Here it used to come on at 5.25 on Wednesdays and Fridays on TV. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. RC: Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture. SB: Were you aware of Hogarth and Gillray as a kid? That goes all the way back to Hogarth, Gillray, all those guys had beautiful crosshatching technique. SB: Which is the ultimate compliment, isn't it? SB: One of your fans once told you that he enjoyed your crosshatching more than being stoned. There's also like 19th century, 18th century. SB: It makes you think of the early 20th century American newspaper strips. I go with the old stuff, I like the old look. It's traditional, isn't it? It's not modern. SB: That's interesting, tradition, because I was going to talk to you about your style of work.

RC: This is a society steeped in tradition, you know. But there you go, we live in a prudish time. Then, you have to take them to court and prove, to the satisfaction of the court, whether the stuff is too obscene to be seen by the sensitive British public. RC: Yes, also they imported books from the US, and often they had to deal with HM Customs, who are free to confiscate anything that they don't like. SB: Yeah, Knockabout Comics, who publish you over here. Tony Bennett here? He knows all about that. RC: That's because so much of it's been confiscated by Her Majesty's Customs over here. In this essay, I want to make a few specific observations about Crumb's work, especially in terms of its relationship to.SB: I realised how much of your work I haven't seen. Crumb's transgressive stories transformed comics, and allowed the 'culture's shame-making machinery' (Middlebrook 647) little room for comfort.

While there is nothing 'ordinary and accessible' about many of Crumb's images, the comics form itself is uniquely accessible, even (seemingly) innocuous. While Robert Lowell famously admitted, 'My mind's not right' ('Skunk Hour' line 30), Crumb's comics are a flood from a burst dam, detailing what is not right with his mind in excruciating detail-and overtly political terms.įinally, Middlebrook notes that confessional poetry attacks the stability of family, opposing cold war paranoia and what Crumb's peers might call establishment ideology: 'Manifestly ordinary and accessible, the images of the confessional poem encode the whole culture's shame-making machinery' (647).

in Middlebrook 636): a phrase perfectly suited to a discussion of Robert Crumb's comics. Initial critical reaction to the poetry-for example, to Robert Lowell's 1960 Life Studies-was that it was too personal, a 'shameful' and 'impure art' (qtd. Like Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, confessional poets were disaffected and anti-bourgeois, and 'participated in the protest against Impersonality as a poetic value by reinstating an insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform' (Middlebrook 635). While Middlebrook writes that 'confessional poetry was not overtly political' (635), it clearly had social and political concerns. Middlebrook positions the confessionals in a Postmodern context, noting that the poets of this generation (born between 19) exhibited great technical skill but opposed Modernist formalism and expressed disillusionment in the hard truths about mankind WWII exposed (633). In fact, so many of these postwar American poets found their voices in what Helen Vendler calls 'the therapuetic hour' that she refers to confessional poetry as the 'Freudian lyric' (31). Confessional poetry spoke to mid-century America, with timely themes including 'psychoanalysis as a mode of address to postwar existential misery, anticommunism as a pressure on American artists and intellectuals, and television as a solvent of boundaries between public and domestic life' (633). Confessional poetry is seemingly autobiographical, and the poems feature a 'first-person speaker' who 'seems to refer' to the poet (636). First, Middlebrook writes, 'confessional referred to content, not technique' (633 emphasis original). Yet, on aesthetic, cultural, political, and even personal levels, Robert Crumb's autobiographical work captures the spirit of the confessional poets.ĭiane Wood Middlebrook's essay 'What Was Confessional Poetry?' neatly defines that movement's major concerns, historical contexts, politics, and subject matter. Those unfamiliar with the norms of underground comix (as they are sometimes known) find Crumb's work anarchic, offensive, and without precedent. While Crumb's work often takes decidedly surreal form, his comic strip narratives are frequently autobiographical, offering a deceptively sophisticated view of the artist and his world. For over forty years, underground cartoonist Robert Crumb has documented his life in the panels of his comics, reveling in his 'resolutely counter-cultural.

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