The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book (Kitchen Sink Press Book for Back Bay Books)
Category: Books,Comics & Graphic Novels,Graphic Novels
The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book (Kitchen Sink Press Book for Back Bay Books) Details
About the Author Robert Crumb was born in 1943 in Philadelphia. After a period drawing greeting cards, he began to work with MAD creator Harvey Kurtzman on his new humor magazine, Help! After Help! folded, Crumb heard the siren song of the Summer of Love and moved to San Francisco in 1967. He began drawing LSD-influenced comics for various underground newspapers, including The East Village Other and Yarrowstalks. In 1968, the first issue of Zap Comix was published and Crumb hawked copies from a baby carriage in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Zap Comix was a success and attracted the attention of other artists, including S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Rick Griffin, all of whom joined Zap with issue 2. Crumb's comics mixed a nostalgia for comics' rich history with a psychedelic exuberance. Crumb produced many more comics in the late sixties and early seventies, including Despair, Motor City, Big Ass Comics, Home Grown Funnies, People's Comix, and Your Hytone Comics, as well as the books Head Comix and Fritz the Cat. Pursued by hustling businessmen who wanted to merchandise his characters Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat, Crumb retreated to rural California. In 1981, Crumb started Weirdo, a new anthology magazine featuring his own new work, the comics of a new generation of young cartoonists, and intriguingly strange work by certifiable "outsider" cartoonists. At the same time, Crumb drew several issues of a new solo comic book, Hup. In 1995, Crumb was the subject of an award-winning film biography, Crumb. Recent books and comics include Kafka, Waiting for Food, and Self-Loathing. Crumb lives in France with his wife, the artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, and their daughter. Read more
Reviews
I had always avoided this book because the title lead me to believe it was just an art book that didn't have any of Crumb's comics in it. Then I finally realized it's a huge book mostly made up of Crumb's comics with some first rate sketchbook drawings and even sketchbook comics, some of which are just as entertaining as his published comics. In addition to this, it's split up into chapters and each chapter features an introduction by Crumb where he pretty much narrates his own life. They did a really good job selecting which comics to put in here. They steered clear of printing a lot of Crumb's earliest (pre-68) stuff and printed a lot of his later work (late 70s-mid 90s),which are not only Crumb's best comics, but some of the best comics ever made, IMO. And thankfully, they hardly printed any of his Fritz the Cat stuff, which might be some of his most well known work, but deifinitely his weakest. I should also mention that a lot of the comics have been colored for this book. I thought that the coloring would look really bad, but I think it actually looks really good and adds to the comics.Anyway, if you're like me and you like Crumb, but you're not really sure which one of his books to pick up, get this one.
