Robert Crumb: "La crème de Crumb"

Though they share fame in unequal proportions, Screw Magazine publisher Al Godstein and the institution he started and cartoonist Robert Crumb and the legend he’s become have something in common. Born in that area when radical meant something to fear, Crumb and Goldstein emerged from the fringe cultural underground. Both were satirists and both went on to attract adoring cult followings. You’d think that Crumb’s softspoken and finely tuned sensibilities would clash with the loud and abrasive Goldstein, but oddly enough they seemed to hit it off as the two chatted at Crumb’s home in the countryside north of San Francisco.

AG: In your comics, which are so revealing, you talk about the hypocrisy of courtship. I agree with what you say, that women are turned on to the aggressive guy, the louder guy. You were talking about your friends, who were slick with words, and about your shyness.

RC: Women are turned on by self-confidence, supreme self-confidence. Nothing gets a woman hotter than seeing that in a man. It's like, no matter what kind of a terrible asshole the guy can be, he could be a Nazi war criminal, but if he has that supreme self-confidence and asserts that in the world, women will just fall all over the place. I've seen it happen too many times. Women don't like to admit that. Very few women will openly agree. They'll say, "He's sensitive and vulnerable ..." Bullshit. Lots of sensitive guys never get laid because they don't assert that kind of confidence in the world. They're kind of nice guys and they just don't have that.

AG: Okay, beating your meat. Do you do it to your own visions?

RC: When I was young, I couldn't connect with women at all, up until I was about twenty. So for the first seven or eight years, from puberty until I was twenty, I developed such an intense fantasy life that was so completely make-believe—it just got wilder and stranger and weirder. That kept up until I started building up a stock of memories and things to masturbate with. I had the craziest, most bizarre fantasies. A lot of that is in my early comics, like the Big Ass comics and stuff where I had these giant vulture demonesses that have heads of predatory birds but women's bodies. That's all literally out of my masturbation fantasies.

AG: What about shoes and feet?

RC: Large, strong, shapely feet. I used to have this girlfriend who had such incredible feet. I was so fixated on her feet; they were a perfect shape. They looked like they were drawn by Michelangelo or something. The arch was really graceful. They were really large and strong, and I used to go buy her these shoes and stuff and did all these weird things with her feet.

AG: Have you ever thought about why your women are the strong, dominant, physical type? Is it that they would protect you and rescue you in your mind? Are they the mother who wasn't there?

RC: No.

AG: Am I too Freudian about this?

RC: I don't know, but it's complicated. Part of the thrill for me is in kind of subjugating this large powerful creature. I get some kind of excitement out of that. (Laughs.) Or getting to utilize this incredible, extraordinary female power that's in the woman's body. It's an archetypal thing.

AG: In one of your cartoons you say, "Do you know she can break you in half?" But there you are fucking her from behind.

RC: That's right.

AG: Isn't it almost like the flea fucking the elephant?

RC: (Crumb laughs.) Well, gee, I don't know. That's kind of putting it rather unromantically.

AG: Have you ever gone to a diet place where the place is piled with big, large women? Do you hang around Weight Watchers meetings?

RC: Partly because I'm such an ectomorph myself, I can't hope to project an image of a big, strong, take-charge kind of guy. I just don't have that in me at all.

AG: Would you ever look at yourself naked in a mirror?

RC: Forget it. I rarely even get naked. I don't even get naked in sex or anything; I keep my underwear on and my socks. (Laughs.) I always focus all the attention on the woman's body. I don't focus attention on my body at all. If they start caressing me or something like that, it bothers me. I get all nervous.

AG: Are you happy with the way your life is going now? How do you look back on your first and last twenty years?

RC: It ain't bad now. I've been through so much craziness with women. Jesus. Been through the mill with it. But right now it seems to be sort of under control more or less. Aline, my wife, she's sort of cool. She gives me some slack, she's not too hard on me. She likes to spend my money and go shopping and thinks she's a princess.

AG: Is she Jewish?

RC: Oh, yes.

AG: Are you allowed to fuck around, or do you sort of do it on the sly?

RC: I'm kind of allowed to, but I have to be graceful about these things. You can't just flaunt it in her face. You have to lie and cheat a little bit. But she doesn't probe that much. She knows. She doesn't say, "Where have you been? Who have you been with?"

AG: How would you feel if she had a lover? Do you think there's a double standard for you?

RC: As long as she was cool about it. If I thought he was some incredible asshole it might be a little irritating, but once in a while she fools around with other guys. She likes to go to Europe. She's in Europe right now, and she likes these German men. It's a sickness.

AG: How do you feel about children?

RC: Well, I have a young daughter. I love her dearly. The only woman I really loved, probably. (Laughs.) The only problem with it is the sex stuff I do in my comics. I'm kind of not sure how to deal with that with her. Sometimes she gets ahold of one and looks at them. She's real fascinated by it. But I don't know quite how to deal with it.

AG: It's hard. I have a teenage son, but it's harder with a daughter. I don't know what one does. I just think it's going to open doors and shut doors.

RC: I don't want to pull it out of her hand and hide it from them either. Obviously, she's going to be sexually more sophisticated than most of the kids from around this area. And she has a lot of little friends whose parents are fundamentalist Christians and stuff. So that whole part is actually more worrisome than actually what it would do to her specifically as to how she's going to be able to relate to the other kids.

AG: Do you ever look back with misgivings?

RC: I have no misgivings.

AG: But your stuff is so honest and so brutally intimate. You really reveal your guts.

RC: I have to, I can't help myself. Something about it, I guess from being a Catholic and going to confession or something. I have to do it.

AG: You're gonna have another comic book there. Do you feel that your means of communication, comics, gets the old, "I get no respect," like Rodney Danger-field? Does that embarrass you or make you angry? Comics are sort of treated like they're for kids.

RC: Yes, well, you're not going to get rich off doing comics in America. Adult comics just get lost in the cracks between the various marketing areas in the culture. It's such a small-time thing now. I meet people who are surprised I'm still alive. They think I died or something.

AG: But in terms of comics—I read Mad as a kid—your words in the mouths of cartoon characters are harder for me to assimilate than if you used prose. Is this my own prejudice? What makes somebody a comic¬book reader and what makes somebody a book reader?

RC: I think it's what you grew up with. People whose parents had cultural pretensions wouldn't allow them to read or even look at comics. People who were programmed into believing comics were utter trash have prob¬lems with comics when they're grown-ups.

AG: You really are brilliant. I don't want to bullshit you because I found you far better than I had remembered. Brilliant, insightful and honest. I was just so impressed the last time I reread you. But I'll go into some book¬stores, see comic books and I'd say, gee, are these for the slow-minded?

RC: Mostly they don't go that deep most of the time. There's not a long history of comic art being used to reveal deep personal existential stuff. Some people are still figuring out how to do that with comics. There are some guys that have achieved that, but it's almost a handful, not many. There's only about ten living cartoonists who I really respect.

AG: Who are they?

RC: Justin Green, Kim Deitch, Spain, Robert Williams, this guy, Peter Bagge—he's real young and doing real good work. Drew Friedman. There are probably others.

AG: What makes a comic successful? My son loves comic books but he's a teenager. I don't think, because of the sexuality, he could read what you do. What seems to be hip now are these mutant turtles.

RC: Oh God, utter trash. It's all junk.

AG: What makes them successful?

RC: It's just that level of culture where there's all this dummy-dumb stuff that appeals to people just because they don't know any better. It's this kind of cultural deprivation. There's nothing with more substance in their lives so they like this cutesy bland stuff or these adolescent power fantasies in the superhero comics. But those never appealed to me as a kid, the muscle-man comics. I never found those interesting at all in any way. Marvel comics and all those. Most of them are really boring.

AG: But you like Mad.

RC: I like the satire and humor comics. When I was a kid there were great humor comics. Donald Duck was a great comic. Artist Carl Barks was a great storyteller. And Little Lulu had incredibly great stories. I still read those Little Lulu comics from the late '40s, early '50s and they're great. There's a bunch of comics now where they kind of attempt to deal with personal things. These don't have any depth; they don't get beyond this cute level. It's real sickening stuff. The bewilderment I have about that is the same bewilderment I have when I'm driving down the road and pass fifty cars that have those Garfield teddy bears stuck on the window. Why do people like that shit? What is that about? I don't understand it. I want to go up and shake them and say, "What is it? Why do you think that!?"

AG: Do you read the papers every day?

RC: Oh God, no. I stay away from the news. I avoid the news like the plague. It's not good for your nerves, not good for your mind. The news is for suckers as far as I can tell. Like everything else in this culture, it's McDonald's hamburgers being forced down your throat.

AG: Do you have any thoughts about the future? Do you think we're headed toward more sexual emancipation, stagnation or a continued conservative swing?

RC: I can't tell at all what's going to happen. You just keep hoping that repressiveness has peaked, but a lot depends on so many variables. Something could happen to cause even more fear and repression. These periods of sexual liberation come and go. It seems like cycles, with the 1920s, you know, a period of liberation. I collect these videos of movies, pre-Code movies, I find fascinating as hell. Here it is sixty years ago and these people are behaving in this liberal way that would shock people now. And you read about the period before Oliver Cromwell in England. The Puritans came along and they just wanted to stop all of this licentiousness that was going on in plays, really filthy plays that were real popular in the 1630s and '40s. Then after Cromwell, the whole period of repression, the 1680s and '90s, it all came back, and they went to another period of sexual licentiousness. Society, in the West anyway, sometimes has a problem dealing with that sexual thing; they're very extreme about it. They can go out and rut until you get syphilis and die, or deny pleasure completely.

AG: It's cyclical.

RC: It is. Now I feel, and I'm sure you do, too, kind of left out there. The wave has washed back to sea and you're kind of on the beach in this little puddle of this like crazy sex thing that you're still into this crusade to keep sex from going back to the Dark Ages or something. Things like AIDS come along and it's just a giant setback. Who could have predicted that would happen?

AG: Do you get cross-fertilized by television, radio, movies? You are in the boondocks; I don't see a satellite dish here.

RC: I read a lot, I'm always scanning the culture, I spend a lot of time doing that to see what's around. I get a lot of stuff in the mail, too. People just send me stuff. Everything that's strange and odd in print, I get it in the mail—all this little subculture underground stuff that's going on. It's interesting to follow what's going on in the youth culture. In a way it's ridiculous, this crazy print stuff. Thousands and thousands of young kids out there are doing these little amateur comics. I don't know what they hope to gain by it. It's just this love of comics that releases all this crazy stuff. Not much of it is any good.

AC: When you came out originally you were censored a lot, weren't you?

RC: Yes, they'd bust the comics. The sad thing about the way it works is the poor shopkeeper was the guy that would go to jail. I think you probably had the same experience with Screw. They'd drag somebody from behind the counter and put him in the slammer. They never touched me, only economically. But usually those kinds of busts actually helped sales in the long run. Unless there's a total across-the-board repression, a bust here and a bust there actually ended up being helpful in a way.

AG: This is the typical Playboy interview question: What would youwant your epitaph to say?

RC: Keep on truckin'. No. I'm sure that's what it will say.

AG: You're going to keep drawing, right? You have no plans to retire or stop.

RC: No. I hope to keep drawing as long as I can.

AG: You're making some money now?

RC: It's all right.

AG: This is a society that's mean towards artists, you know.

RC: Yeah. I don't think that America really respects people who devote themselves to something like sitting alone doing artwork rather than being out there hustling.

AG: I agree. We treat it like something unnatural. Do you realize that if I was a woman I would be afraid of you? You'd want to fuck me.

RC: Ahhh, Jesus. What a repulsive thought. Okay, here's what I like: big, powerfully-built women but very solid and sort of athletic, with a waistline. It can be thick but I'm repulsed by loose flabby flesh.

AG: What women do you fantasize about? Who would you like to fuck? Is Fergie big enough for you?

RC: As far as women in media go, I'm attracted to real plain, straightforward types that most guys would just completely miss if they saw them in the street. Farm-type girls.

AG: Yeah, you really like that?

RC: I really like them sturdy, like they grew up on a farm digging irrigationtrenches.

AG: I absolutely wouldn't give her another look. She should be on a tractor.

RC: Pulling the plough.

AG: Your choice of woman is not my kind of woman. Isn't one of the payoffs that they're so happy being appreciated for who they are instead of feeling defensive?

RC: That's certainly to my advantage. Sometimes I'll actually run into these large women who want so badly to forget they're big. They just don't want to be reminded of it. Like I make a mistake by saying, "Gosh, you really have thick ankles." And they say, "I know, you don't have to tell me that."

AG: Have you tried other art forms or do you feel that the cartoon is...?

RC: Just recently I wrote a movie script. I wrote it with my friend, Terry Zweigoff. It's based on my obsession with large women, more specifically it's based on that story I did called "The White Man Meets Bigfoot" in which this wimpy guy gets involved with this giant, hairy beast-woman. We have these French guys now who want to produce it. I hope it will happen. Of course, the most interesting part to me is finding the right woman.

AG: Are you going to have a casting couch?

RC: I have to be involved in the casting. It has to meet with my requirements.

AG: You're not into food at all, are you? That's not one of your pleasures.

RC: Sex, art and music are the three things in my life.

AG: You were never waylaid by drugs. Why is that?

RC: I smoked dope for a few years and took some LSD way back in the '60s. All those things just ended up making me feel paranoid. I was so  relieved to be straight when I stopped taking that stuff. But I got certain benefits for a while from that stuff, psychedelic drugs. Jesus.

AG: Are there causes that touch you? Were you ever attacked by the feminists?

RC: Yeah, they've lambasted the hell out of me, gave me a lot of trou¬ble. I thought feminism was a great thing. In a lot of ways, it's just that they overreacted, and a lot of them still do. Now there's a big debate between the feminists who want to be able to do any quirky thing they want and the ones who are very prudish about that. They still have to resolve the heterosexual thing with men.

AG: Hasn't that been resolved?

RC: But the feminists who are admitting that they like to be penetrated, it's kind of like being an unfeminist—it doesn't seem politically correct to a lot of women. But they're still working on that. I've always liked it because I like assertive, independent women.

AG: When I speak at colleges, I'm always amazed that women try to make me feel defensive because pornography shows a woman's pussy being eaten or a woman sucking cock, as if the innate act being repre¬sented was somehow bad.

RC: It's ridiculous, real ridiculous. Did you ever see that movie Not a Love Story! That's so ridiculous. To make their point, they prejudiced all the pornography they showed toward the stuff that really debased and degraded women, the guy going in the woman's mouth and all that. They played some sinister theme music behind it. It's manipulative. Meanwhile, at least half of all pornography shows men in a submissive position. And then they completely ignored all homosexual pornography—which is a large segment of pornography—they completely bypassed that whole thing. It's just ridiculous.

AG: If you went to an S&M club in New York . . .

RC: I went to one last year.

AG: Mostly it's for guys. Describe the scene.

RC: I go in with this big woman that I know, this crazy Jewish woman who's just giant. She wears size 14 shoes or something. She'd do any crazy, perverted thing. She was really wild, and she took me to The Vault. We go in and there's a woman strung up on chains being whipped. She's shrieking and really pouring it on thick. Meanwhile, most of the crowd is just these wandering, drifting masturbators who are walking around. If you did anything active, started feeling a woman's legs or some¬thing, these masturbators would stop and start beating their meat, watch¬ing. It was kind of nerve-wracking in a way. And the woman I was with, watching what was going on excited her and made her want to get it on. So I started fondling her and two guys immediately stop and started jerking off. Forget it, forget it!

There was this guy there, an Oriental guy who took this woman's foot and just put it on his face and was like mangeing her foot on his face. There are a lot of masochistic elements. I've heard there are hordes of masochis¬tic men out there, desperate masochistic men who can't find dominatrix women. Submissive women are much more common, much more typical for women. Even Freud said—of course, in Victorian times it was probably more that way, since masochism was so common in women as to not even be considered a perversion or anything sick, it was so pervasive.

AG: It's an amazing scene because 90 percent are guys wanting to lick toes and worship feet. Mostly it's sad.

RC: It was pretty grim in there. (Laughs.)

AG: But it's out there.

RC: It was very interesting, very interesting. Not a dull night, that's for sure. They have this really dark room in the back. There's just a red light bulb in the room and all around the edge of the room are these cells, little booths with narrow doorways leading into them. It was a dungeon in there. And there was this crowd around one of these doors, onlookers. They were craning their necks. I wanted to see what was going on, but then you just couldn't see. You couldn't even get close enough to see. So many people are just voyeurs; they just want to see something happening.

AG: Do you look at fuck films at all?

RC: I find them pretty boring, very boring. They're not my fantasies. I've never seen anything I like to do in them. Once in a while there's a halfway interesting-looking woman, but not that often. I used to hang around the Mitchell Brothers' O'Farrell Theatre. Once in awhile I'd see a woman in there who would really stop my heart.