To view a selection of art from the book, check out our slideshow. I spoke with Crumb about trading records for art, Janis Joplin’s fatal quirks, and getting the hell out of the United States.
This week WW Norton releases The Complete Record Cover Collection, a compendium of Crumb’s greatest music cartoons and album covers. He began drawing album covers and cartoon portraits of musicians while living in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during the 1960s, and has since created an extensive portfolio of illustrations of classic rock figures like Janis Joplin, his old blues heroes, and his own band. Crumb himself is an accomplished banjo player, and made a splash in the 1970s underground folk music scene with his Cheap Suit Serenaders. He’s a die-hard collector of 78 rpm records from the likes of Memphis Minnie and Robert Johnson. Maus creator Art Spiegelman has called him “a monolithic presence, who rewrote the rules of what comics are.”īut behind the overt sexuality and anti-establishment riffs that characterize Crumb’s comics, his muse has always been old-timey American blues. “But the original text is so strange by itself you don’t have to satirize it.”) In 1991, Crumb was inducted into the prestigious Will Eisner Hall of Fame. (“First I was gonna make a satire,” he told me. Natural, was the subject of a Terry Zwigoff documentary, and even illustrated the book of Genesis. Over his nearly lifelong career, this icon of 1960s underground comics has created beloved characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. The renowned cartoonist and American expat lives somewhere in the south of France, but when I call him to talk about his latest book, he steadfastly refuses to tell me where: “I don’t want people coming here looking for me,” he says, “so I don’t tell the name of this town.” He won’t elaborate on whom he might be hiding from, but it’s easy to believe that Crumb, 68, has a cult following.
#R crumb blues free#
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