Genesis has been interpreted and reinterpreted down the ages. Crumb’s visions of highly crafted schoolboy-ish smut are easily transferable to less ‘low brow’ subjects - as it has been in works including his comic book biography of Franz Kafka and his latest illustrated book, The Book of Genesis. Apart from his sheer boy-like zeal to depict entangled bodies in different acts of copulative violence, creations like Mr Natural, a shaggy-bearded man who looks like a cross between God and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Felix the Cat, a hormonally-overdriven pussy-loving feline, are the stuff of unreconstructed innocence. To seek ‘high art’ comparisons with Crumb’s works is to totally miss the point. His clear-inked depictions of bare-breasted women with gigantic buttocks and redwood thighs in strange, unnatural unions with satirical, anatomically impossible smaller men are not from the same world as the one inhabited by the high art of ‘shock’ artists like Yoko Ono or Damien Hirst. In Crumb’s underground comic art - that has only recently been airlifted to the status of ‘gallery art’ - what I value most is his searing, lyrical, anti-avant garde force of subversion. American-cartoonist-Robert-Crumb-shows-one-of-his-paintings-at-the-Museum-Ludwig-in-Cologne-Germany-in-this-file-photo-AFP-Torsten-Silz I don’t come to comic conferences,” Crumb paradoxically started off.Īs he answered a question about his ‘inspirations’ - Mad magazine founding editor Harvey Kutzman, 50s Disney comics artist Carl Barks, 19th century caricaturist (and creator of the modern version of Santa Claus) Thomas Nast, and 18th century political cartoonist James Gillray - I recalled why I’m so enamoured of Crumb. He actually looked more like a disgruntled potato farmer (a bearded version of the farmer holding a pitchfork in Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic) than the cultural iconoclast he is. Crumb, looking his gangly best in a suit at least one size too big, wearing thick aquarium glasses and a Yorkshire cap (the kind that retired bureaucrats wear to the Delhi Gymkhana in winter), looked exactly how I thought he would look: a posterboy misanthrope who would like to be anywhere but ‘here’. The 68-year-old artist is in Delhi attending Comic Con India - the country’s biggest comic book convention - along with his fellow comic book artist-wife Aline. But as I waited with a group of journalists at the Indian International Centre - a venue so distinctly distant from the sex-crazed, drug-induced, physically and mentally unhinged world of Crumb’s comic universe that it was kind of scary - all the smart questions that I had planned to ask evaporated. The prospect of meeting Robert Crumb, comic book artist extraordinaire, was exciting enough.
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