The only thing resembling an appreciative audience the Crumb brothers had were the fellow comic book aficionados they corresponded with on the fanzine exchange network, like-minded geeks who shared their passion for Carl Barks, Harvey Kurtzman, and other cartooning gods. Perhaps because he was only a year younger than Charles, Robert was especially susceptible to his older brother’s suasion.īy the time Robert was 15, the Crumb brothers self-published some of their comics under the umbrella title Foo and tried, with a dismal lack of success, to sell it to their fellow high school students and neighbors in Milford, Delaware. But Charles and Robert remained true to comics, producing stories month after month. The enthusiasm for comics-making soon tapered off for most of the Crumbs or took a different direction, with Maxon giving up comics for grotesque drawings. For a spell they all joined in Charles’s comics cult, crafting stories about characters like Campfire Clown and Jerry the Octopus. There were five Crumb kids in all: in descending order, Carol, Charles, Robert, Maxon, and Sandra. Cherishing funny animal comics in general and the Walt Disney brand with a special passion, Charles shanghaied his siblings intro producing their own “home-made comics” as part of the “Animal Town Comics Club.” Born in 1942, the second of five kids, Charles was a comic book fiend during the era when four-color floppies flooded the newsstands. Long before he hit adolescence, Crumb’s path to becoming a cartoonist was already prepared for him by his old brother Charles.
Robert Crumb’s personal history shows how family and comics can be intertwined even more tightly. The power of comics, like the power of family, is that whenever we return to them we are reverting to an earlier self, the pre-literate and pre-educated child at the core of our being who responds to the world in basic bodily and sensual ways.
#Robert crumb comics free
If you don’t break free of them, they are a presence for your whole life, providing both the context, inspiration, and foil for your actions. Both have the power to start shaping you long before you even have any consciousness of yourself as a separate being.
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