Why R. Crumb Worked With a Biographer

 

 "Unlike paintings or novels, comics hit the beholder with a double whammy of visual and verbal expression, and the result can electrify as swiftly as it can alienate. Over the decades, many have been alienated by Crumb, whose Dürer-level hand is attached to a mind that rages and leers as often as it probes and theorizes.

Part of Nadel’s motivation, he said, was to contextualize a figure who had zigzagged from the margins to the mainstream and back. “There was this idea that Crumb was a bad boy breaking all the rules of the form,” he said. “Actually he’s a traditionalist who figured out a way to use the language of comics to say entirely new things — to deal with adulthood in America in a frank and confrontational way, while maintaining unbelievable formal rigor.”

To write the book, Nadel submerged himself in a colossal archive. Because Crumb doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, he reads email on printouts provided by his assistant, Maggie. He then composes a response by hand, which Maggie types and sends. Hard copies of both messages are then filed in boxes. Nadel estimated that he had read between 3,000 and 4,000 pages of correspondence alone.

“You buried me in paper,” Nadel said over coffee and French fries. “I didn’t know how I’d swim through it all.”

 READ THE INTERVIEW BY MOLLY YOUNG