Crumb (1994)

Director: Terry Zwigoff

Featuring: Robert Crumb, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Charles Crumb, Maxon Crumb, Robert Hughes, Don Donahue, Dana Morgan, Trine Robbins

Robert Crumb is the influential creator of seminal underground comics icons such as Mr. Natural and Fritz the Cat.

 

It would be difficult to have any awareness of American pop culture without encountering his images. 

Terry Zwigoff's powerful documentary chronicles Crumb's life, his work, and his family and friends with an honesty that is frequently shocking. 

One may revile Crumb's work as pornographic and misogynistic (a charge that he might not dispute) or appreciate it as a fearless, honest revelation of psychic baggage that most of us keep deeply and safely hidden, or a combination of the two, but it quickly becomes clear that such judgments are mostly irrelevant: Crumb creates what he does because he has no choice.

 

At a couple points in the film, he questions whether he should have committed certain images and themes to paper.

 

He is compelled by his own inner demons and neuroses; his art is what has saved him from falling into madness. 

Interviews with his brothers, Charles and Max, show just how high the stakes were for him; Charles in particular, though highly intelligent, was extremely maladjusted and suicidal and spent much of his life in one room.

 

This is an extraordinary document of the power of art as therapy.