Crumb

The documentary Crumb delves even deeper into the mind and life of Robert Crumb, which is pretty impressive given how personal his comics are. Crumb is really very transparent in conversation and his hatred for most of humanity shows through. Even though he is so critically acclaimed he still doesn't really fit into his audience. He really doesn't fit in anywhere. Most people seems to treat him more as a peculiar specimen to be wondered at than to actually genuinely interact with. I think this is why Crumb says that he doesn't think that he has ever really been in love. People his whole life, even as he is famous, treat him like a kaleidoscope. They only look and pay attention to him to see the raw deep part of humanity that they are afraid to dig and see inside themselves.

In most families, Crumb would probably be the outcast or the odd one out, but out of the Crumnb family the documentary shows he seems to be the most well off. In fact, a lot of this documentary focuses on his older brother Charles. Much of the documentary seems to talk about the lost potential of Charles Crumb. Robert talks about how Charles was more clever and funny than he was when they were kids and was the head of their family comic club, but even though Charles seemed to be the one destined to be more successful he became a recluse. He became victim of his own depression and hatred of humanity and became a recluse that was jealous of Robert to the point of homicidal thoughts. In my opinion, if Charles had a similar liberating experience as Robert did with the LSD he might have been more functional. Robert had the benefit of being able to let out all of his pent up feelings and frustrations through comics, completely uncensored, which I really think is the only thing that kept him from the same fate as Charles.

Crumb admits that while a lot of people found his cartoons hilarious he initially found them nightmarish. In one of the interviews with one of his past girlfriends she talks about how she thought that he was kidding about being turned on by the things he drew and Crumb laughs and says he's not kidding around. I think that is why Crumb initially found his work horrifying because he was forced to confront his subconscious desires head on and accept that he thought of these things himself, which of most are considered deeply disturbing or taboo by most of society. Confronting your own true desires is scary and I think that is what is at the heart of his work. It's all about coming to terms with your own desires, prejudices, and fears in a society that tries to oppresses them so vehemently.

Tits and Clits and Dicks, OH MY!

The openness and truth of these underground comics are astounding. The artists are telling about their deepest insecurities, intimate fantasies, and fears that really get to the core of what it is to struggle with human urges in a cloistered society. Artists, or people who just had something to say, were using these comics to create a dialogue about insecurities and sex in a society that didn't want to talk about it or even acknowledge it. Even today in American society people are terrified of talking about sex and find these kinds of comics 'lewd' and 'inappropriate'. Most people are scared of their own sexuality, but these women and men who were drawing anything and everything certainly weren't, or at least weren't afraid to talk about their fears. From the comics I read it seems like the women authors tended towards embracing their sexuality and expressing frustrations towards men's and society's attitudes toward women who like sex while the male authors focused more on their fantasies, insecurities around women, and fear of them.

A lot of these comics are laugh out loud hilarious, especially from a female perspective, because they play up the ridiculous expectations of women to be 'pure' and 'proper' and completely free of any sexual wanting. One story in particular shows a woman who becomes obsessed with sex, sells drugs to get money for prostitutes, and in the end she is lead onto the righteous path, but is shown pretty boozed up as the antidote. The lines in it are just perfect, such as the one pictured above, "My God! What'll I do with this vagina!!" They really push the satire with the dialogue and extremes that she goes to in order to get off. Some of these comics are very dark though, dealing with rape. While it is clear that many of these authors did not have much technical artistic training the line quality and mark making that is used in each respective story really seems to match the tone of the story. Satirical stories use traditional styles, romantic stories use smooth swooshing lines, and dark stories use frantic small marks and splotches. Even though they weren't trained, they clearly had a lot of sensibility as to what aesthetic would best support their story. In fact, I really enjoy that many of these are crude because they reflect the raw emotion instinct and lust that these comics are talking about. There is nothing clean about these comics, so the lines shouldn't be clean either.

If you can't appreciate the hilarious sexual antics, at least you can appreciate that these women and men opened up comics and showed that you can do anything with them and that an adult audience was definitely out there waiting to be catered to. One of Crumb's stories in The Book of Mr. Natural actually had a character breaking the fourth wall and saying 'hey look, I could never do this in real life, but I'm in a comic so I can do what I want!'. By really pushing the envelope and telling stories on the border of what is acceptable in society it showed other artists that anything can be explored in this medium, and that it was definitely not just for kids.

Blankets

Blankets is so relatable it's painful. Thompson makes you relive all the pain and pleasure of your childhood through his own brave and truthful true story. But the reason it hits so hard is not because of the dialogue or beautifully rendered sad eyes or even that these issues are universal. It's because Thompson knows what to draw, and it's not the action. He doesn't just draw them having sex for the first time. He draws how having sex for the first time feels. He visualizes ecstasy in swirls and halos instead of simply showing the act. He takes full advantage of the medium by using drawing to show something you can't tangibly touch or see in real life, feelings. That's why Blankets is so good. There have been a million stories and tales of first love and the trials of growing up, but Blankets shows what is happening inside while all of these events are happening. That is what makes this so relatable. While the events of his story may not have happened to you exactly in the same way it still is relatable because it's not the details that matter. It's the raw emotion associated with it that we have all felt or will feel. Thompson so expertly captures those feelings of lust, love, fear, doubt, and anger and draws them how they feel, not the exaggerated fake facial expressions we associate them with, but simple jagged lines and swooshes he is able to reflect what raw feeling really is.

Even though his line is smooth and practiced, the feelings are raw. I relate to those swirls and I can feel them. They trigger memories and I think that reaction is what really gets to the heart of this work. You don't remember every little word that way said or exactly what someone was wearing because it's not about that. It's that raw emotion that stays with you. That is memory. Memories are just the ghosts of raw feelings and Thompson is able to communicate memory and raw emotion in such a true way I struggle think of a story that captures that concept better.

Face it, Archie was a Sistah.

I have no idea how I have not seen Chasing Amy until now. That being said I'm glad I saw it when I did. It seems like a film really ahead of it's time. It really reflects the progressiveness of the underground comix scene with multitude of issues it tackles including race, sexuality, identity, and relationships. When I was watching it I really felt it fit in with the dialogue that is going on today and it was interesting to watch a film that was at the start of when issues of sexual identity and it's flexibility really started being acknowledged seriously and questioned. At the time it must have been super controversial given that most of the dialogue was underground and not a prevalent discussion as it is today.

I found Amy to be a very intriguing creature. Today the character Amy would probably identify as pansexual, where that term probably wasn't widely accepted then and as shown in the film there was prejudice of flexible sexuality in both homosexual and heterosexual circles. The fact that she even suffered Holden's extreme ignorance about sexuality, like saying that lesbian sex doesn't count as 'real' sex, blows my mind. Given the times though and that the majority of people probably thought more along those lines I guess it makes sense that she wouldn't just kick him to the curb immediately. Amy puts up with a lot of shit throughout her whole journey, but really sticks to it because she knows what she wants and who she is. She doesn't bend to societal pressures and listens to herself instead of others.

On a side note, I thought all the behind the scenes and view of a life of an underground comic artist was super intriguing, especially Hooper X. The fact that assumes a completely different identity for a comic that he doesn't even write to manipulate a certain demographic into buying comics is crazy. The scene with him going crazy on a crowd is just magic. All of his dialogue about Archie and Jughead being lovers was hilarious too as it showed how a lot of underground comix artists took those wholesome comics and their style and twisted it to make a commentary about sexuality and repression in a 'straight-laced and wholesome' society.

Classic Comics! Exclamation Point!

While reading these comics I was very confused to how anyone ever thought that comics would cause illiteracy. There is so much text in these older comics. Most of the panels are completely dominated by it taking up usually half of the whole panel. I think that is probably one of the biggest tells that these comics were made in the early days of the comic book. They hadn't quite gotten the balance between text and image down yet. I would imagine many of the writers were coming from pulp fiction and having a hard time writing so little and trusting in the image.

The old EC comics were extremely reminiscent of pulp fiction with the helpless young damsels and the nagging wives. The comics definitely are lacking in women and the women that are present only exist to serve or antagonize the men. One of the comics I read in a Weird Fantasy issue was actually about how people could no longer have children and so they were going to bring people from the past into the future who could still procreate, but they put the portal in a men's restroom so literally no women came through. It most likely wasn't a commentary on lack of women in comics, but still made me laugh a bit because of the connection. Another of the Weird Fantasy stories was about a man who leaves his wife and goes to space with his new lover, his assistant, who he is predictably having an affair with because love has faded in his marriage and his wife nags him constantly. He smuggles his new lover by freezing her, but drops her upon arrival and she shatters. So in this she is literally so fragile she breaks. The women are so archetypal in these comics it makes me laugh, a cynical, bitter laugh, but still a laugh at how hilariously one-dimensional and man-centered the women were characterized as back then.

In the Action Comics issue that I read it became pretty clear that the writers were trying to dictate what the reader's inner dialogue was by narrating it. For example Superman had text like 'What does the evil medicine man mean? How can Superman cause anybody's death?' and 'But how can this save the doomed hun-sha?' which were questions that didn't really need to be written, but are more the job of the reader to wonder and have part of their own inner dialogue. Overall, it seems like in the majority of these comics the writers weren't trusting in the medium. They were trying to fill in all the blanks for the readers and doing all of the work for them, which for me makes these earlier books not as enjoyable to read. While this stage of comics was definitely necessary for the evolution I'm glad that writers and artists trust more in the medium and the reader now and modern comics are less about spoon feeding information.

However, the beginning of the evolution and the start of trust in the medium to communicate story as a balance between text and image is definitely seen in Carl Barks' work. It is kinda funny to me that a comic targeted at kids achieved this balance before the more adult targeted comics that were still really struggling trying to balance text and image. It is probably because of the constraints put on kids comics to not have too many big words or a lot of text, but because of that the image is able to do it's job and text and image works for harmoniously to tell a story. The Bark's work I read was one of the duck comics, The Secret of Atlantis, where Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck get in a squabble about a debt and after lots of shenanigans end up in Atlantis. Rather than relying on text to explain everything that happens in between the panels he draws out the action and shows the reader what is happening instead of telling. He really makes all of his panels count and no action or word is filler. Everything contributes to the story, there is no fat. There is a great momentum in his work because of it and I felt immersed in the story because it was never lagging. Looking at these older comics really reveals the kind of evolution that comics has gone through, especially in regards to trust in the medium and the reader.

Krazy Kat and Krazy Love

Reading Krazy Kat actually makes me motion sick. So much is going on and so many things jump around back and forth and it's all such a great jumble that it creates actual motion when I read it. That feeling of erratic motion really helps contribute even more to the highly disorienting feeling that Krazy Kat creates. Not only are the visuals from panel to panel disorienting, but the dialogue as well. It uses a phonetic way of writing the words so that you can hear the way the characters talk and the accents they have, but it's very different from most writing that is more straightforward. It takes some getting used to, but after a while it certainly contributes to the characters and further fleshes out their personalities. The story line tends to jump back and forth or sometimes starts a story and then changes completely. For example, when suddenly the strip starts off with a stork carrying something and within two panels the story changes and the beginning has nothing to do with the rest of the panels, that is definitely intentionally trying to not make any lick of sense. 

So from my perspective the artist is trying to do everything he can possibly do to make Krazy Kat feel completely non-sensical and make you in fact feel kinda 'krazy' yourself. It seems to me that is the point of Krazy Kat; to be so nonsensical that it becomes humorous how much everything is so illogical. While you are trying so hard as a reader to make sense out of it all it becomes kind of a mad scramble that turns into mad hilarity where you feel insane for trying to make sense of something that isn't supposed to work that way. Crazy things just happen. Deal with it. It's Krazy Kat.

I would say that Krazy Kat is a kind of satire of the illogical rhythm of love and how nonsensical it is to fall in love, especially unrequited love. Most of the stories surround Krazy Kat's obsessive love with Ignatz and Ignatz's hate for Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat is in love with a mouse, which in pop culture and nature should be Krazy's enemy, so that is non-sensical in itself. He/she/it is in love with something that naturally would normally never love crazy back. So is the dilemma of unrequited love. It doesn't make sense to love someone that hates you and throws bricks at your head. But Krazy still does and so do hopelessly in love humans. But Krazy is so innocent and only sees the good in Ignatz and wants so desperately for him to love him back that he decides that the abuse is actually his way of saying he loves him. That idea is so illogical and goes against everything rational about when people hurt us, but love is so blinding that it makes people totally irrational and see things how they want. So it seems what the author is trying to say is that love just makes no sense and people in love abandon all rational thinking. Love is definitely krazy.