriots in 1973. Earlier that year, in Miller v. California, it had shifted obscenity law by giving localities the power to punish expression for being obscene if it violated local mores while lacking "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Many blame Miller for wrecking underground comics as a viable business, with hippie entrepreneurs in college towns across the nation deciding that the profit margins on these curious 50-cent pamphlets were not worth risking fines or jail time.

To Crumb's Zap partner Williams, applying a square's community standards to their transgressive work was an outrage. These comics "were not made for the general public," he said at Comic-Con. "They were made for an audience that seeked them out…an intellectual group in favor of free thought and imagination."
Censure, Not Censorship

No one of significance in the comics community today is calling for 1970s-style legal punishment for unwoke cartoonists. Charles Brownstein, who heads up the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, points out that "there's a distinction between censorship in the courts vs. dissenting points of view in the public square."

Brownstein's organization was born of a 1986 arrest and conviction (later reversed) of a comic shop clerk for selling, among other things, an issue of a Crumb-founded comic called Weirdo. The cases he deals with these days are more likely to be about censoring comics in specific public places, such as public schools and libraries. Arrests of comic sellers aren't much of a thing anymore.

Fantagraphics' Groth, who keeps in print the very same comic that got Kirkpatrick and Dargis hauled into court, grants that he hasn't once over the last two decades seriously feared any legal trouble for selling Crumb. Prosecutions of printed materials not clearly marketed as masturbatory aids are rarely pursued this century. And thanks to Crumb's gallery cred and fame, most prosecutors probably assume that judges and juries will consider his work, if only because it is his, to have literary or artistic value.

But obscenity laws still exist, and that prosecutorial energy has been especially fierce in the past few decades when targeting sexual depictions involving children. One of Zap 4's more offensive strips is an incest riff featuring kids having sex with their parents, so it isn't completely insane to fear that Crumb's work might once again come to be seen as not merely unwoke but illegal. The anti-Crumb sentiments are "still dangerous," Groth says, "because laws can in fact change because of public attitudes." Those attitudes now include mainstream consideration of legislation aimed at curtailing "hate speech."

During the social media storm kicked off by Passmore's comments, Jules Rivera, a black female cartoonist, tweeted out two panels of a Crumb comic in which an obvious cartoon version of him is having sex with a woman identified as being in "a drunken stupor," with no signs of consent. "I'm keeping that rapist ass Crumb art on my phone," she continued. "If anyone challenges me, I'll bust out my phone and say 'so you're down with this?' In person. To your face."

But holding art and expression to the moral demands implicit in that tweet may actually hobble what art is for. Appreciating a creator isn't—or needn't be—a matter of being "down with" the actions portrayed in his every work. One of the many reasons humans have art is to understand, play with, portray, question, and explore the human condition. Which, as Crumb firmly believes, includes a lot of awful, unacceptable thoughts and behavior.

Portraying darkness and evil in art is not the same as celebrating darkness and evil, even when the depiction is not safely anchored to a clear statement of the artist's anti-evil sympathies. Offense and transgression can be a vital part of how expression stays lively, fresh, startling, moving, and true to the human condition. That transgressive art is hard to defend in sober, sensible ways is precisely the point. As Simpsons creator Matt Groening wrote in an introduction to 1998's The Life and Times of R. Crumb, "it sure is a relief to read someone's beautiful Bad Thoughts and realize the world won't come crashing down after all."

The teen Crumb in his published letters saw himself as a good liberal condemning the racial ignorance and prejudice of the yokels surrounding him. The adult Crumb, in addition to his transgressions, did some excellent cartooning on the lives of black musicians who had made the old-time music he revered. Building a wall of exclusion around his art denies audiences the galvanizing work of an artist whose declared intent often aligns with that of his modern-day indicters, even if he's willing to toy with imagery they recoil from.

In a world of free expression and diminishing legal speech controls, if you want to "cancel" Crumb, well, it's your right to try. But Groth for one finds that attitude troubling. It "feels similar to trying to erase Ezra Pound or Yeats or Wyndham Lewis, any number of reactionaries in the history of art and literature," he says. "It's provincial and philistine and based on historical ignorance, and I don't think that's what art should be about."

The Frustrating Tango of Liberal Tolerance

The American culture that R. Crumb and his contemporaries grew up in restricted the ways people could talk about sex, violence, race, and class. The first wave of underground comix artists reacted with metaphorical explosive violence, especially once they realized nothing was stopping them but the constraints of their own minds. That freedom, in all its messiness and ugliness, upset and unnerved and offended many. It also inspired massive amounts of interesting, strange, life-enhancing art, not just in the comics world but in such offshoots of Crumb's aesthetic as National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons.

The attitudes Crumb satirized were real and, he thought, deserving of ridicule via crazed exaggeration. His feelings of hostility toward women are, as he has insisted in his comics and in interviews, true to him (and, he is certain, to many other men). What is to be gained by pretending they're not? Crumb was honest about being the sort of resentful nebbish who in his pre-fame days saw women as controlling something he desperately wanted and couldn't have—what would now be called a corrosive "incel" mentality, after the men who self-identify as involuntarily celibate.

In a 1991 interview with The Comics Journal, Crumb said art should be judged not on ideological purity but on whether it is "interesting or boring…honest and truthful and real…saying what's really on minds.…If it's really in there it ought to come out on paper." At the same time, he reflected, "I don't know, maybe we're all just dragging society down. Maybe we should all be locked up."

The paradox of liberal tolerance remains: Neither the transgressors nor the offended have a right to force the other side to just shut up about what its members think, feel, or imagine. The two are intimately linked in a mutually frustrating tango. The offended want certain expressions to go away or be universally recognized as unacceptable, and the transgressors want a social space to express themselves without feeling driven from society.

Liberal tolerance, as exemplified by the First Amendment—refusing to violently punish someone for his or her expression—offers a way for these battles to take place without anyone being physically hurt. The figurative game of expression, reaction, pushback, and constantly shifting mores can keep being played without either side mistaking the contest for mortal combat. Although cancel culture (without law enforcement involvement) stops short of violence, those who like to wield it should understand that human beings are social animals. To be told that you and anyone who doesn't join enthusiastically in condemning you should be expelled from society can feel like war when you're the target.

Many people understand that art is for expressing and exploring the human mind and soul—and the human mind and soul contain darkness, sexual mania, racism, hostility, and any number of awful truths. To force those things out of the conversation is to unreasonably limit the whole project, they say. Art is a treasured aspect of the healthy human condition, even if what the art says is unhealthy on various dimensions. Many others consider that tradeoff worth it in the name of protecting the status and feelings of previously excluded or oppressed groups.

Crumb's attempt to open comics to a vast range of human expression was victorious: Whether they want to acknowledge it or not, those working in the field today are his descendants. Like all children and grandchildren, they can choose whether or not to understand their patriarch, whether to emulate him or tell him to fuck off. Their choices may not always be kind or wise, but such is human freedom.

src: https://reason.com/2019/04/29/cancel-culture-comes-for-count/

must be a day ending in y.

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

>Today it's creators, not cops, who want to banish R. Crumb,
>onetime king of the comics underground.
>
>Brian Doherty | From the May 2019 issue
>
>Robert Crumb is the undisputed godfather of alternative
>comics. His work has appeared in museums across the world,
>from the Venice Biennale to New York's Museum of Modern Art;
>he was the subject of Terry Zwigoff's acclaimed documentary
>Crumb (Gene Siskel's favorite film of 1994); his drawings are
>so coveted by collectors that a sale of some sketchbooks in
>the early 1990s bought him a centuries-old chateau in
>southeast France. The legendary art critic Robert Hughes has
>favorably compared his portrayals of the human grotesque to
>Pieter Bruegel and William Hogarth, declaring Crumb "the one
>and only genius the 1960s underground produced in visual art,
>either in America or Europe."
>
>Nearly every milestone on the long road comics have crawled
>from derided trash to treasured American art form was inspired
>either directly or secondhand by Crumb's choices and
>achievements. With his first issue of Zap in 1968, Crumb
>singlehandedly invented a format and sensibility, under the
>broad label of "underground comix," that permanently changed
>how printed cartoon stories are perceived. Along the way, it
>opened the form to social criticism, history, outrageous
>satire, and the full range of deeply personal human
>experience, including the both lightly and darkly sexual.
>
>Crumb's occasional collaborator Harvey Pekar, one of the major
>innovators of quotidian comic autobiography, says his partner
>demonstrated that "comics were as good an art form as any that
>existed. You could write any kind of story in comics. It was
>as versatile a medium as film or television." Similar praise
>from other creators for Crumb's mind-blowing importance to
>them could go on for pages; anyone making noncorporate,
>nongenre, self-expressive comics occupies a space he created.
>
>But events in the comics world last year served notice that
>the social-justice re-evaluation currently sweeping comedy,
>film, and literature has arrived at the doorstep of
>free-thinking comics. In September, at the Small Press Expo's
>Ignatz Awards ceremony in Bethesda, Maryland, Crumb's
>successor generation of alt artists let the 75-year-old have
>it with both barrels.
>
>While presenting the award for Outstanding Artist, the
>cartoonist Ben Passmore, who is black, asserted that "comics
>is changing…and it's not an accident." He lamented the
>continued industry presence of "creeps" and "apologists," then
>called out the godfather by name: "Shit's not going to change
>on its own. You gotta keep on being annoying about it.…A
>while ago someone like R. Crumb would be 'Outstanding.'"
>
>The room erupted with both "ooohs" and booing. "A little while
>ago there'd be no boos," Passmore responded. "I wouldn't be up
>here, real talk, and yo—fuck that dude." The crowd burst
>into applause.
>
>The brief against Crumb is both specific to his famous
>idiosyncrasies and generally familiar to our modern culture of
>outrage archeology. His art has trafficked in crude racial and
>anti-Semitic stereotypes, expressed an open sense of misogyny,
>and included depictions of incest and rape. Crumb's comics are
>"seriously problematic because of the pain and harm caused by
>perpetuating images of racial stereotypes and sexual
>violence," the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (MICE)
>explained last year when removing Crumb's name from one of its
>exhibit rooms.
>
>Such talk alarms Gary Groth, co-founder of Fantagraphics, the
>premiere American publisher of quality adult comics, including
>a 17-volume series of The Complete Crumb Comics. "The
>spontaneity and vehemence" of the backlash, Groth says,
>"surprised me—and I guess what also disheartened me was, I'm
>pretty sure the vast majority of people booing Crumb are not
>familiar with his work.…This visceral dislike of him has no
>basis in understanding who Crumb is, his place in comics
>history, his contribution to the form."
>
>Key to the misunderstanding is Crumb's willingness to probe
>human darkness, including his own, and his sheer maniacal
>delight in transgression. (Crumb's own explanation for one of
>his more notorious incest-related strips was, "I was just
>being a punk.") The Ignatz Awards crowd, Groth worries, "will
>not tolerate that kind of expression, and I think that's
>disturbing. Cartooning has a long history of being
>transgressive and controversial and pushing boundaries, and
>now we have a generation very much opposed to that, who want
>to censure fellow artists from doing work they don't approve
>of—even though they are able to do what they are doing and
>want to do precisely because of trailblazing on the part of
>artists they now abominate."
>
>Crumb blew minds and inspired a generation with his eagerness
>to portray and explore "the stark reality at the bottom of
>life," as he put it, delivering "a psychotic manifestation of
>some grimy part of America's collective unconscious." In
>pursuit of that goal, he produced many comics, sometimes with
>reasonably clear comic grotesquerie, sometimes with
>undeniable—Crumb himself never denied it—truly dark
>personal expressions that would strike most people now (and
>many even then) as unacceptably hostile toward women.
>
>Two of his most notorious stories were titled "When the
>Niggers Take Over America!" and "When the Goddamn Jews Take
>Over America!" His fans insist they were obvious pitch-black
>satires of bigoted madness. But they were so outrageous that
>they were reprinted in actual American Nazi papers. Crumb told
>The New Yorker in 1994, "I just had to expose all the myths
>people have of blacks and Jews in the rawest way possible to
>tilt the scale toward truth."
>
>Trina Robbins, the first female cartoonist in Crumb's San
>Francisco coterie in the late 1960s and a co-founder of
>Wimmen's Comix (the longest-running all-woman-made comic
>series), was the first prominent voice raising feminist
>objections to how he portrayed women and sex. She says she was
>written off as an annoying scold by the scene's "little boys
>club" for noting the violent hostility toward women expressed
>in some of his work.
>
>Defenses of Crumb, who is no longer producing new comics, read
>as anachronistic to many in our woke age. The Massachusetts
>Expo's reasoning for shunning Crumb follows an
>all-too-recognizable one-two formula for casting problematic
>artists adrift: "We recognize Crumb's singular importance to
>the development of independent and alternative comics, the
>influence that he has had on many of our most respected
>cartoonists, and the quality and brilliance of much of his
>work," the organizers explained. But! "We also recognize the
>negative impact carried by some of the imagery and narratives
>that Crumb has produced, impact felt most acutely by those
>whose voices have not been historically respected or
>accommodated."
>
>Passmore did not respond to emailed attempts to interview him
>for this story. But MICE-like, he seemed to imply that respect
>for Crumb necessarily means disrespect for black
>cartoonists—that the racial and gender diversity flourishing
>in comics today is definitionally opposed to Crumb. As he said
>at the Ignatz Awards, "I wouldn't be here."
>
>His comments elicited a wave of social media support from
>fellow artists and fans. A white male cartoonist named Derf
>Backderf, who belongs to the generation between Crumb and
>Passmore and is best known for a gripping memoir about being
>childhood friends with Jeffrey Dahmer, initially came to the
>master's defense on Twitter. But Backderf soon deleted his
>pro-Crumb tweets, admitting on further contemplation that he
>was prepared to "box up Crumb and stick him in the attic."
>
>In Backderf's final tweet on the episode, he said he was moved
>by a post from black female cartoonist and publisher C. Spike
>Trotman, who said, "Personally speaking, I'm pretty relieved I
>no longer live in a world where I walk into a comic shop and
>there are Angelfood McSpade chocolate bars by the register."
>
>Angelfood McSpade was Crumb's absurdly exaggerated and
>sexed-up depiction of an African wild woman. It is very easy
>to understand why a black woman would feel uncomfortable
>viewing that character. And yet, as the comics historian and
>New Republic writer Jeet Heer commented in a post not directly
>responding to Trotman at The Hooded Utilitarian blog, "anyone
>who can't see the satirical (indeed outlandishly satirical)
>element of Angelfood McSpade has no business being a comics
>critic.…I think it is to Crumb's credit that he is willing
>to implicate himself in his satires on racism—that he
>doesn't see racism as cultural phenomenon outside of himself
>that needs to be condemned but as cultural legacies that
>pervasively shape his own sensibility and need to be
>confronted internally."
>
>Today, many think that fine distinctions between racist art
>and art that satirizes or complicates American racism are a
>luxury for people who, because of color or status, don't have
>to personally endure bigotry or its vestiges. Whatever the
>intent, they say, a racist caricature is a racist caricature,
>and it's long past time for that sort of thing to disappear.
>
>But those familiar with Crumb's history have reasons to be
>suspicious of the idea that some art is so vile and offensive
>that its creators, distributors, and even consumers should not
>be tolerated. That attitude has led to bad places, in living
>memory.
>
>'Zap No. 4 Is an Exploiter'
>
>Crumb made the first two issues of Zap by himself, but soon a
>murderer's row of cartoon superstars formed a collective to
>produce the book. One of them was Robert Williams, now a
>founding father of a school of "lowbrow" figurative painting
>valorized in galleries from New York to Japan. At a 2018 San
>Diego Comic-Con panel discussion, Williams cheekily said that
>"me and Crumb appreciated that what we did, someone would have
>to pay for." Meaning: "Someone at a newsstand had to sell the
>damn thing, and that poor clerk could be arrested."
>
>Indeed, many clerks were. On the panel, Ron Turner of the
>underground publisher Last Gasp told tales of his friends at
>stores and galleries being dragged downtown by vice squads.
>Joyce Farmer, founding co-editor of one of the first
>underground comix entirely by women, Tits & Clits, somberly
>revealed that she was scared off of creating anything
>potentially controversial for years after seeing a bookstore
>that had been run by her editing partner raided because of the
>comics she made and enjoyed. On a separate Comic-Con panel,
>Robbins said that the legal heat in the early 1970s around
>underground comix was so severe that Ms. magazine refused to
>print an ad for Wimmen's Comix for fear that Ms. itself could
>wind up charged with marketing obscene material.
>
>Even finding a printer was fraught; some might keep and
>destroy your negatives after deciding they didn't approve of
>the comic you'd paid them to reproduce.
>
>Most of the arrests from this era did not result in
>convictions, for various reasons. At Comic-Con, Turner and
>Williams tag-teamed a well-honed tale of an early '70s
>prosecution coming a cropper after an offending comic was
>apparently purloined from the evidence room by a sleazy cop,
>leaving a judge to ask in open court, to no avail, "Where's
>the Felch?"
>
>An existing network of head shops and record stores, which had
>first centered around the market for psychedelic concert
>poster art, eventually took up the wave of underground comix
>being made by Crumb and his pals. Although Crumb himself cares
>for almost no American culture past 1930, Zap and a plethora
>of fellow travelers became a core part of the hip
>revolutionary counterculture of the time.
>
>Thus, some suspect there was more than a concern with the
>moral fabric of Manhattan—something more like animus toward
>youth culture—that led a New York undercover agent from the
>Morals Squad to enter two different bookstores in August and
>September of 1969 to buy copies of Zap issue No. 4. On the
>second visit, he arrested several employees for selling an
>obscene publication.
>
>East Side Bookstore manager Peter Dargis admitted to having
>stocked and sold around 200 copies of the comic, though he
>said he had not read it himself. He pointed out to the court
>that his business stocked more than 16,000 titles and that
>comics such as Zap amounted to less than 1 percent of the
>store's gross. Charles Kirkpatrick, manager of the New Yorker
>Book Store, told a similar story of a huge stock, a tiny
>percentage of which was potentially naughty comics whose
>specific content he had not studied.
>
>The case was presided over by Judge Joel Tyler, the same man
>who declared the movie Deep Throat to be legally obscene. The
>district attorney offered no evidence other than the copy of
>Zap 4, whose scurrilousness was supposed to speak for itself.
>The sellers pointed out that the material was marked "adults
>only" and that the undercover agent was indeed an adult.
>
>Expert witnesses from the world of comics and art—including
>Whitney Museum curator Robert Doty, who had included some
>Crumb comics in an exhibit, "Human Concern/Personal Torment:
>The Grotesque in American Art"—tried to convince Tyler there
>was more to Crumb and Co.'s work than smut.
>
>Sidney Jacobson, who worked for the children's comic company
>Harvey, home of Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost,
>shook things up by insisting that Archie Comics, a rival,
>produced cartoons "purposely written and drawn to arouse
>sexualities in teenagers." The publishers and creators of
>Archie, Jacobson maintained, "are trying within it to appeal
>to the sexual desires of their public," while Zap's more
>grotesque representations of sex, including Crumb's depiction
>of sex acts between family members, were designed to be less
>arousing than Betty and Veronica. (Jacobson offended Tyler by
>referring to his own company's work as aimed at the lowest age
>group. The judge harrumphed that he himself read Harvey comics
>regularly.)
>
>Dargis and Kirkpatrick were convicted in October 1970, with
>Tyler deciding that Zap was "utterly unredeemed and
>unredeemable, save, perhaps, only by the quality of the paper
>upon which it is printed. It is patently offensive.…It is a
>part of the underworld press—the growing world of deceit in
>sex—and it is not reality or honesty, as they often claim it
>to be. It represents an emotional incapacity to view sex as a
>basis for establishing genuine human relationships, or as a
>normal part of human condition.—Zap No. 4 is an exploiter;
>its effect is to purvey 'filth for filth's sake.' It is
>hard-core pornography.…The material must fail by any legal
>test yet announced."
>
>Sellers of such filth, Tyler ruled, should have known it was
>impermissibly obscene (even though it did not become legally
>obscene for sure until the judge said so). As for those
>eggheaded claims to artistic value, he found "these witnesses
>failed to particularize in understandable lay terms their
>generalizations that the cartoonists were 'original,' or how
>they were 'influencing a new generation of cartoonists,' or
>how they showed 'enormous vitality,' or where was the satire
>or parody of the sexual experiences depicted…or how do these
>cartoons, dealing as they do in the main with perverted sexual
>experiences, attempt to 'humorously outrage' the reader and
>place in perspective human values."
>
>In lieu of a 90-day jail sentence, the store managers were
>fined $500, the equivalent of more than $3,200 today. Their
>appeals in the New York state system failed essentially on
>grounds that they couldn't prove they didn't know Zap 4 was
>obscene. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that outcome in
>October 1973, leaving in place a ruling that the then-chief of
>the American Booksellers Association called "frightening,"
>since "no one can possibly know in advance what a judge will
>consider obscene. The effect of this decision is to make every
>bookseller in the state a censor."
>
>In a blistering dissent, Justice William Brennan repeated his
>assertion from an earlier case that "the First and Fourteenth
>Amendments prohibit the state and federal governments from
>attempting wholly to suppress sexually oriented materials on
>the basis of their allegedly 'obscene' contents." Yet the
>Court seemed to have it out for Crumb and his compatriots in
>1973. Earlier that year, in Miller v. California, it had
>shifted obscenity law by giving localities the power to punish
>expression for being obscene if it violated local mores while
>lacking "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific
>value." Many blame Miller for wrecking underground comics as a
>viable business, with hippie entrepreneurs in college towns
>across the nation deciding that the profit margins on these
>curious 50-cent pamphlets were not worth risking fines or jail
>time.
>
>To Crumb's Zap partner Williams, applying a square's community
>standards to their transgressive work was an outrage. These
>comics "were not made for the general public," he said at
>Comic-Con. "They were made for an audience that seeked them
>out…an intellectual group in favor of free thought and
>imagination."
>Censure, Not Censorship
>
>No one of significance in the comics community today is
>calling for 1970s-style legal punishment for unwoke
>cartoonists. Charles Brownstein, who heads up the Comic Book
>Legal Defense Fund, points out that "there's a distinction
>between censorship in the courts vs. dissenting points of view
>in the public square."
>
>Brownstein's organization was born of a 1986 arrest and
>conviction (later reversed) of a comic shop clerk for selling,
>among other things, an issue of a Crumb-founded comic called
>Weirdo. The cases he deals with these days are more likely to
>be about censoring comics in specific public places, such as
>public schools and libraries. Arrests of comic sellers aren't
>much of a thing anymore.
>
>Fantagraphics' Groth, who keeps in print the very same comic
>that got Kirkpatrick and Dargis hauled into court, grants that
>he hasn't once over the last two decades seriously feared any
>legal trouble for selling Crumb. Prosecutions of printed
>materials not clearly marketed as masturbatory aids are rarely
>pursued this century. And thanks to Crumb's gallery cred and
>fame, most prosecutors probably assume that judges and juries
>will consider his work, if only because it is his, to have
>literary or artistic value.
>
>But obscenity laws still exist, and that prosecutorial energy
>has been especially fierce in the past few decades when
>targeting sexual depictions involving children. One of Zap 4's
>more offensive strips is an incest riff featuring kids having
>sex with their parents, so it isn't completely insane to fear
>that Crumb's work might once again come to be seen as not
>merely unwoke but illegal. The anti-Crumb sentiments are
>"still dangerous," Groth says, "because laws can in fact
>change because of public attitudes." Those attitudes now
>include mainstream consideration of legislation aimed at
>curtailing "hate speech."
>
>During the social media storm kicked off by Passmore's
>comments, Jules Rivera, a black female cartoonist, tweeted out
>two panels of a Crumb comic in which an obvious cartoon
>version of him is having sex with a woman identified as being
>in "a drunken stupor," with no signs of consent. "I'm keeping
>that rapist ass Crumb art on my phone," she continued. "If
>anyone challenges me, I'll bust out my phone and say 'so
>you're down with this?' In person. To your face."
>
>But holding art and expression to the moral demands implicit
>in that tweet may actually hobble what art is for.
>Appreciating a creator isn't—or needn't be—a matter of
>being "down with" the actions portrayed in his every work. One
>of the many reasons humans have art is to understand, play
>with, portray, question, and explore the human condition.
>Which, as Crumb firmly believes, includes a lot of awful,
>unacceptable thoughts and behavior.
>
>Portraying darkness and evil in art is not the same as
>celebrating darkness and evil, even when the depiction is not
>safely anchored to a clear statement of the artist's anti-evil
>sympathies. Offense and transgression can be a vital part of
>how expression stays lively, fresh, startling, moving, and
>true to the human condition. That transgressive art is hard to
>defend in sober, sensible ways is precisely the point. As
>Simpsons creator Matt Groening wrote in an introduction to
>1998's The Life and Times of R. Crumb, "it sure is a relief to
>read someone's beautiful Bad Thoughts and realize the world
>won't come crashing down after all."
>
>The teen Crumb in his published letters saw himself as a good
>liberal condemning the racial ignorance and prejudice of the
>yokels surrounding him. The adult Crumb, in addition to his
>transgressions, did some excellent cartooning on the lives of
>black musicians who had made the old-time music he revered.
>Building a wall of exclusion around his art denies audiences
>the galvanizing work of an artist whose declared intent often
>aligns with that of his modern-day indicters, even if he's
>willing to toy with imagery they recoil from.
>
>In a world of free expression and diminishing legal speech
>controls, if you want to "cancel" Crumb, well, it's your right
>to try. But Groth for one finds that attitude troubling. It
>"feels similar to trying to erase Ezra Pound or Yeats or
>Wyndham Lewis, any number of reactionaries in the history of
>art and literature," he says. "It's provincial and philistine
>and based on historical ignorance, and I don't think that's
>what art should be about."
>
>The Frustrating Tango of Liberal Tolerance
>
>The American culture that R. Crumb and his contemporaries grew
>up in restricted the ways people could talk about sex,
>violence, race, and class. The first wave of underground comix
>artists reacted with metaphorical explosive violence,
>especially once they realized nothing was stopping them but
>the constraints of their own minds. That freedom, in all its
>messiness and ugliness, upset and unnerved and offended many.
>It also inspired massive amounts of interesting, strange,
>life-enhancing art, not just in the comics world but in such
>offshoots of Crumb's aesthetic as National Lampoon, Saturday
>Night Live, and The Simpsons.
>
>The attitudes Crumb satirized were real and, he thought,
>deserving of ridicule via crazed exaggeration. His feelings of
>hostility toward women are, as he has insisted in his comics
>and in interviews, true to him (and, he is certain, to many
>other men). What is to be gained by pretending they're not?
>Crumb was honest about being the sort of resentful nebbish who
>in his pre-fame days saw women as controlling something he
>desperately wanted and couldn't have—what would now be
>called a corrosive "incel" mentality, after the men who
>self-identify as involuntarily celibate.
>
>In a 1991 interview with The Comics Journal, Crumb said art
>should be judged not on ideological purity but on whether it
>is "interesting or boring…honest and truthful and
>real…saying what's really on minds.…If it's
>really in there it ought to come out on paper." At the same
>time, he reflected, "I don't know, maybe we're all just
>dragging society down. Maybe we should all be locked up."
>
>The paradox of liberal tolerance remains: Neither the
>transgressors nor the offended have a right to force the other
>side to just shut up about what its members think, feel, or
>imagine. The two are intimately linked in a mutually
>frustrating tango. The offended want certain expressions to go
>away or be universally recognized as unacceptable, and the
>transgressors want a social space to express themselves
>without feeling driven from society.
>
>Liberal tolerance, as exemplified by the First
>Amendment—refusing to violently punish someone for his or
>her expression—offers a way for these battles to take place
>without anyone being physically hurt. The figurative game of
>expression, reaction, pushback, and constantly shifting mores
>can keep being played without either side mistaking the
>contest for mortal combat. Although cancel culture (without
>law enforcement involvement) stops short of violence, those
>who like to wield it should understand that human beings are
>social animals. To be told that you and anyone who doesn't
>join enthusiastically in condemning you should be expelled
>from society can feel like war when you're the target.
>
>Many people understand that art is for expressing and
>exploring the human mind and soul—and the human mind and
>soul contain darkness, sexual mania, racism, hostility, and
>any number of awful truths. To force those things out of the
>conversation is to unreasonably limit the whole project, they
>say. Art is a treasured aspect of the healthy human condition,
>even if what the art says is unhealthy on various dimensions.
>Many others consider that tradeoff worth it in the name of
>protecting the status and feelings of previously excluded or
>oppressed groups.
>
>Crumb's attempt to open comics to a vast range of human
>expression was victorious: Whether they want to acknowledge it
>or not, those working in the field today are his descendants.
>Like all children and grandchildren, they can choose whether
>or not to understand their patriarch, whether to emulate him
>or tell him to fuck off. Their choices may not always be kind
>or wise, but such is human freedom.
>
>src:
>https://reason.com/2019/04/29/cancel-culture-comes-for-count/

Ralph Bakshi

R.I.P. Loud But Wrong Guy
Dec 29th 2009 - Dec 17th 2017

i get it was the time period and a filtering of the indivudals perspective through it, however, some of what was produced veered WAY too much into mockery and fetishism to be funny to me

smearing that fine line between laughing with, and laughing at

and similarly obscuring line between pointing something out and ramping it up to show the folly in it (being intentionally shocking), and reveling it from a safe distance with no regard to the pain it might cause

the article is long though *shrug*

sure he had an impact on indie comics but in all honesty it could have been any artist

______________________________________

Everything looks like Oprah kissing Harvey Weinstein these days

seems to me that being over-rated or not is purely a matter of opinion, which doesn't really lend itself to discussion

how do you examine whether someone's assessment of OTHER people assessment is justified?

in this specific case, there are actually books written with both glowing praise and damning critique

which is the same for anyone esteemed - hell, folks like MLK, Muhammad Ali and others once considered "untouchable" are now - a generation later - regularly knocked down from their pedestals for one reason or another

one man's trash... (right?)

>sure he had an impact on indie comics but in all honesty it
>could have been any artist

could it? i dunno. (who though?)

but WAS it?

again, how do you discuss the validity of something hypothetical?

again, he (Crumb) isn't necessarily my cup of tea - but if we are gonna talk about why he shouldn't be esteemed so highly (particularly as opposed to someone else)

being specific is a good start, providing detail as to the alternates might further enlighten also

>seems to me that being over-rated or not is purely a matter
>of opinion, which doesn't really lend itself to discussion
>
>how do you examine whether someone's assessment of OTHER
>people assessment is justified?
>
>in this specific case, there are actually books written with
>both glowing praise and damning critique
>
>which is the same for anyone esteemed - hell, folks like MLK,
>Muhammad Ali and others once considered "untouchable" are now
>- a generation later - regularly knocked down from their
>pedestals for one reason or another
>
>one man's trash... (right?)

Personally I think we can agree that Crumb isn't in a league with Ali or MLK, but rather in a league with guys like Rob Liefield or Todd McFarlane. I wouldn't even put him on par with Jack Kirby.

Guys like Mcfarlane and Liefield are known for their style and maybe an iconic character or take on one, but they are just regular ass dudes who we should expect to be general representations of their respective backgrounds and we celebrate the iconic nature of their work more than their beliefs. When the work puts forth ideas that are unappealing they can still remain as such without it uplifting the character of the artist.



>>sure he had an impact on indie comics but in all honesty it
>>could have been any artist
>
>could it? i dunno. (who though?)
>
>but WAS it?

If it wasn't Crumb, Ed Roth maybe would have absorbed Crumbs Popularity or Jean Giraud (Moebius)

>again, how do you discuss the validity of something
>hypothetical?

Numbers. With there being an ever ready supply of young men and women who want to draw for a living -- personally I can't not think another artist with a popular style would have filled the breach

>again, he (Crumb) isn't necessarily my cup of tea - but if we
>are gonna talk about why he shouldn't be esteemed so highly
>(particularly as opposed to someone else)
>
>being specific is a good start, providing detail as to the
>alternates might further enlighten also

Yeah esteemed might be muh, I think he should recognized just like we recognize the creator of the Star Spangled Banner, but not their ideals

______________________________________

Everything looks like Oprah kissing Harvey Weinstein these days

>Personally I think we can agree that Crumb isn't in a league
>with Ali or MLK, but rather in a league with guys like Rob
>Liefield or Todd McFarlane. I wouldn't even put him on par
>with Jack Kirby.

thats the point. they are held in MUCH higher esteem and catch flack from folks a generation removed from their direct "impact"

crumb shouldn't expect to be different

>Guys like Mcfarlane and Liefield are known for their style and
>maybe an iconic character or take on one, but they are just
>regular ass dudes who we should expect to be general
>representations of their respective backgrounds and we
>celebrate the iconic nature of their work more than their
>beliefs. When the work puts forth ideas that are unappealing
>they can still remain as such without it uplifting the
>character of the artist.

I'm struggling with the idea that macfarlane and liefield are good equivalents, though i guess you could say their impact from a "creator's rights" angle could rival crumb as the so-call grandfather of counter-culture/underground comics

past that though

i don't think anyone ever really held crumb up as a paragon of character as an artist - including himself

moreso, he got/gets credit for boundary pushing (simplified, but i think thats whats at the core of it)

the pushback has (also in my opinion) is that he often veered into areas where it was either shock for shock's sake OR a blind kind of
encroachment where he ignored that simply exposing some kinda dark underbelly can be just as harmful as the machine he was personally raging against

its difficult for me to explain his deal because, as stated before, i don't really get it (there isn't really any appeal for me)

parenthetically, a lot of that "postmodern" counter-culture stuff from our parents generation (60s-70s) leaves me cold because there WASN'T a lot of forethought to the consequences of all that supposed "freedom"

>If it wasn't Crumb, Ed Roth maybe would have absorbed Crumbs
>Popularity or Jean Giraud (Moebius)

I think those are different "lanes" though

Roth always struct me more as a designer/illustrator than he was a "philospher" like crumb tried to be (meaning, crumb's stuff was more kind of examination of the "everyman" of his day and the darker sides of their behavior/thought)

likewise

Moebius was more of a "serious" (classical?) artist, with a definitively greater European perspective, style, and influence. I definitely wouldn't call him "counter cultural" (which Crumb's cult share as his claim to fame)

>>again, how do you discuss the validity of something
>>hypothetical?
>Numbers. With there being an ever ready supply of young men
>and women who want to draw for a living -- personally I can't
>not think another artist with a popular style would have
>filled the breach

correct me if i am misunderstanding. the original statement you made was that crumb "he had an impact on indie comics but in all honesty it could have been any artist". Are you saying the number of people who want to emulate is somehow a means of validating what artist COULD have had a greater impact on indie comics?

doesn't the breadth of the actual existing media ABOUT him point to his impact. No disrespect to either buy I'm not aware of movies and books (by others) about anyone else but Harvey Pekar - who could easily be seen as from the Pekar tree (right?)

>I think he should recognized just
>like we recognize the creator of the Star Spangled Banner, but
>not their ideals

is this the "judge the art, not the artist" argument?

>>Personally I think we can agree that Crumb isn't in a
>league
>>with Ali or MLK, but rather in a league with guys like Rob
>>Liefield or Todd McFarlane. I wouldn't even put him on par
>>with Jack Kirby.
>
>thats the point. they are held in MUCH higher esteem and catch
>flack from folks a generation removed from their direct
>"impact"
>
>crumb shouldn't expect to be different

True his messaging and attitudes should not be free from scrutiny. At the same time I think he shouldn't be expected to have a moral compass similar to those who wanted people to be treated better. That was never his angle IMO


>I'm struggling with the idea that macfarlane and liefield are
>good equivalents, though i guess you could say their impact
>from a "creator's rights" angle could rival crumb as the
>so-call grandfather of counter-culture/underground comics
>
>past that though
>
>i don't think anyone ever really held crumb up as a paragon of
>character as an artist - including himself
>
>moreso, he got/gets credit for boundary pushing (simplified,
>but i think thats whats at the core of it)

Definitely. I'd say boundary pushing is his claim to fame. Maybe Larry Flynt is a better example?


>the pushback has (also in my opinion) is that he often veered
>into areas where it was either shock for shock's sake OR a
>blind kind of
>encroachment where he ignored that simply exposing some kinda
>dark underbelly can be just as harmful as the machine he was
>personally raging against
>
>its difficult for me to explain his deal because, as stated
>before, i don't really get it (there isn't really any appeal
>for me)

Yeah agreed. The harm that comes from exposing dark underbellies is unavoidable it would seem. Crumb may have been reckless in that sense but most us would be. He's just a guy trying to figure out the world around him not an activist


>>If it wasn't Crumb, Ed Roth maybe would have absorbed Crumbs
>>Popularity or Jean Giraud (Moebius)
>
>I think those are different "lanes" though
>
>Roth always struct me more as a designer/illustrator than he
>was a "philospher" like crumb tried to be (meaning, crumb's
>stuff was more kind of examination of the "everyman" of his
>day and the darker sides of their behavior/thought)
>
>likewise
>
>Moebius was more of a "serious" (classical?) artist, with a
>definitively greater European perspective, style, and
>influence. I definitely wouldn't call him "counter cultural"
>(which Crumb's cult share as his claim to fame)

I can see that. With shock seemingly being what drove Crumb into the limelight though it seems that any artist who could draw naked women and or sex scenes that enough people appreciated could be in Crumbs position. Howard Chaykin for example -- IDK I look at it like Timothy Leary; someone was going to create and or evangelize LSD.


>correct me if i am misunderstanding. the original statement
>you made was that crumb "he had an impact on indie comics but
>in all honesty it could have been any artist". Are you saying
>the number of people who want to emulate is somehow a means of
>validating what artist COULD have had a greater impact on
>indie comics?

Just saying that there are and were so many people looking to draw and actually drawing comics (indie and mainstream) that someone else who liked to draw naked women, sex, and taboo subjects would have filled his spot. When it comes to his subject matter he is not unique is my point. He'd be nothing in Europe or Japan where sexual views are not the product of culturally insecure, religious fanatics, with alcohol problems.


>doesn't the breadth of the actual existing media ABOUT him
>point to his impact. No disrespect to either buy I'm not aware
>of movies and books (by others) about anyone else but Harvey
>Pekar - who could easily be seen as from the Pekar tree
>(right?)

Maybe IDK that's a tough question. I'd say yes and no.

>>I think he should recognized just
>>like we recognize the creator of the Star Spangled Banner,
>but
>>not their ideals
>
>is this the "judge the art, not the artist" argument?

More like judge the art and artist in different courtrooms

______________________________________

Everything looks like Oprah kissing Harvey Weinstein these days

helped me to own the fact that I am attracted to big women...

question though.. with all the cancel culture.. what is the edge? what are the boundaries being (or to be) pushed?

I'm not saying crumb is some kind of be all end all for alternative comics but to ignore his contributions or erase them doesn't help.. they weren't all bad... History is important we don't need to celebrate the bad but we should avoid erasing it and/or pushing it out of the story.. we need to learn important things from all that bad ish...

seems like folks don't really want to be challenged or forced to think critically they just want it all lumped into one box or another, good, bad, acceptable or unacceptable.

still waiting for that first one

LOL "seems like folks don't really want to be challenged or forced to think critically they just want it all lumped into one box or another, good, bad, acceptable or unacceptable."

says the guy lumping people into a box as not wanting to be challenged or forced to think critically.



www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

>still waiting for that first one


https://www.indiewire.com/2018/01/woody-allen-career-over-timothee-chalamet-times-up-1201917667/

Woody Allen’s Career Is Over, But Why Did It Take So Long? — Opinion

Is this really the end? IndieWire's staff debates the latest developments.

By Eric Kohn, Kate Erbland, David Ehrlich, Jude Dry

Jan 16, 2018 2:57 pm



DAVID EHRLICH: Woody Allen’s career is over, “A Rainy Day in New York” will be his last film, and most filmgoers will only notice he’s stopped working due to the newsworthy circumstances of his forced retirement.



At this point, its hard to imagine how anyone would be willing to finance, or star in, or even buy a ticket for whatever Allen might hope to make next.


edit:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/04/affair-best-friend-with-awful-wife-advice.html

Q. Woody Allen poster dilemma: My beloved father-in-law passed away last month. We both worked at the same office. For 20-plus years, he had a poster of a famous Woody Allen movie in his office. I love this movie as well, and we would often quote lines to one another. Now that he’s gone and I helped to clean out his office, the poster has been passed along to me. My question is: I love the film and want to honor his memory and what I think may have been his wish to gift it to me, but can I display it in my office?

A: The question isn’t whether you can separate the artist’s behavior from his art. The question is whether you think it would make most people, especially traumatized and vulnerable people, feel comfortable and ready to share painful confidences with you if they had to look at a poster over your head featuring one of the most famous accused abusers in the world.

I don't think that's cancelled, that's just ending.

nobody took his shit off of anything, you can still go watch woody movies. people not wanting to front him millions of bucks (TO MAKE MOVIES WHERE HE OR A DOPPLEGANGER FOR HIMSELF FUCKS YOUNGER WOMEN BTW) isn't cancel culture

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

to finance, or star in, or even buy a ticket for whatever Allen might hope to make next."



uh....


If that is not what Woody would want (no one financing, starring in, or seeing new work from him), then that is cancelling (because Woody might prefer to still make art for the public).

cancelled.

dude.

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

somebody cancelled you (when you stopped being able to do it the way you wanted or expected to be able to do it).

yeah.. walked right into that.

I have the capacity for hypocrisy in me never denied it.

as for who's been cancelled I'm not trying to get into the semantics of "Cancel" so fine I get your point but it's based around semantics and kind of a dismissive way to ignore the situation

there is no great cancel culture.

what there is, is people who were never getting listened to before

who are saying they have a problem with x, y and z.

in my opinion, that's better than what we had before.

I'm not really worried about history being wiped out because that's not what happens, and even the most problematic shit, if anyone's at all realistic about dealing with it, can be handled in a better context.

www.engadgethd.com - the other stuff i'm looking at

yeah I can get behind everything you just said there. respect.

>question though.. with all the cancel culture.. what is the
>edge? what are the boundaries being (or to be) pushed?

i wouldn't get lost in the phrase itself and cut more toward to core of it

*I* think it references the means by which people get to be accepted, or not, by the larger populace (to whatever degree that is a thing)

if someone is a repugnant person should their contributions be dismissed or ignored?

in the end, I think that's a personal thing and i also think it *becomes* a problem where someone (or a group of someones) says it shouldn't be

I would only add that there has to be room for peoples humanity and fallibility as there will always be some in every case in every individual.. if we define each other simply by our worst aspects and lowest deeds then as a species there really is nothing redeeming to be said for any of us imo.... not saying we give passes either just saying there is value in consciously and critically making our own choices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZfUgVSfKdQ

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Everything looks like Oprah kissing Harvey Weinstein these days

sounds like pure toilet

yep

Janis Joplin's band

that's iconic 60's stuff

and always wondered wtf

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TBH the fact that you're even a mod here fits squarely within Jag's narrative of OK-sanctioned aggression, bullying, and toxicity. *shrug*