Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [96]
Crumb had actually tried living in a more traditional American way, when he married and worked as a card designer for the American Greetings Corporation in Cleveland; but he wasn’t happy. He abandoned that life without warning, leaving his wife and job behind and taking off for the West Coast, where he found a receptive culture in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Drugs—particularly LSD—gave him a new perspective on both his life and his art. “All the old meanings become absurd,” he said later, long after his name had become synonymous with comix, “so it heightens your sense of the absurdity, or mine, anyway, of all the things you’re taught or programmed to believe is important or significant about reality, so that it made it easier to poke fun at everything.”
Crumb could have scoured the entire country and he wouldn’t have found an environment more receptive to his art. The Bay Area, historically tolerant and freewheeling in its thinking, loved its eccentrics, misanthropes, antiheroes, outlaws, tricksters, pranksters, dissidents, and radicals. Peter Fonda’s Captain America was a far better fit than the Jack Kirby/Joe Simon comic book hero by the same name, and Crumb’s Mr. Natural, with his long hair, waist-length beard, and totally laid-back demeanor, was far more interesting than a tights-wearing, muscle-bound superhero defending truth, justice, and the American way. Crumb’s characters had huge feet and big butts, legs like tree trunks, and overall physiques that seemed like polar opposites of the glamour cultivated by Hollywood a few hundred miles to the south. They were hairy as hell, smoked lots of pot, and jumped in the sack whenever the mood struck—which was often. Crumb urged his readers to “Keep on Truckin’” at a time when America was rocketing to the moon. His album jacket art for Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills attained iconic status before Janis Joplin’s boozy blues voice had reached the ears of the young folks in the hinterlands.
Crumb inspired other comic artists and countless imitators, but lost in the hoopla was the fact that, whatever his image, he worked like a demon, more out of necessity than the Muse’s constant calling. There still wasn’t much money in comics—and especially not in the underground variety—and living on the West Coast wasn’t cheap. Fortunately, there was a steady demand for Crumb’s art, much of it in the Midwest, where publishers like Denis Kitchen, Jay Lynch, and others coveted Crumb’s latest work. In San Francisco, Crumb produced his own titles and hauled them around the city in a baby buggy, selling them to people on the streets.
He wasn’t alone by any means. Comix artists, some rebels without a cause and others more traditional practitioners unable to land work with the bigger publishers, either contributed to someone else’s underground comic book or started their own. Circulation for these comix could be spotty and their lifetimes brief, but it was better to be a hometown hero than never to be seen at all. Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, featuring the antics of three potheads named Fat Freddy, Freewheelin’ Franklin, and Phineas, cracked up readers in their relentless pursuit of great dope. Shelton, an aspiring filmmaker, also created a stir with his Wonder Wart-Hog and Smiling Sergeant Death and His Merciless Mayhem Patrol titles, which skewered characters in the Marvel and DC stables.
Readers loved the undergrounds for their irreverence, wacky artwork, and taboo-shattering subject matter, but they also loved the energetic intelligence that rumbled beneath the surface of all the mayhem. The comix producers were offering the kind of lacerating social commentary you weren’t finding in the more traditional media outlets. Like their cousins the alternative newspapers, comix could address off-limits topics and be as subversive as they wanted to be without fear of offending any corporate sponsors that supported them through