And various of his other works tell other people's stories and thus are fairly free of (what some people see as) the pernicious elements of Crumb's work for instance, I recommend his eight-page retelling of " The Religious Experiences of Philip K. Crumb's Kafka (first published under the title Introducing Kafka). He's also illustrated a number of Kafka stories in R. He's illustrated a lot of scripts for autobiographical comics writer Harvey Pekar - all but the most recent ones are collected in the 1996 collection Bob and Harv's Comics - and if you don't like Crumb's writing, that's a good book to read. (Fortunately for those of us who feel this way, Crumb has done a fair amount of work in collaboration. Frankly, much as I like Crumb's drawing, I'm not crazy about his writing. I don't know enough about his work to evaluate the charges of racism that are often hurled - the defense is basically that Crumb isn't racist so much as misanthropic, and that reveals itself in the way he portrays everybody - but it's there. While he is not as blatantly or over-the-topic misogynistic as fellow cartoonist Dave Sim, Crumb has often, and I think justifiably, been called misogynistic. Crumb has a certain reputation as a social critic, too, and that is also featured at its best here.Īt the same time, most of the less universally liked aspects of Crumb's work are absent. One aspect of his superb drawing is his drawing of the urban landscape - which is, of course, highlighted in this piece. Crumb is, by almost universal acclaim, one of the great draftsmen of his age. If you've never seen Crumb's work before, incidentally, this is a good piece to serve as an introduction to Crumb for a number of reasons. Here's a version done up as an animation, although I personally don't like that nearly as well. Here's all twelve panels in black and white here are the first six panels in color (and then here are the second six). It is most effective in context, however, so let me link to a few versions of the entire work. Amazing as the whole work is, it was page four that took my breath away. And Brunetti presented the comic as a four-page work.įor that matter, there really wasn't any doubt in my mind about which page, either: it was page four. (Partly this was because Brunetti's book was the first time I had ever seen the work in print, and the details of the work were simply so much clearer on a high-resolution, dead-tree screen - and more than in any other comics I can think of, in this piece it is the details that make the work.) And so I decided that a page of this work had to be included in my hundred. (I didn't check, but it looks to me like more Crumb is included than any other single artist.) I'd read it before - heck, I even had the images saved on my computer - but as sometimes happens when re-encountering great art, seeing the work in Brunetti's book made me see as if for the first time how amazing it was. (A related difficulty is that there seem to be two versions, both color and black and white - both done by Crumb, so far as I can tell.)įrankly, a good argument could be made that Crumb's "Short History of America" is one of those comics for which 'page' is not the relevant unit of analysis, and thus ineligible for this series.īut in the early stages of thinking about this series, I happened to check out Ivan Brunetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories, in which this work (along with a very generous selection of other Crumb works, both on his own and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar) is presented. This 12-panel work has been presented in many different formats: you can buy it from the official Crumb site as a single-page poster it was likewise presented as a single page in The Complete Crumb Volume 17 (at a size so small as to be nearly illegible) several web sites have presented it as an animation the Guardian presented it in two parts and so forth. The difficulty here is deciding what counts as a 'page'. Links to: an introduction to the series an index of posts by creator an index of posts by title. Third of a series of posts about 100 great comics pages.
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