The Four Color Media Monitor

Rolling Stone interviewed cartoonist Robert Crumb (archive link), who's been living in a French village (Le Grau du-Roi, I think) for possibly 3 decades now, even though he may not speak much French, and here's what they say:

Most lastingly, Crumb, 82, is still considered the godfather of personal-story (his own) underground comics that emerged from the counterculture era. Starting with his Zap Comix series, first published in 1968, Crumb moved out of the notion of the cartoonist-entertainer and instead created comics as open, uncensored self-expression. While inventing his many other characters, he also planted his own antihero persona in his work, usually in self-derogatory fashion. And this inspired a later wave of personalized comic writing, culminating in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, as well as many of the autobiographical graphic novels that flood the market today.

But is Crumb aware there's leftists who've turned against his bizarre visions? No doubt, there's leftists who don't appreciate Maus either, but Crumb's fellow leftist Spiegelman doesn't seem interested in that possibility. Interestingly enough:

Crumb’s rising fame was not without controversy. His personal drawings were often sexually explicit, if not brazenly pornographic, earning him public condemnation as a misogynist. Then, in the 1990s came the purposefully outrageous “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!” or “When the [N-—rs] Take Over America!” — savage tongue-in-cheek satires that appeared in his Weirdo comics and brought him powerful negative feedback. He also knowingly played with racist stereotypes in his character Angelfood McSpade, an oversexed African American woman one would have seen in chauvinistic cartoons out of the 1920s. Crumb defended the work as criticism of those stereotypes, presuming that people familiar with his art would get the point. Many didn’t.

Why do I get the feeling he wouldn't draw any cartoons, satirical or otherwise, about "when the Moslems take over America" (and he likely hasn't/isn't doing anything similar regarding Europe itself), nor anything to do with say, Zohran Mamdani, one prominent example of an Islamist (and communist) who's soon to lord over by far the biggest city in the USA? Whether or not Crumb's an informed person, his leftist loyalties unfortunately seem to color his drawings from a modern perspective.

For five hours, we walked the medieval pathways of the village, where the Vidourle River winds its ancient curve before plunging into the Mediterranean at the resort town Le Grau-du-Roi. Our conversation similarly wandered, covering his sexual appetites, his friendship with Janis Joplin, his mistakes of the past, his new preoccupation with conspiracy theories, his (surprisingly sympathetic) feelings about RFK Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Outdoors, for some reason, you become even more aware of Crumb’s high-pitched, nervous laugh, which clings onto nearly every utterance, whether humorous or bleak. When we asked how it feels to be in the winter of his life, his reply was as unvarnished and self-aware as his cartoons.

He's okay with MTG, despite her approval of antisemitism that played a part in her resignation from Congress earlier this year? I guess that's telling something more. And then, when it comes to his lifestyle, it says:

Crumb has not exactly adapted to these surroundings. Over 32 years in this village, he has not learned to speak French. And yet, he has no intention of leaving. [...]

Added to Crumb’s geographical isolation is his refusal to own a computer, to have access to the internet, or to use a cell phone. There is a television on the top floor of the house, but he doesn’t know how it works. He craves the simple station-changing dial of the old days, and is somewhat terrorized by the very idea of a remote control. In a concession to modernity, he does email people, in a manner of speaking: He writes out messages by hand, in pencil (the old-fashioned kind with detachable erasers, which he mail-orders from the U.S.), then gives them to his secretary, Maggie, to type and send. When he receives a response, she prints it out for him to read.

If he doesn't know what's going on even within France, that too is sad weakness. What good does it do to say he's a famous cartoonist when he doesn't even keep informed about anything, save for what he reads quite possibly in the most mainstream papers by print? That he doesn't speak French is undoubtably another weakness.

“For me, the bug was not particularly horrifying,” he says, “although people are repulsed by this giant insect. But he’s not a menacing insect. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody. So then, to me, he becomes almost a lovable bug. So I made him a kind of big, fat beetle. It’s a very Jewish self-hatred kind of humor. Which you find in Lenny Bruce and other types of Jewish humor, where they paint themselves as something really repulsive. That all comes out of alienation. The pain of alienation. You can turn it into humor, but it’s a dark humor.”

On the issue of self-hatred, does he think that's acceptable? It most definitely isn't when it comes to ethnicity. Some could wonder if veteran actor Mandy Patinkin's an example of what he speaks, and it's very disturbing. He's sold on leftist causes hurtful to Israel, and that's very troubling. And then, more about Crumb's take on Taylor Greene:

Which brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Politically, Crumb has no doubts about who she is: “The most low-level, sleazy, opportunistic politics of playing on the ignorance of her constituency, which is some remote mountain county of Georgia.”

Nevertheless…

“I saw her on TV, where she was talking. I thought, ‘Oh, she’s kind of good-looking.’ And she’s athletic. She goes to the gym, and she’s just looking terrific. Wow. So a kind of tough-looking blonde, you know? A shiksa from the South. Wow. I started getting the hots for her. Wow. And I thought I could change Marjorie Taylor Greene. I could, you know, if I was involved, I could raise her consciousness and convert her to something more like an ethical state of mind and become a better person as well as, you know, having a good time with her.”

I thought for a moment, on hearing this astonishing news, that we might be lucky enough to expect a new Reactionary Girl comic starring MTG following in the sleazy footsteps of Lenore Goldberg: Girl Commando, Honeybunch Kaminski, Devil Girl, and the other Crumb Amazons.

“I thought about that, but I don’t want to get in trouble,” he says. “Who knows what kind of nasty shit she’d be capable of? Who knows? Nasty. She’s nasty. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Great-looking, though. Boy, what a body! Wow. Tough. Tough body.”

Oh, please. I don't find her particularly attractive myself, and her ideological beliefs ruin everything. That's why it's a good thing the GOP pushed her out. That said, I do think it's reprehensible that Crumb would use the word "shiksa", because of how it took on a demeaning use among ultra-Orthodox extremists who use it even against Jewish women over petty issues. What does he think he's accomplishing with that? Mainly because his leftist visions only make it all the more tasteless in ways even his cartooning couldn't redeem. And then, the magazine claims, oddly enough:

CRUMB IS SURPRISINGLY au fait with the tempestuous political events of the last few years, despite his resistance to electronic input. Still, from all indications in our recent discussions, I can see he’s moved close to the danger zone of right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theory. This is a personal dilemma for me, never having lost an ounce of my lifelong political combat against the reactionary steamroller. Crumb and I have often been at odds politically. I remember, many years back, his giving ear to a moronic Holocaust-denier who had turned up on his doorstep (although RC later renounced this). He can be annoyingly gullible sometimes. Yet, in his favor, he seems to harbor a healthy natural skepticism that has often manifested itself in his artwork and which gnaws at him in his seclusion. Having virtually no one to argue with, he finds himself in natural dialogue with his own private, darker side, one that questions almost everything. On Ukraine:

“Everybody’s always talking about what a terrible guy Putin is. He’s a terrible monster like Hitler. Na da da da da. But I’m not sure the Americans are much better. So what do we know about what’s really going on? We just hear the Western propaganda — United States, Western Europe. And it has its program, its agenda, its interests. What do we really know?”

Crumb is also not vaccinated. He says he would have voted for RFK Jr. if the latter hadn’t gone over to Trump. Moreover, he powerfully backs the health secretary’s “medical” views.

I guess it's no shock at all Crumb's anti-Trump, so what do they mean he's risking a right-wing standing? And if he's saying the USA is no better than Russia under Putin, undoubtably based on his view of Trump, that's telling. He is gullible, but not in the way the interviewer thinks.

DESPITE BEING A ‘TOTAL FOREIGNER,’ Crumb is content to spend his final days in his adopted homeland rather than return to America. “This medieval village suits my sensibilities just fine,” he says. “You know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” And ironically, since the passing of Aline, he manages to live like a sultan here, despite his isolation. His daughter Sophie helps to look after him, alongside a cadre of local caretakers.

It could be he shares a bit in common with his fellow cartoonist Daniel Clowes, who's left the USA, at least partly because he despises Trump. I'd like to say it's okay if they want to live in European locales, but if they have no interest in opposing the creep of Islamic sharia on the continent, what good does it do to live there? Such isolationism is unhelpful, and in fact does a disservice to all innocent people in Europe who deserve better. If Crumb's got no interest in showing appreciation for the hospitality of the populace who've welcomed his residence there, then he merely defeats whatever positive points his cartoons supposedly had. Despite what the magazine's writer claims, Crumb's not well informed, and is merely demonstrating what's wrong with plenty of cartoonists of his sort nowadays. Goodness knows there must be a whole generation of veteran artists who've nullified their work's impact when they refuse to prove they have the courage to take up certain issues, and practically go the opposite direction as though their previous creations had never been. It's just hugely sad and disappointing, but hardly surprising in the end.

Labels: censorship issues, comic strips, Europe and Asia, history, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, msm propaganda, politics