![]() ![]() I came here when I was nineteen after I left home to look for a job and to live with my friend Marty Pahls, and I was here like two weeks and got a job with American Greetings doing color separations. ![]() I was here off and on for three or four years. Like I get a lot of ego build-up that way, but Cleveland’s a big dumb town. Like in Chicago, Milwaukee, or Detroit or Denver or a lot of other towns, I can get a lot of attention from people who appreciate artists. Like you can get right down to basics here or something. In other ways I really like Cleveland, ya know? It’s like the lowest common denominator or something. Of all the big cities I’ve been in, Cleveland’s about the deadest or something. Here’s a selection of Crumb’s remarks on his time on Ohio’s northeastern shore: It seems that the San Francisco trip did, finally, put an end to Crumb’s status as a Cleveland resident, although he notably returned to the city for a while in 1971, during which time he met up with Pekar again. While he was in San Francisco he contributed to American Greetings by mail. During the same year, the Lakeview Center for the Arts and Sciences in Cleveland put on a show dedicated to his works. In May 1967 Crumb headed for San Francisco, where he made inroads in the underground comix scene and established his reputation once and for all. ![]() He worked for the Topps trading card company for a couple of months and then returned to Cleveland.įrom November 1965 to April 1966 he was in Chicago before once again returning to Cleveland. In August of the same year he went to New York to work on a magazine called Help!, which folded as soon as he got there. In June 1965 he had his first truly formative experience with LSD, which messed up his head quite badly for several months (an event for which his fans are eternally grateful, of course). Around the same time he took a sort of sabbatical and visited Europe for several months with his wife, Dana. By the autumn of the next year he was assigned to the Hi-Brow cards division. ![]() (Of course, it was also where he met Harvey Pekar, with whom he collaborated fruitfully.)Ĭrumb started working at American Greetings in 1962 at the age of 19. His boss there was a man named Tom Wilson, who created Ziggy-which some of Crumb’s work at American Greetings distinctly resembled.Ĭrumb spent significant time in Cleveland, and while he had and has some affection for the place, he seems to have spent most of his stint there trying to get out. Unsurprisingly, a temperament as touchy as Crumb’s was seldom discerned to be content working for a corporation dedicated to transmitting saccharine and ingratiating content to the great middle class, but the experience did shape Crumb’s art in significant ways-as the artist himself grumpily acknowledged. Natural and Flakey Foont, he would still draw a paycheck from American Greetings into the 1970s. contributing to Zap Comics and inventing many of his characters such as Mr. Like many others, Crumb, who entered the world in 1943, had an apprenticeship period in his late teens and early twenties, and in Crumb’s case he kept body and soul together primarily for the American Greetings company in Cleveland, Ohio, even while he was traveling widely-to Europe, to New York, to Chicago, to San Francisco-even while he was infiltrating and in some measure helping create the underground comics tradition mostly associated with the West Coast, even while he was famously having his mind expanded with some high-octane LSD-25 (as it was called at the time) and even while he creating ground-breaking narratives of questionable taste involving sex and race. Of all the cartoonists who emerged after the syndication/dimestore period of the first half of the twentieth century, it’s safe to say that none of them has so consistently produced work that is as widely familiar and as preternaturally compelling. Crumb), whose exquisite and wide-ranging oeuvre is known the world over for its boisterous use of language, its festering misanthropy, its juvenile instinct for humor, its confident crosshatching, its daring deployment of lettering, its affinity for kink, and much else besides. The prevailing genius of American comix (as opposed to “comics”) during the twentieth century has long since been acknowledged to be Robert Crumb (sometimes R. ![]()
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