The critic Robert Hughes has compared him to Bruegel, with his images of hedonism and suffering, but Crumb also evokes a painting tradition in Weimar-era Germany called lustmord, literally “sex murder,” in which artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz painted scenes of rape and mutilated female bodies that captured the nihilism in Europe between the world wars. Yet Crumb is perhaps most directly indebted to the 19th-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who helped bring down Tammany Hall and New York’s Boss Tweed political machine. A framed Nast hangs in the Crumbs’ hallway: an 1871 drawing of a tiger (a representation of Tammany politics) mauling a woman, who stands for justice, before an enormous audience in a coliseum. “What are you going to do about it?” reads the caption.
Although Crumb’s work hasn’t softened in recent years, it has changed. He’s now gazing less directly at a bigoted, violent world and instead examining his distance from it. Now he’s a grandfather — Sophie, who has three children, lives a short drive away — and his comics from the past five years are often about that.
But he continues to test the boundaries of audiences. His newest comic is “The Crumb Family Covid Exposé” (2021), made with Kominsky-Crumb, 74, and Sophie — each drawing and writing themselves — and published as a limited-run magazine by David Zwirner. Crumb caught Covid-19 last fall but, well before that, he’d developed extreme conspiracy theories about the pandemic. He calls himself “resolutely anti-vax.” In conversation, he is fixated on his distrust of the medical community though, in his work, he doesn’t present this worldview as correct, or even necessarily valid. He seems to be dissecting a contrarian impulse in himself the same way he used to look at his twisted sexual fantasies. His wife, a cancer survivor, is vaccinated and, at one point in the comic, believing the shot has made her arm magnetic, he tries to see if a spoon will stick to her. “Is this a crazy person?” he asks of himself, drawing himself very much like a crazy person.
He’s still willing, in other words, to make himself ugly and unlikable in his work. There’s a question that recurs in a lot of Crumb’s art, which I found myself wondering about as he dismissed the Covid vaccines to me as merely a way to enrich Big Pharma. It’s some variation of “What’s wrong with this guy?” In one comic, called “Anal Antics” (1971), the byline is “R. ‘What-Does-It-All-Mean?’ Crumb,” and the plot features Snoid living inside a woman’s posterior. In the first panel, there’s a subtitle: “More sick humor which serves no purpose.”
