The Comics Journal Library Vol. 9: Zap The Interviews - preview

The

ComICs Journal lIbrary Volume 9

The Interviews

The

ComICs Journal lIbrary Volume 9

The Interviews Fantagraphics Books, Inc. Seattle, Washington

Fantagraphics Books 7563 Lake City Way NE Seattle, WA 98115 Editor: Michael Dean Associate Publisher: Eric Reynolds Published: Gary Groth The Comics Journal Library Volume 9: The Zap Cartoonists is copyright ©2015 Fantagraphics Books. All images copyright © 2015 their respective copyright owners. Introduction and 2008 S. Clay Wilson interview copyright © 2015 Bob Levin; 1988 Robert Crumb interview, 1998 Spain Rodriguez interview, 2002 Victor Moscoso interview and 1994 Paul Mavrides interview copyright © 2015 Gary Groth; 1998 Robert Crumb interview, 1998 and 1999 S. Clay Wilson interviews, Don Donahue/S. Clay Wilson interview, 2011 and 2012 Spain Rodriguez interviews, 1973 Rick Griffin interview, 2012 Victor Moscoso interview, 1972 Gilbert Shelton interview and 2012 Paul Mavrides interviews copyright © 2015 Patrick Rosenkranz; Juxtapoz Spain Rodriguez/S. Clay Wilson interview copyright © 2015 the estate of Spain Rodriguez; 1974 Rick Griffin interview copyright © 2015 Denis Wheary; 1989 Rick Griffin interview copyright © 2015 John Grady; 1996 Gilbert Shelton interview copyright © 2015 Frank Stack; and 1993 Robert Williams interview copyright © 2015 Steve Ringgenberg. All rights reserved. Permission to reproduce material must be obtained from the publisher.

Title page photo by Suzanne Williams. Left to right: S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Gilbert Shelton, Rick Griffin, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams and Robert Crumb in front of Shelton’s San Francisco house in the 1970s.

Thanks to all who contributed to making this anthology as complete and accurate as it is, including the Zap cartoonists and their friends and relatives; underground expert Patrick Rosenkranz; Fantagraphics editors J. Michael Catron and Kristy Valenti; and interns Keith Barbalato, Ryan Brewer, Daniel Johnson, Lucy Kiester, Sonya Selbach, Caroline Siblia and Althea Solis.

To receive a free full-color catalog of comics, graphic novels, prose novels and other fine works of artistry, including previous volumes of the TCJ Library Interviews, call 1-800-657-1100, or visit www.fantagraphics.com. You may order books at our website or by phone.

ISBN: 978-1-60699-788-8 First Fantagraphics printing: January 2015 Printed in Singapore

ConTenTs roberT Crumb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 s. Clay WIlson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 spaIn rodrIguez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 rICk grIffIn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 VICTor mosCoso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 gIlberT shelTon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 roberT WIllIams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 paul maVrIdes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Jam poster promoting a 1968 gallery show featuring Zap artists Rick Griffin, Robert Crumb, Victor Moscoso and Robert Williams. Photo provided by Suzanne Williams.

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The Comics Journal Library Volume 9: The Zap Artists

draw, Write, Talk

By Bob Levin

In his book Writers’ Fighters, the celebrated sportswriter John Schulian explains his — and other authors — attraction to practitioners of The Sweet Science. “Boxers,” Schulian writes, “not only lead more interesting lives than any other athletes, they are more willing to talk about them too.” I feel similarly about underground cartoonists. I have found them to be bright, witty, uninhibited conversationalists; and since they came of age in the 1960s — a time when, it seemed, all apples presented were to be bitten, the only commandment was to break commandments, and the golden rule was to do to yourself what you wished others would do with you, preferably in a hot tub while slugging Red Mountain wine, — their conversations had much to draw from.

First some history.

It’s been an oft-told story, but ...

In February 1968, Robert Crumb, a 24-year-old ex-greeting-card artist, and his wife Dana ambled through a fair on San Francisco’s Haight Street selling a comic book of Robert’s creation from a baby carriage. The comic’s publisher was Don Donohue, a UC — Berkeley drop-out, whose only previous effort toward media-baron-hood, an eight-page newspaper, had been sabotaged by a printer who had objected to the sexual organs depicted. For his comeback, Donohue had swapped a used tape recorder to the Beat poet Charles Plymell for an old Multilith printing press and run off copies of Zap #1.

Which was not, in fact, the first Zap. Crumb had created that earlier at the request of Brian Zahn, whose Yarrowstalks, a Philadelphia underground newspaper, had published some of his cartoons. But that book had not appeared, because Zahn feared the cover of a nude man with his cock plugged into an electric socket could lead to an obscenity prosecution, and Crumb refused to change it. Business hazards of a particularly 1960s flavor, involving LSD and trips to India, intervened; and by the time Crumb recalled he had another copy, Donohue’s edition had made its debut. To correctly order his creativity sequentially, Crumb dubbed its predecessor Zap #0.

From such a mix of talent, desire, eccentricity and coincidence is history made. For Zap struck America like a roundhouse right to the jaw — or maybe a kidney punch or thumb in its eye.

Since the institution of the Comic Book Code of 1954, comics had been restricted in language and pictorial content to make them as safe for children’s consumption as Gerber’s peas.

Suddenly, they had appeared, re-perceived, as valid a form for adult artistic expression as films or novels or oils on canvas. Instead of cute talking animals, sassy, clean-living teenagers and noble superheroes battling crime, Crumb had filled them with despair, rage, racist caricatures, dirty words, naked bodies, non-linear stories and the touting of drug consumption as the only sensible response to a world that was insane.

For Zap #2, Crumb took an equally unprecedented and impressive step. He invited the offbeat artists S. Clay Wilson, Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso to contribute stories — and offered each an equal ownership share. Gilbert Shelton was added to the partnership in #3 and Spain Rodriguez and Robert Williams in #4. (Zap remained a closed shop until issue #14, following Griffin’s death in a motorcycle accident, when Paul Mavrides, an anarchically inclined, third-generation Greek from Akron, who was a decade younger than the rest but had established his worth assisting Shelton on his individual projects, was added to the fold.) This mix resulted in what Gary Groth has termed “one of the most individualistic and disparate group of artists of any artistic movement of (the 20th) century.”

Crumb was one of five children raised in a small town in Delaware into varying degrees of psychopathology by a career Marine and his speed-addicted wife. Griffin was a SoCal surfer/ musician, who had been drawing rock-show posters and would shortly turn his talents, after spiritual enlightenment, into bearing witness for Jesus. Moscoso, another poster artist, was a Spanishborn, Brooklyn-raised sharpie with a keen business sense, who had studied color theory with Hans Hoffman at Yale. Rodriguez, a factory worker/biker/Socialist Workers Party activist had come out of Buffalo by way of The East Village Other. Shelton, a product of college humor magazines and the Austin counterculture diaspora, had been cast out of the Army for general unsuitability.

Williams, a court-certified juvenile delinquent from Albuquerque, had apprenticed by drawing T-shirts and cartoons for the hotrod-centered empire of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. And Wilson, an ex-Nebraskan, had seasoned in Indian bars and the even wilder and woolier Lawrence, Kan., assembling a portfolio of battling, sexing pirates, space monsters, dykes and demons which, once Crumb had opened the door to what might be permitted within a comic book, blew off the roof, knocked down the walls, and pissed on the floor.

Zap became, in Rodriquez’s words, “a collective made up of the most uncollective guys there were.” Some were character- and story-oriented; others could not have cared less. Some sought stability in their personal lives; others fled from it. Some had ceased formal education when “Pomp and Circumstance” played at their high-school graduations; others lasted until graduate school. But all were young, all had drawn since childhood and all had been vastly – vastly – affected by drugs. Most had been raised Catholic, most had been influenced by EC Comics (plus Carl Barks and Little Lulu) and most had little good to say about art since Picasso went Cubist. None had much good to say about mainstream America either, but every one of them was dead serious about his art and his vision, commercial consequences be damned.

Zap was unique among underground comics because its restricted roster of contributors so contradicted the “Hey, man, aren’t we,

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Left to right: Rick Griffin, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams, Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson and Victor Moscoso. Photo by Suzanne Williams.

like, all one” spirit of the times. This exclusivity benefited its quality. Each member of the Gang of Seven knew and respected the work of their fellows. Each knew his contribution would be measured each issue against that of other heavyweights, so he had best — to revive my pugilistic metaphor — keep in shape and throw his punches sharp and straight. Each artist brought his own audience to each issue, raising the potential number of future consumers for the work of every other artist. And since each had a financial stake in the profits of each book, they had equal interest in keeping the franchise going.

Zap was also special because, while its contemporaries seemingly had the life span of day dreams, it lasted, albeit with diminishing frequency, 36 years. Zap #5 appeared in 1970; then came one apiece in 1973, ’74 and ’75. There were only seven more — appearances often trumpeted like a rock band’s reunion or the discovery of a presumed extinct beast — before its final manifestation in 2004. When, with the second issue, Donohue’s Apex Novelties proved too small an operation to handle the demand for Zap, it moved for publication and distribution to Don Shenkar and Bob Rita’s Print Mint. When that venture ran financially aground, in the mid-’70s, it moved again, to Ron Turner’s Last Gasp — and

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finally to Fantagraphics for issue #16.

Over the decades, some of the Zap artists developed their styles and broadened the range of subjects they addressed, while others continued to dance only with the ones what brung ’em.

None, however, lost their commitment to produce work that challenged and provoked. There was not an obscenity Zap’s word balloons did not welcome, nor a sexual perversion its panels refused to embrace. By its demise, Zap was agitating within a cultural stew far more accustomed to the transgressive than when it had begun, but it still took a brave soul to open issue 15 on a café or bus and not shield its pages with one’s shoulders from a neighbor’s gaze. Not when it shrieked, “Fucking fuck my goddamned motherfucking cocksucking piss licking shit dick fuck!” and portrayed dripping twats, humping buttocks, walking/talking turds, and a super-powered warthog performing bestial acts on right-wing zealots before ripping off their limbs. Such efforts had rewarded the artists with gallery and museum exhibitions and five-figure sales for original works. It had also targeted Zap for condemnation from both ends of the political spectrum, as well as busts in multiple jurisdictions. But neither rapped knuckles nor patted backs had influenced the direction of the artists’ work.

The Comics Journal Library Volume 9: The Zap Artists

The interview is a challenging form. The reporter should familiarize oneself with the subject’s background and work. (Often, it seems, when it comes to matters like dates and publications, the reporter is the most knowledgeable person in the room.) The interviewer should read previous interviews with the subject in order to shape the questions to expand upon previous gleanings and deflect responses that need not be heard again. The interviewer must put the subject at ease to encourage free speaking. The interviewer must balance any fondness for the subject with the responsibility to readers to allow this free speaking to lead to the potentially embarrassing or demeaning. The interviewer must be aware that his or her desire for such a “scoop� may lead to the memorialization of that which has no value beside the satisfying of the public’s (and the interviewer’s own) taste for the salacious — and that may discourage others from sitting down with the interviewer in the future out of their resentment for these perceived betrayals.

Interviews offer insights into the questioner as well as the questioned. Readers will meet those who are most comfortable discussing pen points and work schedules, as well as those who collect childhood traumas and behavioral indiscretions like trading cards.

Some interviewers square up for confrontation and battle. Others lay back, turn the tap, and let the water flow. Either by hammering or erosion, nuggets may be exposed. (Unfortunately, under either approach, readers may wish the batteries on the recorder had run down prior to the subject laying down his or her view on, for example, NAFTA.) A successful interview yields insights into its subject’s formative years, maps the bumps and dips of a life’s journey, and provides context for the mindset which resulted. It allows for the expression of personality and style, wit and intelligence, biases and blind spots. (It will yield to the careful reader of this volume answers to such questions as: Which cartoonist believes he’s had “more pieces of ass than you’ve had hot dinners�? Which doesn’t blame Jews entirely for “their particular brand of obnoxiousness�? and Whose work has been protested by both Politically Involved Girlfriends (PIG) and Queer Nation? At its best, an interview will leave its readers with their heads shaking, their breaths sucked down throats, and then exhaled, mouthing silent “WOW!�s.

Interviews have drawbacks too. The form is not designed for the interviewer to analyze utterings or shade content with perspective. Nor are the interviewee’s assertions often fact-checked. So falsehoods, deliberate or innocent, are digested, uncaught by readers and are passed along, page-to-memory and mouth-to-mouth, for decades until (perhaps) uncovered and corrected.

But, hey, isn’t that why universities pay scholars big bucks?

During the period in which these interviews were conducted, mainstream media paid little attention to underground cartoonists, so interest from The Comics Journal, where most of these originally first appeared, was usually welcomed. The cartoonists came to

them unshielded by handlers or press agents or corporate minions laying down “off-limits� placards to keep them on safe ground.

The cartoonists were not veterans of the process slapping back set answers to set questions like ping-pong players. They came with tales they yearned to tell, opinions they ached to express, gripes they could not wait to clear from their chests, and long-muted horns to toot.

Reading these interviews, usually for the first time since they appeared in print, I was struck again by the openness of the revelations. I was equally impressed by the range of interests, the depth of knowledge, the freshness of opinions and the strength of artistic conviction on display. I also laughed out loud a lot.

When it comes to conversing, there is not a glass-jawed UPNBUP DBO JO UIF CVODI t

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Sketch by Robert Crumb.

a marathon Interview With legendary underground Cartoonist robert Crumb From The Comics Journal #121 (April 1988)

This February (or early March; accounts differ) was the 20th anniversary of Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix. While it wasn’t the first underground comic book, it was to become the inspiration for the movement. In a matter of months, Zap, coupled with the appearance of his earlier Fritz the Cat stories in the men’s magazine Cavalier, lifted Crumb from complete obscurity to worldwide celebrity. Over the next five years Crumb had what must be one of the most creative periods of any cartoonist, publishing 16 solo books and contributing to dozens more. It was a pace no one could maintain, and in the mid-’70s, a series of legal and tax troubles combined with a serious case of ’60s burnout cut his output down drastically. In 1981 he came back with Weirdo. Under the editorship of Crumb (and later Peter Bagge), Weirdo was instrumental in the revival of creative comics in the ’80s, as well as giving Crumb an opportunity to explore a wide range of new subject matter and new techniques. In 1987, he added Hup, a twice-yearly solo book, and Fantagraphics Books began publishing The Complete Crumb Comics, a massive project aimed at reprinting all of Crumb’s published comics and hundreds of pages of sketchbooks, illustrations and other art.

The interview was conducted in three long sessions by Gary Groth. As the sessions were informal, there was a great deal of overlap in subjects between them. In order to make a coherent interview, the editor sometimes would tie together a section from one session and a section from another session with a line from a third.

Even so, the time scale can still get a bit confusing, so a chronology has been added to help the reader keep the dates straight.

The interview was transcribed by Gary Groth and Joe Sacco and edited by R. Fiore.

famIly GARY GROTH: Let’s talk about your upbringing.

ROBERT CRUMB: Sordid affair.

GROTH: So I gathered.

CRUMB: A real mess. My family was a real mess.

GROTH: You referred to your parents as being “drugged by television.” Would you like to elaborate?

CRUMB: We were the first ones in our neighborhood to get a television, in 1948.

GROTH: You were 5 years old.

CRUMB: Yep … spent a lot of time watching it.

GROTH: Do you watch much now?

CRUMB: Nah, hardly ever.

GROTH: You own a television, though.

CRUMB: Yeah, Sophie [Crumb’s daughter] likes to watch Sesame Street. She can sing the Inspector Gadget song if you want to hear it.

GROTH: What was your home life like? Your father was in the Marines?

CRUMB: Until ’56 he was in the Marines. He joined in ’36, so we moved around a lot, shifted around, and starting from the time I was about 9 years old, my parents fought all the time, constantly screamed at each other, threw things at each other. My mother was an amphetamine addict all through the ’50s and ’60s, which didn’t help matters. She used to sit downstairs all night in the living room, raving at nobody in particular. She would just rave. I would periodically wake up and hear her down there raving.

GROTH: When was this?

CRUMB: Late ’50s and all through the ’60s, ’till I left home. It went on after I left home.

GROTH: What was her problem?

CRUMB: She had these diet pills from these doctors. In the ’50s they were giving housewives these strong amphetamines, dexedrine, cartwheels, whatever you wanted.

She really got into it, and got hooked on ’em.

GROTH: That caused a kind of chemical imbalance?

CRUMB: Have you ever known any speed freaks? You get all cranked out, your nerves get all raw, but you can’t stop. It’s kind of like caffeine when you’re coming down. You feel awful but you can’t stop. I’d come home from school and my mother would be in the kitchen like this [demented panting] … you know, “Uh oh, steer clear.”

GROTH: What a delightful portrait.

CRUMB: It was grim, but we could always retreat into the wonderful, wacky world of comic books.

GROTH: When you say “we,” does that mean your brothers?

CRUMB: Yeah.

GROTH: What was your father like during this period?

CRUMB: Grim. He used to come home from work, watch television, argue with my mother. Then sometimes he had two jobs, a lot of times to avoid coming home. Sometimes I wouldn’t see him at all.

GROTH: Your parents were devout Catholics?

CRUMB: Not really. They just practiced a specific type of

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Sketch by Robert Crumb (1979).

working-class attitude about doing your duty. The day we all [the children] stopped going to church, they stopped, too. It seems that we decided that it was all bullshit, and they stopped going, and never talked about it again.

GROTH: How old were you at that point?

CRUMB: I was about 16.

GROTH: Why did you drop away from Catholicism?

CRUMB: I couldn’t go any more. If you have any intellectual curiosity at all, it doesn’t take you too long to figure out that that thing is up the creek. When I was 16, this priest, Father Donahue, came over to our house to debate theology. He was 50 years old and seemed to be sort of intelligent. I had these questions and he said he would come over and talk to me about them. I was kind of a mystical idealist when I was 16. Catholic mystic. I studied the lives of guys like St. Francis. My parents were there and they were very impressed with the priest. You know, wow, the priest is coming over to talk to Robert about religion! And I said something like, “Don’t you think that most people go to church out of a sense of obligation? Most people are just going through the motions.”

And he just blew up. He got real hot under the collar and started yelling at me and actually came at me with a clenched fist. This hot-headed Irish priest. My father had to intercede to stop him.

[Laughs.] That was it for me. That was the final convincer that the whole thing was so much dummy-dumb stuff. I mean, at the core of Catholicism there is indeed a very interesting and mystical body of religious theory that the most deeply devoted Jesuits or people like that might get into, but most of it is nonsense. The core of any religion has that interesting mystical element, but most of the

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peasants that belong to any religious group are just going along with a bunch of hocus pocus. They’re just being manipulated.

Also, the priest was asking too many nosy questions at confession. He was real curious. He pried into my sex life too much, which was pretty weird anyway.

GROTH: At age 16?

CRUMB: Yeah, just a little bit of horsing around with my sister, that’s all. No overt genital contact or anything. Wrassling around a little bit, a little bit of feeling up. What the heck?

GROTH: This was your sister?

CRUMB: Yeah, the one who became a lesbian later. [Laughter.]

GROTH: You don’t have that many sisters, do you?

CRUMB: An older sister, who is probably the most normal person in the family. She stopped having anything to do with the family at a certain point.

GROTH: Are you in touch with her now?

CRUMB: Yeah, actually we kind of reconciled things later. She’s all right.

GROTH: So that was your home life — a mother who was going off her trolley and a father who would like to avoid her.

CRUMB: Yeah, things were pretty miserable. I used to think I was the most miserable person on the face of the earth in my adolescence. Thought about committing suicide a lot.

GROTH: Was that directly related to your home life? Was it also school?

CRUMB: Just the whole thing. This acute feeling of alienation.

It was “Is this all there is to life?” Forget it, who needs it? But I was too gutless to go through with it and actually commit suicide.

Sometimes I was really gonna do it and just chickened out. I was too scared of dying. “Oh, well, I’ll have to go on living on this lousy fucking planet.”

GROTH: You think suicide is an act of courage?

CRUMB: It takes courage to end it. Either that, or you have to be so fucking miserable that it’s the only way you can stop the pain. I guess I wasn’t miserable enough.

GROTH: Aside from your father being an officer in the Marine Corps and your mother’s stint with drugs, can you describe your parents’ value system, or what it was about them that affected your life?

CRUMB: My father came from this real straight-back Puritan family with a Midwestern background. The Crumb family were very proper farm people in Minnesota. My mother’s family was from Philadelphia, and they were almost lumpen proletariat degenerates. Semi-criminals and alcoholics with a lot of disillusionment, families breaking up, all that kind of stuff. Very amoral people.

So there was always this tension between my parents because my father was always horrified by that aspect of my mother and her family, who just wanted to get drunk and have a good time. They didn’t really give a shit about anything else. My father was this person with a completely rigid sense of duty and honor and all that stuff. Always a source of tension. If a paycheck came in, it seemed my mother wanted to spend it on stuff, blow it immediately. They always fought about money, typical lower-middle-class bourgeois.

GROTH: What was your mother’s reaction to your work as you started to get more popular?

CRUMB: She kind of liked it. The thing about my mother is, as soon as I showed some strength about anything, she just dropped all her phony convictions about everything, you know? My father,

The Comics Journal Library Volume 9: The Zap Artists

on the other hand, maintained his rigid, straight-backed attitude and was very upset when somebody showed him my comics. He wouldn’t talk to me for five years.

GROTH: Your mother’s values were more transient, though?

CRUMB: Yeah, she came from this somewhat amoral family background, and tried to have some sense of decency, but it was pretty weak. She could have easily been led down the most degrading gutter, she could have gotten into heroin without much trouble.

GROTH: Where do you place yourself between those two extremes?

CRUMB: I’ve got both of those in me in some funny way.

GROTH: But you certainly have convictions about most things.

CRUMB: I imagine I attained some sort of balance, fortunately.

Now I lead a real responsible life, keeping the home front running and all that stuff. It’s amazing that I can do it. But I still have that other degenerate side of me that likes to go off … let’s not even talk about it.

GROTH: And your responsible side?

CRUMB: My responsible side is the “I can’t do that” input. To take care of things.

GROTH: Is it a function of age?

CRUMB: A sense of duty and everything else. I probably got it from my father. My father definitely felt it was people like him who were keeping civilization going, that without people like him, people like my mother would run amuck and everything would just fall apart. Everyone would be hooked on drugs and alcohol and everything would just crumble. Children would all starve, barbarians and communists would take over and enslave all free people, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

GROTH: Do you think your art is the result of some sort of moral conviction?

CRUMB: Nah! It’s the result of some overwhelming need to compensate for social rejection. When I was in my teens, I used to walk around with this bitter feeling, thinking that some day they’d all be sorry, I’ll show them, I’ll become a great artist and I’ll go down in history and the rest of these bums will just die like dogs. They’ll be sorry. I’ll roll back into town with a beautiful blonde on my arm I’ll have a bundle of money. That was my way of getting revenge on society, instead of becoming a criminal. My older brother definitely had criminal tendencies. He liked to go out and do really destructive things, but he always got into such heavy trouble for doing them. Being younger than him and observing that, I learned that it was just foolhardy. He’d go out and slash tires, or break into garages and steal stuff, but he’d always end up with the police bringing him home and my father would kick his ass. He never learned. Finally he just stopped going out, because he’d always get into trouble when he went out. Even as late as 1967-’68, when I would go home to visit and he would say, “C’mon, let’s go for a walk,” and I’d take him out and he’d immediately go up to some lady on the street and start preaching. She’d get real scared and start calling for the police.

GROTH: Has he changed in the intervening years?

CRUMB: He just stopped going out, he just doesn’t go out. He’s still got the same crazy ideas and all that.

GROTH: His crazy ideas are very much your ideas, aren’t they?

CRUMB: Yeah, but I don’t go out on the street to strange people and start preaching this shit at them.

GROTH: You put it down on paper.

Panel from “Treasure Island Days,” a collaboration between the young Charles and Robert Crumb from 1959.

CRUMB: He doesn’t know how to get along in the world at all.

He never learned; he just doesn’t know how to go along to get along. When he was a little kid he would always do these crazy things, and he’d get in a peck of trouble. I remember in his Long John Silver period he’d dress up like Long John Silver with his leg tied up and this crutch that he made for himself and he’d walk around town. He was about 13. I remember one time he went up to these — actually I did a comic strip about this, now that I think of it — he went up to these greaser-hoodlums and started yelling “Avast ya swabs, ya white-livered scum” and all this stuff at them.

The two guys came over and pounded his ass, reduced him to a sniveling heap on the sidewalk. I said, “Come on, Charles, let’s get out of here. You can’t play Long John Silver with those guys, they don’t get it.” [Laughter.]

GROTH: You think he was just a born troublemaker?

CRUMB: I don’t know. He just couldn’t connect his acts with the consequences. Once when we were real little, I was about 5 and he was about 7, he figured this thing out at the supermarket where you could go to this bin of bottles, take the bottles out, and go to the cashier and get money for them.

GROTH: These were bottles that people had already brought back?

CRUMB: Yeah, they just put them in this big bin. It took about five times before they finally caught on. Just kicked his ass out of the market. So then, to get revenge because they kicked him out of the market, he snuck back in and got some toothpaste and started squeezing it all over the windows of the market. Then he really got in trouble.

GROTH: Maybe we should be interviewing your brother.

CRUMB: Poor devil.

GROTH: It sounds like he had a genuine criminal mentality.

CRUMB: Yeah, he just had a real anti-social attitude. Great writer, though. He writes me these brilliant letters. Brilliant as a diamond.

But he can’t organize any of his stuff enough to get it together.

GROTH: What does he do now?

CRUMB: He stays home and writes. Doesn’t have a job or anything.

GROTH: Does he write for money?

CRUMB: No, he doesn’t have any connection to anything. He lives with my mother and stays in his room. He comes down to

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eat dinner, and he walks the cat. My mother has this fat cat that he walks on a leash sometimes. He had to go to a mental hospital for a couple years. He tried to commit suicide by drinking a bottle of Lemon Fresh furniture polish. They put him on some kind of downers that he has to take every day just to maintain stability, so he doesn’t crack up. Otherwise, I don’t know how he could stand it. He’s totally isolated, just reads and writes.

GROTH: What about your younger brother?

CRUMB: Oy! He’s another case. He lives in a Skid Row hotel in downtown San Francisco. He thinks he’s the greatest holy man in the Western world, he really does.

He’s really into it. He has this bowl, and he goes out and sits in front of it. He does that all day, that’s his work. When he’s not doing that he works on his artwork, which is really nice. Painting and drawings. I printed some of them in Weirdo. They’re real impressive, beautiful stuff. But he’s got real problems, he has these fits periodically where he falls on the floor and screams and rolls around. He has those about twice a month. They’re brought on by any kind of stressful situation, especially having to do with sex.

I had the privilege of witnessing one of those fits last time I was down here. It went on and on for seven or eight minutes. Finally I said, “For God’s sake, get up and stop this, what are you doing?”

He said, “I can’t help it! I can’t stop it!”

Then finally it ended, and I said, “Jesus Christ, that was really a harrowing experience watching you go through that,” and he said, “Ah, it’s old hat to me, Jack.”

early years GROTH: At the age of 12 you moved to Milford, Del., which must have been a real paradise. Where did you live before then?

CRUMB: We shifted around a lot. My mother made my father retire from the Marine Corps in ’56. She had this idea that she wanted to go back and live in this town where she was born. I was always struck by how beautiful it was there. I remember the day we drove into town. It was so beautiful; I was so thrilled at the idea of living there. But gradually it became evident that it was just a really hard-assed redneck place. You just weren’t accepted if you were a stranger from out of the area. It was hard to break down this wall. After a while, I got to hate the place. But even when I hated it I appreciated how beautiful it was, a real old little town.

It was in this kind of Southern setting with a lot of foliage, woods all around, streams and lakes. I used to wander around there by myself, just sit by the lake feeling sorry for myself.

GROTH: At what point did you recognize you were in conflict with the values of your parents and the community?

CRUMB: Around the age of 14, 15, around here. It didn’t take me long to get a real superiority ego going about my alienation from the world. They were all just a bunch of dumbos, those guys. I was just too smart for them, obviously.

GROTH: Were you doing well academically?

CRUMB: Nah. I wasn’t interested in school at all. It was a crummy school, none of the teachers were any good. There just wasn’t anything happening at all. I’d do my own studies, completely separate from anything going on in school. I was studying the culture in my own way.

GROTH: So how did you come to this feeling of superiority?

CRUMB: A cheap defense mechanism. The other side of this was

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feeling horribly inferior. Girls weren’t interested in me at all. I couldn’t make it at all in the teenage scene. So I had to rationalize it by thinking I was too smart for all these jerks.

GROTH: You said, “I was rejected by my age group,’’ and then you refer to a panicky fear of not being accepted, of not fitting in, of being rejected. “I was a social misfit.” Did that grow out of your home life, or was that just something totally separate?

CRUMB: I was just a little faggot. [Laughter.] This was in the late ’50s, when the Fonz was the ideal, and I was this guy who had this shirt buttoned all the way to the top and carried my school stuff around in a school bag. I was a twerpy guy who also had two front teeth missing. Somebody hit me in the mouth with a rock when I was 12. All through my high-school years, I walked around with two front teeth missing. Finally, after I left home and got this job, guys would come up to me and say, “Yeah, Crumb, you’re gonna have to do something about those teeth. It’d really help your image a lot, ya know?” So as soon as I had some money earned I went to the dentists and had these false teeth put in the front.

I couldn’t get with it at all. I guess part of it was that my family was so crazy and eccentric I could never learn how to act right, and they couldn’t help me at all. They didn’t know how to act right, either. But now I’m kind of glad I didn’t. I developed my own individuality. I was lucky that I didn’t fit into that whole thing. I think most people I know who turned out to be interesting are people who went through that whole painful exclusion thing, failed to pass their puberty rites. In America, you’re really better off if you don’t. Because if you do, and you have any intelligence at all, then later on you have to try and struggle with that whole fucking value system and throw it off somehow. My older brother Charles and I became real close in our teen years. He had a really sharp perception and critical stance on the whole social thing, so being with him I could never forget and slip back into thinking, “Gee, I wish I could be accepted. This one is so cool, and that one is such a neat person.” He kept me from ever slipping into that by always talking about how lousy and fucked up the whole thing was, which was essentially true.

GROTH: How much older is your older brother?

CRUMB: Two years older than me. I watched him go through the whole process: First trying to be a cool guy and be accepted, then really having the shit beat out of him bad. So I just avoided the whole thing completely, didn’t even try. Realized that it was a hopeless case. I spent a lot of time drawing, and that’s a crucial period for developing your skill. You can really get into something if you happen to be in the right circumstances. I really got serious about drawing when I was 16, 1 mean really serious. I spent all my free time earnestly trying to learn how to draw, developing that whole craft. There was nothing else to do. There was no alternative for me, basically.

GROTH: I would assume that your early intuitive dislike and condemnation of the social environment affected your political and social views later?

CRUMB: Of course. I was immediately attracted to any kind of underdog political philosophy, like communism and all that, or the beatniks. The beatnik thing really attracted me. I read Jack Kerouac when I was 17: “Jesus, these guys are really living it up.”

They shucked the whole bullshit thing and had a good time. I met this guy, Marty Pahls, who was heavily into the communist

The Comics Journal Library Volume 9: The Zap Artists

leftwing philosophy. He was going to Kent State at the time. The whole thing was really strong there. He indoctrinated me into that when I was about 15 or 16. I got this real political thing going early because of that, but it didn’t carry on too long. I corresponded with Marty Pahls for years, and he just passed the whole political education he was getting at Kent State on to me.

GROTH: Can you define more precisely what it was you were rebelling against politically at that time?

CRUMB: From being ostracized in high school, and having any intelligence at all, you just develop the ability to think about things and question things. It’s not too hard to figure out that the whole thing is fucked in some way, that there’s something wrong with the whole Ozzie Nelson image of what you’re supposed to be, the whole middle-class value system.

GROTH: Can you elaborate on the middle-class value system?

CRUMB: It has a lot to do with materialism and upward striving.

In the high school I went to, there were a lot of farmers and poor kids. They weren’t treated with any respect by the middle-class kids at all, just looked upon as dirt, and even if you’re in your teens, if you start reading at all, or if someone turns you on to stuff, it becomes real clear that there’s something wrong with that.

People were looked up to because they had fancy cars, they had fancy clothes, the whole phony charming act they learned to put on. If you’re an outsider and you’re perceptive, you can see the picture in broader perspective. Also, from the anger and hurt of being an outsider you develop a critical view of things. There’s something wrong with it because it rejects you. You think you’re cool. I thought I was hot shit. I didn’t see why I should have been rejected.

GROTH: You said you and your brothers would escape from the madness at school and at home through reading and drawing comic books. Was that your safety line?

CRUMB: Oh, yeah. All through the last four years of high school I became completely obsessed with Mad, especially Kurtzman. As little kids we did all these pseudo-funny animal comics. We did hundred and hundreds of them with these simply drawn characters that were all take-offs on Andy Panda, Mickey Mouse, etcetera. When I was a kid, I didn’t like drawing comics that much. My brother made me do it. [Laughs.] I had a character named Brombo the Panda that I drew for seven or eight years. I drew hundreds of comics about Brombo the Panda. It was only because this teddy bear was easy to draw. I could draw a whole comic about Brombo

the Panda in two days. [Laughs.] The comics were something like 12 pages long.

GROTH: And what inspired you to do the funny-animal stuff? Barks, probably. Was there anyone else?

CRUMB: Before the age of 10, we weren’t terribly discriminating. We read all those Dell funny-animal comics, but mostly we focused in on New Funnies, the Disney stuff, Little Lulu and Mighty Mouse. My brother was really into Mighty Mouse. But Barks was the best of the Dell funny animals.

GROTH: Did you recognize that at the time?

CRUMB: Yeah, although I didn’t know his name. He definitely stood out above the others in storytelling. His comics and John Stanley’s Little Lulu were the two best of those kid comics, and I still enjoy reading them a lot. I have a big collection of Little Lulu comics, which I still like to get out every once in a while and read.

They’re great. Great stories.

I remember when I was about 5 years old becoming heavily sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny. I don’t know why. It’s true, though. I remember cutting out Bugs Bunny from the cover of a Looney Tunes comic and carrying it around with me. I was fascinated by Bugs.

GROTH: The beginning of your sexual aberration.

CRUMB: You were talking before about burning your hand with an iron. It reminded me of this Bugs Bunny cut-out, which got all wrinkled. I asked my mother to iron it for me, and she ironed it for me on the ironing board.

GROTH: There was a genuine sexual attraction?

CRUMB: I was sexually aroused by Bugs Bunny.

GROTH: Boy, that’s fairly sick.

CRUMB: I remember reading something later on, some wise-assed guys like the Mad Peck wrote, “Are you sexually aroused by cute funny animals?” I think that’s probably a universal experience for small children.

GROTH: A portent of things to come. When did your sexual impulses shift to other characters or humans?

CRUMB: All of a sudden, when I was 12. Did you ever see the television version of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle? Sheena was played by this really beautiful woman, Irish McCalla. That changed everything. No more Bugs Bunny. I couldn’t wait to go to bed at night to dream about Sheena.

GROTH: What was your social life like with girls in high school?

CRUMB: Practically nil. Nothing. Well, actually, for a while in

From “Footsy” in Weirdo #20 (1987).

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eighth grade, I was able to play footsies with this girl Jeanette Bates who sat behind me in an American History class, but that was it.

Besides that there was nothing.

GROTH: Until?

CRUMB: Until I was living in Cleveland and got involved with these beatnik girls who were able to appreciate the quirky guy I was.

GROTH: That’s when you met your first wife?

CRUMB: Yeah, it was around that time. My father always said that I’d marry the first one who came along.

GROTH: When you were being influenced by Kurtzman and Mad, were you influenced by any of the other EC books or Kurtzman’s war books ?

CRUMB: Not terribly.

GROTH: It was mostly Mad, then?

CRUMB: Mostly Mad, then later Humbug and Trump. There was something happening in those that, to me, said it all about American life at that time. I look at them now and it still has the same effect on me. It’s all there. That was a good period for all kinds of comedy and satire.

GROTH: What other forms of comedy and satire were you attentive to?

CRUMB: Stan Freberg’s records. Did you ever hear any of those satires he did of rock ’n’ roll, like “The Great Pretender?” Hilarious.

He hated rock ’n’ roll. And some of the stuff on television, Ernie Kovacs and Phil Silvers. I can still remember the experience of seeing the cover of Humbug #2 on the newsstands at the local soda fountain. It was a mystical experience for me that will always stand out in my mind as one of the great moments of my life. I saw that cover and thought, “What the hell is this!?” It had nothing to do with anything else that was going on. It was just this thing coming out of the blue that was absolutely stripped of all bullshit. That said it all. I get that out and look at it and it still just sucks me right in.

GROTH: Have you seen anything since that time to match that stuff?

CRUMB: Something in my brain, maybe, but I think that kind of thing happens to people only one time. It’s like the first time you get laid. People have told me they’ve had that experience when they saw the early Zap comics. It breaks you out of something, and you’ll never really have that breakthrough again. Actually, there was an even earlier experience when I was too young to understand. It was when I saw the cover of Mad #11, where they did that takeoff on Life magazine with the Basil Wolverton drawing.

I was 11 and I’d see that on the newsstand and be puzzled by it, puzzled as hell. It was incredible. Here was this completely rude ridiculing of a venerated magazine that was part of every family’s household. There was “Mad” there in the red square with this hideous, grotesque cartoon and it was not trying to be cute or smooth it over or make it nice or respectable. It was just a completely rude breakdown of everything we valued in this society.

GROTH: Do you think that that type of humor has been rendered ineffectual now that it’s become so commonplace?

CRUMB: It’s different now. We’ve gone through the most vile gross-outs. Things aren’t the same anymore.

GROTH: These kinds of social institutions are almost impossible to parody now.

CRUMB: It’s just a different set of relationships going on.

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Obviously, with those Weirdo covers that I do, I’m still making this pathetic attempt to recapture the experience that I had from those early Mads and Humbugs.

GROTH: So it obviously captured your subversive mentality when you were 11 years old?

CRUMB: Yeah, but only in a very vague way. I was too young to deal with it. I remember looking at Mad when I was a little kid, finding it fascinating but also kind of disgusting, because they were so raunchy. They almost gave off this bad smell, like there was all this body hair and sweat in there, eccchhh, I couldn’t handle it. My mother would never allow any of those EC comics in our house at all. We had to go down to the drugstore and read them there, until the guy would come over and kick us right in the bottom of the backbone and say, “C’mon, c’mon, that’s enough, if you’re not going to buy anything, get out of here.”

GROTH: Did your mother think they were some sort of subversive influence?

CRUMB: Dirty. They had sexy girls in them, and that meant they were dirty comics. My brother tried to bring a couple of those EC horror comics home, and she just tore ’em up and threw ’em in the garbage. Actually, it’s interesting, I never thought of this before, but that was the point in my life that I realized I was a social outcast. I had never realized that before. I was 14 when I first became conscious of being a social misfit, and that was when I really started looking at Mad and that sort of stuff, interesting things in the culture.

GROTH: Do you think Mad appealed to you because it was culturally subversive?

CRUMB: I don’t know. And it was culturally subversive at the time. I’m not sure. I wasn’t that conscious of it; it just grabbed me.

GROTH: Perhaps you found an intuitive kinship.

CRUMB: I think it was more that I was freed from the need for social acceptance. Not the need so much. I was freed because I gave up on it. I gave up on being socially acceptable. I gave up trying to live up to the commonly held cultural and social forms, what you were supposed to like and dislike. I began to use my own free judgment about things. Being cast out, although painful, was a liberating process.

GROTH: Foo! was influenced by Kurtzman and Mad quite a bit, wasn’t it?

CRUMB: Oh, yeah. Foo! was a complete take-off on Mad. It was the first printed thing I ever did, the first time I felt the magic of print, ever.

GROTH: This was a comic you and Charles did when you were in high school.

CRUMB: Yeah.

GROTH: You would literally go door-to-door and try to sell it to people and tell them it was a school art project, and they would either slam the door in your face or give you money without taking the magazine just to make you go away.

CRUMB: Right. It was a dime. We wanted 10 cents for Humbug #2: it. First, we tried to sell it in high school, but since we were considered weirdo-creeps, people would take it and look at it, and they’d either hand it back or just run off with it and not give us any money. Most of the time they didn’t want anything to do with us or it. We were greatly disappointed. So then we said, “We’ve got to sell these things somehow.” We went to these huge housing

The Comics Journal Library Volume 9: The Zap Artists

From “My Encounter with Dracula” in Foo #2 by Charles and Robert Crumb (1958).

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From Crumb’s Roberta Smith Office Girl strip for American Greetings Corporation Late News Bulletins, 19631964.

projects near an Air Force base and we went door-to-door. We found that people weren’t interested in it unless you told them that the money would go to the school. They’d look at it — they wouldn’t know what it was, this Mad imitation — and people would stare at it blankly. I’d say, “We drew it ourselves,” and they’d say, “Oh well, what is it?”

I’d say, “It’s a comic book.”

“What’s it about?” What can you say? They’d say, “Are you sure the money’s going to go to the school? Are you sure of that?

Who’s your teacher over there? What’s his name?” I’d tell them all this information, and they’d say, “No, not interested.” It turned out to be a lot more work than it was worth. You’d make a dollar in two hours. [Laughter.]

GROTH: Was this your first experience at deception?

CRUMB: It was my first experience in the comic business. Very discouraging. After that I was so turned off I decided to heck with comic books. I was completely disillusioned with the whole idea of being a comic-book artist. I set my sights on becoming a commercial artist at that point, although for some reason I still continued to draw comics. I don’t know why, or what I hoped to gain by it.

It’s just that I was so into it that I just couldn’t stop somehow.

Cleveland and europe GROTH: When did you start working at the American Greetings Corporation?

CRUMB: I started in 1963 when I was 19 years old, right after I left home. I worked there off and on up until about 1967.

GROTH: How did you get started there? What were the circumstances?

CRUMB: It was pretty basic. Marty Pahls, who I’d been writing to in Kent, Ohio, invited me to leave home and go live with him when he graduated from college and moved to Cleveland. I went to the state employment agency and told them I was an artist, and they steered me into the greeting-card company. They hired a lot of young artists out of art school. It was a giant art factory, basically.

There were hundreds of people who did artwork and color separation. The first year I worked there I just did color separations.

GROTH: Mechanical separations?

CRUMB: No … the color separations were all done by hand. We didn’t use Zipatone screens at all. We’d mask off areas and airbrush gray tones. For the first four months I worked there it was all just training. I had no idea what I was being trained for. I didn’t know what color separation was. They had you do these percentages of gray with the airbrush. They tested you with this light meter to see

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if you got exactly 20 percent or 30 percent.

GROTH: Then after a year of that you became a staff artist?

CRUMB: Some of the guys around there became aware that I could draw cartoons, so they got me into this department where they did humorous cards, it was real easy work.

GROTH: This was eight hours a day?

CRUMB: Yeah. Punch in, time clock.

GROTH: Did you appreciate that as discipline? Did it serve to discipline your drawing at all?

CRUMB: Nah, all it did was make me aware of how the whole commercial thing works. When I started to do those humorous cards I spent six months just doing nothing but training and training to draw cute, to remove all the grotesque quality from my work. I’d draw something that I thought was cute as I possibly could draw, and they’d say, “No, too grotesque.” They’d say, “Look at those hands, they’re like claws, humanoid hands. We don’t want that. We want these cute little fat figures.” They had a standard character on every one of those cards, a Nebbish. It had a great big head, a little tiny short body, little fat hands, and little fat feet, you know that stupid Ziggy? Well, that’s done by Tom Wilson, who was head of the department. He thought that the Ziggy-like Nebbish was the ideal.

GROTH: Haven’t you complained that you still can’t get that cute aspect out of your work?

CRUMB: It’s irrevocable. It’s just ingrained. I was trained to be cute, and I never lost that. It probably helps sell my work.

GROTH: You must tell me the story behind the Roberta Smith, Office Girl strip. You got in trouble doing that, didn’t you?

CRUMB: I did it for the American Greetings company bulletin.

Some guy just suggested I do a comic strip for the bulletin to lighten it up a little bit. It was a pretty grim affair. I thought up this thing based on this girl I had a crush on, Roberta Smith. I did one where I showed one of the employees of the company speeding in a car, and so the guy who was in charge of putting out the bulletin said, “We can’t show an employee doing this. It’s a bad reflection on the company.” He wouldn’t use that one, so the next strip I did was a takeoff on this guy’s overly serious attitude about things. He said he couldn’t use that either, so I quit doing it eventually.

GROTH: Didn’t they realize they might have trouble from you when they asked you to do a strip?

CRUMB: They didn’t ask me to do it. I submitted the strips, and the first ones I did were very cute and lovable. [Laughs.] These cute little harmless office jokes, where Roberta brings her pet flower to

The Comics Journal Library Volume 9: The Zap Artists

work and puts it on her desk and talks to it. Everybody loved it, but I got tired of that. That’s when I realized I could never do a cute, lovable comic strip.

GROTH: How did you like living in Cleveland?

CRUMB: Oh, God, it’s such a grim town. Try it for a year. Try Cleveland.

GROTH: How do you suppose Harvey Pekar survives it?

CRUMB: He has a deep Jewish fatalism. He’s learned how to thrive on it. He’s learned how to make something out of it. He’s the artist who speaks for Cleveland. He’s put Cleveland on the map as far as cultural history goes for this period of time.

GROTH: You once said, “Of all the big cities I’ve been through, Cleveland is probably the deadliest,” and then you said, “It’s a dumb town.” Is that because it’s non-vital?

CRUMB: Well, all these ethnic groups live there, and they’re all working class, and they’ve all become entrenched, and they all hate each other. There’s all this suspicion and isolation. Everybody stays in their own pocket and won’t have anything to do with anyone.

And yet, what might have once been a rich cultural uniqueness has been wiped out by the mass media and all that. There’s a little bit of that ethnic color left, but even that is fading fast. The onslaught of mass media creates paranoia and suspicion and a xenophobic withdrawal.

GROTH: How do the mass media wipe out ethnic identity?

CRUMB: The next generation doesn’t want to be identified with all that old-fashioned bullshit, they just want to be modern and look good. They don’t want to go dance the polka in the Baby-Doll Lounge anymore. They want to listen to rock music and be cool.

And they carry that on into adulthood, so the old ways die out.

The only thing left is that suspicion of all the other groups. The blacks are in a really nasty ghetto, really nasty. God, it must be hell there now. It was bad when I lived there in the ’60s, but there was still this real colorful strip of bars and clubs. A lot of music, small black corner shoe-shine parlors, drug stores, beauty parlors.

There were a couple of streets with all that kind of stuff, but it’s all gone now. It’s all been completely wiped out, devastated. You just go to the K-Mart, that’s all that’s left. You stay home and watch television or listen to your music. It’s all over.

GROTH: In 1964, you met and married your first wife. You’re quoted as saying that you married the first girl you could get along with. Is that pretty accurate?

CRUMB: Yeah. We were both desperate, desperately clutching at each other.

GROTH: I’m interested in your experiences living in Switzerland and Copenhagen. Why did you go over there?

CRUMB: I got to the point where I thought, “America’s really fucked, I’ll just go live in Europe.” But after living over there for a year, I found out that I was just too bound up in American culture.

Europe was just kind of boring and stodgy to me. I don’t know, maybe that’s just Switzerland and Denmark.

GROTH: Why Switzerland?

CRUMB: My wife knew someone there, so that was where we went.

GROTH: Did you think of living in France or Italy?

CRUMB: We just went where we had some connections. I don’t know why we ended up in Copenhagen.

GROTH: What was it like over there?

CRUMB: It’s beautiful physically. It’s not all schlocked up like America. No long dreary miles of fast food joints. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. I couldn’t believe how everybody was so entrenched in their social class and ideas. Americans are shifting and changing all the time, which I guess I was addicted to as a product of America. In Switzerland, everything is in its narrow niche and just stays there, and you knew you’d always be an outsider.

GROTH: It was the rigid class system that bothered you so?

CRUMB: And the tradition was so strong. It held everything together. Everybody had their own little piece of land and wasn’t about to let it go or sell it or change the way they did things.

GROTH: The social hierarchy was more clearly defined over there?

CRUMB: Yeah, real sharply set patterns. It’s appealing in some ways, but I didn’t see any future in it for me. I was still doing greeting cards, waiting for checks from the company to keep us going. They always took too long to get there, so it just wasn’t working out. It also wasn’t working out too well with my first wife.

I didn’t want to be stuck in Europe with her.

GROTH: Did she feel similarly?

CRUMB: No, she really wanted to hang on to me. She was a real millstone around my neck. Still is.

GROTH: So what was it about America you missed?

CRUMB: The craziness. It’s a crazy fucking country. You can’t tell what the hell is going on or where you fit in. It’s the possibilities.

That was also the ’60s. I don’t know about now. If things keep slipping into this fucking conservative fascism, I might really seriously get the hell out of here.

GROTH: We could move Fantagraphics Books and operate out of a Swiss chateau.

Sketch by Crumb (1970).

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