Comics of R. Crumb

Contributions by José Alaniz Ian Blechschmidt Paul Fisher Davies Zanne Domoney-Lyttle David Huxley Lynn Marie Kutch Julian Lawrence Liliana Milkova Stiliana Milkova Kim A. Munson Jason S. Polley Paul Sheehan Clarence Burton Sheffield Jr. and Daniel Worden <p/> From his work on underground comix like Zap and Weirdo to his cultural prominence R. Crumb is one of the most renowned comics artists in the medium's history. His work beginning in the 1960s ranges provocatively and controversially over major moments tensions and ideas in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries from the counterculture and the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement to racial politics and sexual liberation. <p/>While Crumb's early work refined the parodic over-the-top and sexually explicit styles we associate with underground comix he also pioneered the comics memoir through his own autobiographical and confessional comics as well as in his collaborations. More recently Crumb has turned to long-form book-length works such as his acclaimed Book of Genesis and Kafka. Over the long arc of his career Crumb has shaped the conventions of underground and alternative comics autobiographical comics and the graphic novel. And through his involvement in music animation and documentary film projects Crumb is a widely recognized persona an artist who has defined the vocation of the cartoonist in a widely influential way. <p/> The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum is a groundbreaking collection on the work of a pioneer of underground comix and a fixture of comics culture. Ranging from art history and literary studies to environmental studies and religious history the essays included in this volume cast Crumb's work as formally sophisticated and complex in its representations of gender sexuality race politics and history while also charting Crumb's role in underground comix and the ways in which his work has circulated in the art museum.