Adult-comic legend's work comes to Seattle

Ideally, there would be big-legged girls to piggyback visitors through "R. Crumb's Underground."

Those girls are just one of the many obsessions of the preeminent underground cartoonist festooning the walls of the Frye Art Museum now through April 27. Mr. Natural, Devil Girl, Angelfood McSpade, Fritz the Cat, Crumb's loathsome self-depiction — more than 150 familiar and rare images are on display from Robert Crumb's four-decade career of tapping his id to create uncomfortably hilarious and truthful adult comics. Already a legend among comics fans for his pioneering work, he became a household name after director Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary about him, "Crumb." It's fitting that Seattle is the site of his most comprehensive U.S. exhibition, since it's also home to the largest publisher of his work, Fantagraphics — whose impressive output includes 17 volumes of "The Complete Crumb Comics" and 10 of the "R. Crumb Sketchbook." (Complementing the Frye show is "Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution,"at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery in Georgetown.)

The misanthropic self-described social reject, now 64, is at his home in the south of France, so I strolled through his filth with Robin Held, the museum's chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections.

Q: Will Crumb be appearing here?

A: No.

Q: Have you spoken with him about the exhibit?

A: No. He's not very interested in doing this. He goes in and out. He sort of authorizes exhibitions. His relationship with Todd (Hignite, the exhibition's curator) was the genesis of this show.

Q: Looking around at all of this, I see explicit perversion, drug use, fetishism, misanthropy ... Forget the old masters! This is educational.

A: Well, but the old masters were doing this kind of work, too. I mean those images by male artists of inert females and how you can finally overpower them, or sexual images of women created for other male viewers. It's a long, long history of that in art.

Q: Crumb said psychedelic drugs broke him out of his social programming, and that he made his most popular characters on acid in the mid-'60s. Now he's fabulously successful and able to live in the south of France. What's the message for today's youth?

A: I'm not sure how to answer that. Because a lot of what you just went into was a lot of mythology about Crumb.

Q: No, it's straight out of his mouth.

A: Well I know, as a lot of things are, because he also says he went on a really bad trip and never took drugs again.

Q: It seems like the message isn't exactly "Just say no."

A: Oh no, the message is not "Just say no." The influence of drugs on his work, it doesn't seem to me like something like William Burroughs — where William Burroughs took heroin his whole life, and for him it was part of his creative work to be in that altered state. I don't get that sense about Crumb the same way.

Q: Crumb hates the establishment, hates commodification. And now he's the subject of this museum exhibit. (Note: There's plenty of merchandise for sale in the gift shop, too.) Irony, huh?

A: Well, I think everything you can say about him, you can also say the opposite. He would say the opposite. He's pretty contrarian. Just at the point you want to construct him as a really countercultural guy, he'll turn into the family man. And just as soon as soon as you construct him as a family man, he wants to paint himself as this sort of outlaw counterculture guy.

Q: Let me read you something he wrote: "Curators and gallery people are not oriented toward cartoons, comics or commercial art. That world is quite alien to them. Now, through complex circumstances, they have decided that I am somebody worth promoting and displaying in galleries and museums. My work has some value economically, and then, too, I've been around a long time. Reputable critics have praised my work, all of which has validated me to some degree to the museum and gallery people. Otherwise I'm not sure that they really appreciate what my work is all about. I'm not sure that they really know what they're looking at."

What do you think of that?

A: What you see here are original drawings and storyboards ... [that's] not stuff that would end up in art museums, anyway. But that's why we made an attempt to bring the comics here, too, because the real experience is really about you and that sweaty comic book in front of your face, right? And what you're reading on the couch or reading in the tub or reading on the bus. So, in a way, this is not the art. That's the art.

But this gives people one way in. I mean, having it in frames and behind glass and having these be precious objects, no, that isn't it. But it is a way for some audiences to get at the work he does. It's hard to draw that really fine line, because he's been showing — when did he start doing work? The stuff he was doing in his bedroom was 1960, right? He started showing it publicly not only in the comic books in the late '60s, he was in gallery exhibitions in the '70s and he was in museum shows starting in 1983.

Q: So he's a big hypocrite.

A: No, I just think he plays both sides of the coin.

Q: I think he hates everyone, including himself.

A: I think that's probably fair.

Q: What do you think makes him an important artist?

A: I think his amazing draftsmanship in all kinds of styles has been influential to many, many, many artists. And he can get an economy of line and shade at these very specific figures, very specific actions, very specific preoccupations. He's really, really good at what he does, and the images are incredibly powerful.

Q: What's your favorite piece in the exhibit?

A: I'm really, really fond of the Strong Girl. I really like the strong girls, and how they're about his fears and fantasies and also about the power of those women over him and trying to best him. Yeah, big butts and power and Strong Girls.

Q: Bearing that in mind, can I have a piggyback?

A: Whoa, I think you're bigger than me. I'm not quite a Strong Girl. (Laughs.) I'll give you one if you give me one.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com