The Four Color Media Monitor

Wisconsin Public Radio interviewed author Dan Nadel, who published a biography of cartoonist Robert Crumb. Among the topics in discussion, there's the following:

Doug Gordon: How did you get the chance to write the very first biography of Robert Crumb?

Dan Nadel: In 2019, I wrote him a letter proposing this very idea, with the pitch being that I wanted to contextualize him in comics and the 20th century, that I wasn’t interested in unearthing personal revelations, although I did along the way. But my focus would be his legacy and where he comes from in terms of art history. And after some back and forth, he agreed.

But there were two things. One was that he wouldn’t have to explain comic book history to me, which was enormously appealing. He did not want to educate his biographer in his medium.

The condition he put on my writing the book was that I very honestly address the racist and misogynist material in his comics and give that a fair airing so that it would not be a hagiography. I, of course, agreed, and off we went.

This is definitely amazing if Crumb admits there's anything racist and sexist in his illustrations and writing, like his portrayal of Angelfood McSpade, who's discussed along the way, though I doubt it'll change the minds of any left-wing social justice advocates who reject his cartoons today. That said, how strange Crumb doesn't want to educate Nadel in anything comics-related. That has the effect of suggesting he doesn't care about the medium he worked in, or not anymore, though at the same time, there's bound to be some who'll argue a guy with visions like his isn't the best suited to give clear insight as to the medium he worked in.

DG: I’d like to get your opinion on Angelfood McSpade. Can you tell us about her and how she is possibly the most controversial comic character from the silver age of comics?

DN: Angelfood McSpade was a character that Robert invented that was based on a generic racial racist trope of the kind of wild, Black, jungle woman. And she was drawn as though she was made out of cylinders. So this cartoonish, cylindrical sexual fantasy of a Black woman was a character that Robert employed and did a few different things with.

On the one hand, he showed how she could be a stand-in for this objectification of powerful Black women in the culture. It’s like the way someone like Tina Turner was marketed as this unhinged savage or something horrible like that, the way a lot of Black music at that time was marketed as being somehow more authentic because it’s so wild and unhinged.

And on the other hand, he used her as a way to show how white people approached Black people in the culture.

He has a great strip that’s extremely difficult to look at, about a group of anthropologists and scientists going to find Angelfood McSpade in the deepest “jungles” and bringing her back, offering her fame and fortune, but then totally degrading her. It was his commentary on how white people have appropriated, used and then discarded Black people throughout the history of culture, particularly when he was writing and drawing this in ’67 and ’68. It was a particularly horrible history.

That said, he is also using an extremely disturbing racist caricature to do all of this. So while he’s commenting on it, it’s also, understandably, extremely difficult for many people to look at. And it’s the thing he’s critiquing in some ways, as it doesn’t transcend the racism inherent in its design or Robert’s gaze at it. It is a problematic work of art, but it is undoubtedly worth examining and thinking about because Robert is not racist; however, he did employ these sorts of images and was not always successful in telegraphing to anyone that this was not meant to harm.

One of the most insulting things about how Angelfood McSpade was drawn is that it was little different from previous depictions of black women as physically unattractive, such as the short hair. During the Golden Age, when stereotypical drawings of blacks appeared in comicdom, it may have primarily been men who were subject to crude stereotypes big, ghastly mouths, but even women were just as victimized, and short, almost entirely flat hair, if at all, was definitely one of the forms of stereotyping black women underwent. Which is why I find it disputable she's described as a "sexual fantasy". Are they kidding? With that kind of character design, she's anything but that, and it sure doesn't encourage respect for Black women any more than Black men. And the only "objectification" she could represent with that character design is a negative form of focus that only belittles.

Crumb may not have intended harm, but it's mystifying why anybody like him believes they have to rely on stereotypical character designs even for a social commentary, when here, Crumb and his colleagues who drew anything similar had a big chance to transcend that stereotypes and offer a character design far more compelling than what's seen in the finished product, and instead, they threw it away. It kind of reminds me of the time Grant Morrison wrote "New" X-Men, and rather than avoid boomeranging back on the Jean Grey-as-Phoenix cliche, he made things worse by putting her in the afterlife again, which lasted for nearly a decade. And he may have said at the time it was intended as a "joke" for how past writers wouldn't think of anything better to do with Jean, but if Morrison wasn't willing to prove he could improve upon that, then what business did he have resorting to the Phoenix cliche either?

DG: Would it be fair to say that there was a lot of controversy because people weren’t able to realize the nuances of what Crumb was telegraphing?

DN: You know, it’s interesting that at the time, there wasn’t controversy. That didn’t happen until decades later, really, until the 2000s.

One could argue the lack of controversy had what to do with complacency on the left, all despite their claims to the contrary they'd changed their ways. But, look at how Marvel produced The Truth: Red, White & Black during 2003, and were able to do it without any serious complaints from certain leftist news sources, all because the anti-American message mattered so much, they were willing to overlook the crude, unintelligable illustrations if that's what it took to get their shoddy "point" across. On the other hand, the Canadian cartoonist Dave Sim, who wrote questionable takes on women in Cerebus, was only shunned by the leftists he surely appealed to around the turn of the century, in an early example of leftists only rejecting a onetime "icon" out of wokeism.

DG: Given the frequently controversial nature of his work and the constant evolution of what is socially acceptable, what do you think Crumb’s legacy should be?

DN: I think it’s a complex legacy. I think he’s one of the great artists of the 20th century. He paved the way for an enormous amount of innovation in comics. He also, for many contemporary artists, opened them up to express their inner demons in a way that he and his compatriots did. And I think you can read his work, certainly the best of his work, and tap into a vision for how to think about America, how to think about contemporary life and how to deal with our inner selves — our lusts, our anger, our anxieties and our paranoias.

So, a complicated legacy, but a legacy of somebody who communicated through art and communicated, I think, vital information about how we might think about and move through the world.

Is Crumb really one of the great artists in spite of the stuff that could be considered tasteless? Maybe, but I still wouldn't consider him any better than say, legendary artists like Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, John Buscema, Gil Kane and George Perez. And in the past decade, if not today, the notion Crumb paved the way for innovation certainly went backwards. Will that change now? Who knows? All I know is that the kind of satire Crumb was known for doesn't all hold up well, and there's much he could've proven capable of transcending, but didn't because he fell back on certain cliches, like how Angelfood McSpade is drawn. No doubt, that's considered horrific by modern standards, but in the past, some liberals were willing to overlook that, and to be sure, there were conservatives who were just as monumentally stupid in not calling Crumb out for being insulting to black women. Such errors are definitely in serious need of improving upon.

We'll see for now just how well Nadel's Crumb biography does in sales and reception, but the whole notion the veteran cartoonist didn't want to educate the historian in the medium still comes off as quite surprising, even if he's not the most fit for the job of offering history descriptions.

Labels: history, misogyny and racism, msm propaganda, politics