Robert Crumb, the icon­ic, found­ing fig­ure of the under­ground and alter­na­tive comix scene, began his career as the ulti­mate out­sider. “I was so alien­at­ed when I was young that draw­ing was like my only con­nec­tion to soci­ety,” he says in the video inter­view above from the Louisiana Chan­nel, “the only thing I could see that was gonna save me from a real­ly dis­mal fate of god knows what.” He had no social skills and no oth­er abil­i­ties to speak of. He was debil­i­tat­ed by self-doubt yet inflat­ed by the buoy­ant ego of the lone artist deter­mined to “make [his] mark on the world.”

What Crumb calls his “two sides” have nev­er been rec­on­ciled, although he has left behind cer­tain racial car­i­ca­tures in more recent work and he claims, in a recent inter­view with Nad­ja Sayej, that he is “no longer a slave to a rag­ing libido.” But his shame­less indul­gence in exag­ger­at­ed stereo­types was always a blunt instru­ment that both pulled read­ers in and pushed them away from the more sub­tle satire and pathos in his comics. As an edi­tor at a Lon­don gallery put it, “there’s some­thing irrec­on­cil­able at the heart of the work that doesn’t resolve towards a sin­gle vision of beau­ty.”

Crumb’s comics are “about seduc­tion and repul­sion. You are drawn into the work and you are judg­ing your­self as you look at it.” We are also judg­ing the artist. Crumb has been called racist, misog­y­nist, a bit­ter, hate­ful lon­er with a nihilis­tic streak five miles wide. These descrip­tions hap­pen to apply to a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of con­vict­ed and poten­tial ter­ror­ist killers these days, the very peo­ple we seek to mar­gin­al­ize from pub­lic dis­course with hate speech laws and pub­lic sham­ing and shun­ning.

As you might expect, Crumb has no tol­er­ance for such things as fall under the head­ing “polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness.” Sup­press­ing art that offends “can even lead to cen­so­r­i­al poli­cies in the gov­ern­ment,” he says, defend­ing the rights of the artist to say what­ev­er they deem nec­es­sary. His work, he says, even at its most extreme, was nec­es­sary. It saved his life. “The art­work I did that used those images and expressed those kinds of feel­ings, I stand by it…. I still think that’s some­thing that need­ed to be said and need­ed to be done…. It prob­a­bly hurts some people’s feel­ings to see those images, but still, I had to put it out there.”

Some of Crum­b’s imagery is hard to defend, such as his use of black­face imagery from the 1920s and 30s, and his some­times vio­lent objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women, from the point of view of char­ac­ters near­ly impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate from their cre­ator. But why, if his art is con­fes­sion­al, should he not con­fess? In so doing, he reveals not only his own teem­ing desires. Crumb illus­trat­ed the male hip­pie uncon­scious as well as his own.

After start­ing a rel­a­tive mass move­ment in under­ground comix in the 60s (and becom­ing a reluc­tant leg­end for “Keep on Truckin’”), he says, “I decid­ed I don’t want to be America’s best-loved hip­pie car­toon­ist. I don’t want that role. So I’ll just be hon­est about who I am, and the weird­ness, and take my chances.” Crumb’s can­dor hap­pened to lay bare many of the atti­tudes he observed not only in him­self but in the denizens of the San Fran­cis­co scene, as he told Jacques Hyza­gi in a very reveal­ing Observ­er inter­view (which prompt­ed a very bit­ter feud between the two).

The hip­pie cul­ture of Haight-Ash­bury, where it all start­ed for me, was full of men doing noth­ing all day and expect­ing women to bring them food. The ‘chick’ had to pro­vide a home for them, cook meals for them, even pay the rent. It was still very much ingrained from the ear­li­er patri­ar­chal men­tal­i­ty of our fathers, except that our fathers, gen­er­al­ly, were providers. Free love meant free sex and food for men. Sure, women enjoyed it, too, and had a lot of sex, but then they served men. Even among left-wing polit­i­cal groups, women were always rel­e­gat­ed to sec­re­tar­i­al, menial jobs. We were all on LSD, so it took a few years for the smoke to dis­si­pate and for women to real­ize what a raw deal they were get­ting with the ne’er-do-well hip­pie male. 

Do we see in Crumb’s work, in which burly, huge-calved women dom­i­nate weak-willed men, a cel­e­bra­tion or a con­dem­na­tion of these atti­tudes? We can say, “it’s com­pli­cat­ed,” which sounds like a cop out, or we can go back to the source. Hear Crumb him­self explain his work, as a prod­uct of two war­ring selves and a need to draw him­self into the world with­out hold­ing any­thing back. He showed oth­er artists and writ­ers who were also “born weird,” as he says, that they could tell their sto­ries entire­ly their own way too.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

R. Crumb Illus­trates Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

The Con­fes­sions of Robert Crumb: A Por­trait Script­ed by the Under­ground Comics Leg­end Him­self (1987)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Med­i­ta­tion and art have an ancient, inter­twined his­to­ry in Chi­na, where the begin­nings of Chan Bud­dhism are insep­a­ra­ble from land­scape paint­ing. In Japan, Zen art has con­sti­tut­ed “a prac­tice in appre­ci­at­ing sim­plic­i­ty,” of dis­ap­pear­ing into the cre­ative act, cul­ti­vat­ing degrees of ego­less­ness that allow an artist’s move­ments to become spon­ta­neous and unham­pered by sec­ond guess­es. The “first Japan­ese artists to work in [ink],” notes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, “were Zen monks who paint­ed in a quick and evoca­tive man­ner.” They passed their tech­niques, and their wis­dom, on to their stu­dents.

Per­haps the clos­est ana­logue to this tra­di­tion in the west is com­ic art. Artist Ted Gula has worked with comics leg­ends Frank Frazetta and Moe­bius and drawn for Dis­ney, Mar­vel, and DC. As a child, he watched Jack Kir­by work. “He wouldn’t speak,” says Gula. “He’d be in a trance…. The pen­cil would hit the paper and it wouldn’t stop until the page was com­plete, like it poured out.” How is that pos­si­ble? Gula asked him­self, aston­ished. Kir­by had dis­ap­peared into the work. There were no pre­lim­i­nary sketch­es or rough indi­ca­tors. He would draw an entire book like that, Gula says in the video above from Proko.

Say what you will about the con­tent of Kirby’s work—superhero comics aren’t to everyone’s lik­ing. But no dis­taste for the nature of his sto­ry­telling dimin­ish­es Kirby’s attain­ment of a pure­ly extem­po­ra­ne­ous method he seems nev­er to have explained to Gula in words. Lat­er, how­ev­er, while work­ing with Moe­bius, Gula says, he learned the tech­nique of “auto­mat­ic draw­ing.” Demon­strat­ing it for us above, Gula describes a way of draw­ing that shares much in com­mon with oth­er med­i­ta­tive visu­al art tra­di­tions.

“It’s all doing very organ­ic shapes,” he says, show­ing us how to “draw your mind’s eye. This takes your mind, and your mind’s eye, to a place that nor­mal­ly is unex­plored, and it can’t help but enhance your whole view of your abil­i­ty.” The ego must step aside, exec­u­tive func­tion­ing isn’t need­ed here. “I have no idea,” Gula says, “it’s all just hap­pen­ing on its own.” Moe­bius explained it as “just let­ting my mind relax” and Gula has observed sim­i­lar prac­tices among all the artists he’s worked with.

Gula describes auto­mat­ic draw­ing as a nat­ur­al process for the artist’s mind and hands. The inter­view­er, artist and teacher Sam Prokopenko, also men­tions Kore­an artist Kim Jung Gi in their inter­view, who does “amaz­ing­ly accu­rate draw­ings from his mem­o­ry with­out any con­struc­tion lines,” as Prokopenko says above, in a video from his “12 Days of Proko” series, which inter­views well-known artists about their tech­niques. What’s Kim Jung Gi’s secret? Is he pos­sessed of a super­hu­man, pho­to­graph­ic mem­o­ry? No, he tells Prokopenko.

The secret to becom­ing ful­ly immersed in the work—one that sure­ly goes for so many pur­suits, both cre­ative and athletic—is just to do it: over and over and over and over and over again. (To many people’s dis­ap­point­ment, this also seems to be the secret of med­i­ta­tion.) In Kim Jung Gi’s case, “of course, some part of it is a tal­ent he was born with, but we can’t over­look how much that tal­ent was devel­oped.” We need no expert tal­ent, either innate or devel­oped, to get start­ed. Auto­mat­ic draw­ing seems to require a beginner’s mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moe­bius Gives 18 Wis­dom-Filled Tips to Aspir­ing Artists

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

In Search of Mœbius: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to the Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness