In the mid-1970s, following the decline of the underground, Crumb moved towards biographical and autobiographical subjects while refining his drawing style, a heavily crosshatched pen-and-ink technique.
#R CRUMB CARTOONIST SERIES#
During this period he launched a series of solo titles, including Despair, Uneeda, Big Ass Comics, Motor City Comics, Home Grown Funnies and Hytone Comix. Readers looked forward to new episodes of their favourite characters, including the bohemian Fritz the Cat, the spiritual guru Mr Natural, and the oversexed African-American stereotype Angelfood McSpade. The overtly pornographic content of Snatch, together with its shaky finances, led to its demise after just three issues, but by this time, in early 1969, Crumb was also working with Don Donahue and Charles Plymell on the more acceptable but equally experimental zine Zap!, which was financially successful and quickly developed a market for underground comix.įor the next ten years Robert Crumb was enormously prolific, regularly turning out two hundred pages of comix each year. Clay Wilson on an explicitly sexual comic, Snatch. In January 1967 Crumb moved to California, where he contributed to a new magazine called Yarrowstalks, and that soon led to a collaboration with fellow cartoonist S. One particularly bad trip left him semi-dazed for six months, during which he and Dana lived apart they separated finally towards the end of 1967. In 1964 he married Dana Morgan, and they had a son Jesse the couple travelled in Europe, during which Crumb continued to produce work for Kurtzman and American Greetings. Crumb was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with his job and marriage when in June 1965 he began taking LSD, a psychedelic drug that was then still legal. Crumb stayed in New York for a while, drawing comic trading cards for Topps Gum among other work, and then returned to Cleveland. He continued drawing comics, sending one to the public gallery section of Harvey Kurtzman’s magazine Help! Encouraged by Kurtzman, Crumb moved to New York to work for him, but the magazine folded shortly afterwards. Eventually, Fred became Fritz the Cat, one of Crumb’s best-known characters.Ĭrumb left home in 1962, getting a job as a greeting card artist for American Greetings in Cleveland, Ohio.
One of the characters he invented was Fred the Cat, named after the family’s pet. As a child, Robert and his brother Charles started drawing home-made comic books for their own amusement. If you have only ever heard of one American cartoonist, it is highly likely that it’s Robert Crumb, the important and influential granddaddy of the underground comix movement.
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