Vintage Vault: Crumb
By Jeff Vandusen
Lance Writer
October 15, 2008
 “How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure,” was the personal mantra of Charles Crumb, the older brother of famous underground comic book artist Robert Crumb—creator of such characters as Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Devil Girl, and Flakey Foont and the artist of the cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills album.
Charles Crumb may perhaps be the biggest artistic influence on Robert, and he (along with Robert’s other brother Maxon) are the focal points of Robert’s life.
The unnerving fact about this is that Charles and Maxon, both incredibly talented artists in their own right, live in squalor, unable to properly deal with the outside world.
Charles, a depressive recluse, lived with his mother in a house that stunk of cat urine where he repeatedly read the same books until he committed suicide in 1994. Maxon spends his days meditating on a bed of nails in a filthy San Francisco apartment where he paints portraits of the Oriental women he admits to obsessively fetishizing. Robert was the only one of the Crumb brothers to find a comfortable and productive outlet for his trauma, but, as the documentary shows, Robert is just barely holding on to sanity by his fingernails. Art, at least in director Terry Zwigoff’s eyes, had saved Crumb’s life.
Zwigoff (of Ghost World and Art School Confidential fame), is a close friend of Robert’s who became close with him over a shared love of obscure pre-war American music. This theme is explored in-depth in the film, which opens with Crumb curled up on the floor in front of his record player rocking back and forth. “I listen to old music because it’s one of the few times I have an actual love of humanity,” he says—and we’re treated to a music sample from Crumb’s extensive record collection, which plays over a beautifully moving slideshow examining Robert’s twisted and vibrant artistic imagination.
Zwigoff was going through a bout of crippling back pain and suicidal depression when he was filming Crumb and it comes through in the final product. Zwigoff has a strange and magical identification with Robert. Crumb is the perfectly unwilling documentary subject, seeming meek, shy and uncomfortable in front of the camera.
Crumb involves the meeting of like-minded people. We get a strangely illuminating tale about a world of deviant sexual obsession, artistic genius, and misanthropy—an art documentary more interesting than other art documentaries because it reveals so much to us without resorting to petty biographical details and scholarly speculations (although there is an appearance by know-it-all Australian art critic Robert Hughes who calls Crumb “the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century”). The subject of Crumb is alive and the hang-ups and demons are all alive too—it’s a horrific and sometimes depressing journey, but it’s real and uniquely American.
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