Robert Crumb
Robert Crumb
Robert Dennis Crumbis an American cartoonist and musician who often signs his work R. Crumb. His work displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth30 August 1943
CityPhiladelphia, PA
CountryUnited States of America
artistic charles comics visionary
We were always drawing comics as kids. My brother Charles made me draw comics. I was very much under his domination. He was actually a much stronger artistic visionary than I was.
american-artist interest type
I have always had an abiding interest in that type of female anatomy.
bunch pictures power text
Pictures have a lot more power than text. Text is just a bunch of little symbols. You have to actually read it and imagine it, and even that can be censored. With pictures, it's a lot more immediate.
backed bastards became drove mass moved sexual sinister
I moved further and further away from mass entertainment. The sexual element became increasingly sinister and bizarre. Don't blame me! The bastards drove me to it! They all backed off after that!
guys looking money somebody spend time
I oughta be rich. But, you know, if you don't spend all your time looking after money, somebody else will. The guys who look after money, they're the ones who get the money.
best good hard ink line paper surface western
I use the old Strathmore vellum surface paper, which is the best paper you can get in the Western world for ink line drawing. It has a good, hard surface.
aspect call interested knowledge nature pursuing seeking somebody understanding
I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality.
brief catholic prayers saying spending stuff time
In my midteens I went through a brief stage of religious fanaticism, but it was very much about just saying prayers and stuff like that, reciting rosaries and spending a lot of time on that kind of Catholic ritual.
heroic journalist
There's many heroic underappreciated investigative journalists.
vigor
Your vigor for life appalls me.
drawing way i-can
Drawing is a way for me to articulate things inside myself that I can't otherwise grasp.
outsiders
I'm an outsider. I will always be an outsider.
humanity kind old-music
When I listen to old music, that's one of the few times that I actually have a kind of love for humanity.
depressing reality people
They were just snapshots, nothing special, nothing particularly artistic. They were used for utility purposes. (On photographs of mundane streetscapes he had Stanley Something-or-other take in Sacramento in 1988 to serve as backgrounds to his cartoons. People don't draw it, all this crap, people don't focus attention on it because it's ugly, it's bleak, it's depressing... But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life. )