So the crumbs showed up yesterday in the downsizing effort at The Farm. Many were unseen for several years. There was the Marylin Monroe collection, all sorts of gimcracks and gee-jaws.There was enough of her to sequester in her own stack down in the garage to help the estate auction team when they arrive at the end of the month. Other things that had been together, then separated for easier stacking, came together. Some of them completely forgotten.

Which was the issue with the Crumb stuff. First experience was long ago, in Ann Arbor, MI, when Crumb was the hero of the hippie art age. Some background might help:

Robert Dennis Crumb is an American cartoonist and musician known best as ‘R. Crumb.’ His work turned up yesterday in the downsizing drill. Right now, it is the “sorting” phase of the junk piled up in the garage into the various stacks. One large one is reserved for Pete Elliot, the auctioneer over in Madison. Then there is the “Kids” stack, whether they want it or not. They will have to throw it out. Then there is the “Military Junk” pile that includes an eclectic assortment of bayonets, helmets, swords, web gear, WWII uniforms, relics from the Civil and First Big One.

Crumb was something special, and the three pieces are an incomplete glimpse of his portfolio. they were purchased bought in retrospect, so they have a certain intrinsic value detached from the comic world, and the Mr. Natural and “Keep on Truckin'” anthem he created. His stuff “displays a nostalgia for American folk culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and satire of contemporary American culture.” Crumb was prolific and his drawings helped define an age.

That is the direct connection between all of us. In A2, we were living around the corner from one of the campus drug stores that stocked the comics. While it is possible the one in a frame here at The Farm was a first printing, there were six other releases over the years. Despair was viewed later as the wellspring source of Robert Crumb’s existential diatribe about dramatic transition in modern life in America.

We college students figured we were in the same boat. We lived at 1016 East University, and “Despair” was in a stack on one of the tables for a year or more, kept neat, and probably with “Fantastic Four #1” which may be worth a few bucks. It was what attracted interest when seen years after and we had it framed nicely to go along with a poster-sized edition of the cover which eventually emerged from the framed art stacks in the garage.

Despair is certainly one of Robert Crumb’s most popular editions, seven printings in about seven years. It’s also got one of the most enduring, effective comic covers in history. “Why bother?” indeed. Truly a mantra for the modern age. We will have to look and see if this one is numbered or just the junk print.

Crumb’s career was taking off almost directly in line with our collective college education. Starting in 1967, had ventured on to San Francisco, right there in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and perfectly paired with the rising counterculture movement. “Fritz the Cat,” and Mr. Natural may be the ones remembered best. They featured a life approach that regardless of how imposing the circumstance, staggering forward would prove successful. His “Keep on Truckin” theme became a mantra for going forward. Or somewhere.

The crumb of Crumb (above) is here, numbered and signed. The provenance was a celebration of the album cover for Janice’s marvelous record “Cheap Thrills.” There was controversy about it, of course, but was a splendid example of the beginning of some social combat issues going on now.

Wish we had this one:

By the time it appeared, Crumb was a minor cult hero. He’d left San Francisco in 1967 (junior year in high school for some of us), after an attempt on his life by his spouse. He wound up in New York, where his cartoons found acceptance in the famed East Village Other. Returning to San Francisco, he contributed to the first number of Zap Comix and immediately became an underground sensation. When he was offered the Cheap Thrills jacket, Crumb said, “Yeah, I’ll do your album cover, but the only thing is, when I meet Janis, I want to be able to pinch her {Redacted}.”

“Why, we don’t know about that,” they said, but several months later, after the album release, they were all at a party. When Janis was introduced to Crumb, “he grabbed her {Redacted},” it was said “She just looked at him and said, ‘Oh honey!’ and R. Crumb was delighted.”

Here is what research says: “The following year, at the opening of the New Comix Show in Berkeley, Janis and Crumb posed for photographers, kissing each other passionately. The woman on the Cheap Thrills jacket is Crumb’s idealization of Janis as the ultimate hippie chick, with proud, ripe buttocks and jutting {Redacted}.”

Robert Crumb and his wife Aline currently live in the South of France. He was subject of a recent NYT feature and has a secure legacy as a sign of his times. They appreciate him in a EU now riddled in analogous crisis to the one he left in America. Awards? They include nominations from Angoulême Grand Prix and the Harvey Special Award for Humor. The reason for this research? Evaluating some of Crumbs crumbs. We figure that there will be a spark of interest when he passes, like us, and are trying to figure the market. Plus whether we will be on the proper side of it.

He is 79, so you never can tell. But seeing him emerge from the downsizing pile was pure entertainment.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
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