.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
“You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust.”
R. Crumb
One of the most influential and notoriously puckish cartoonists of the late twentieth century, Robert Crumb made his breakthrough in 1968 with the debut of Zap Comix, a seminal publication in the history of American counterculture. Emblazoned prominently on the cover, "Fair Warning: For Adult Intellectuals Only!" Zap heralded the arrival of the west coast underground comix movement with its outrageously unhinged conflation of cartoon imagery, irreverent humor and themes of drug abuse, sexual taboos and the underlying absurdity of contemporary life. The first issue was famously sold on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco out of a baby stroller pushed by Crumb's then-wife, Dana. Zap featured some of the ludicrous and begrudgingly loveable anti-heroes that would appear throughout Crumb’s work: the hapless holy man, Mr. Natural, his slightly disturbed disciple, Flakey Foont, and the irreverently racist Angelfood McSpade, an extremely offensive caricature of black femininity. Crumb’s ethnic malapropisms and parodic pratfalls served to skewer the whole spectrum of middle-class American anxieties with sly, acerbic dexterity. As Crumb tellingly explained in 2010 after having emigrated to the south of France some twenty years previously, “When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got… When I’m over here, I look at America and think, ‘Why are people not more angry about what’s going on? Why are the people not more up in arms?’” (R. Crumb, quoted in D. Vankin, “R. Crumb on greed, senior sex and life in France: ‘I’m not less angry’,” Los Angeles Times: Hero Complex, 10 November 2010). Crumb channels this sense of indignant alienation with boisterous enthusiasm, creating works that are at once hilarious, profane and transcendental.
The present comic strip, The Adventures of 'Wichita' the Rat Dancer was originally published in the magazine, Weirdo, no. 24, 1988 as a satirical sendup up of the obscure erotic comic, "Omaha" the Cat Dancer. The strip presents several vignettes about modern intimacy, ranging from a marijuana-addled threesome botched by unexpected kink, an apparently married couple’s completely mundane dinner date and a sadomasochistic romp between anthropomorphic pig-man and bird-woman. Crumb flies his freak flag defiantly high, plowing through sexual mores with reckless abandon—and yet, at the heart of his ridiculous slapstick are subtly profound observations about the human condition and our attempts, however clumsy, to connect with one another in a meaningful way. For example, shortly after the revelation of his fetish for exotic body odor, Dave, a leather-clad Cat-man, asks Wichita to dance, and she accepts with obvious hesitation. Dave, picking up on Wichita’s uneasy vibes, asks, “You’re still bummed about what happened earlier, huh? Do you see me as a sicko perv now??” to which she awkwardly replies, “No, it’s only… You know, people are never, you know, quite what you think they are… or something… I don’t know.” Wichita’s awkward vulnerability and ineloquence in this moment are exemplary of Crumb’s unique ability to embed dead-serious psychological insight within otherwise asinine hijinks.
R. Crumb
One of the most influential and notoriously puckish cartoonists of the late twentieth century, Robert Crumb made his breakthrough in 1968 with the debut of Zap Comix, a seminal publication in the history of American counterculture. Emblazoned prominently on the cover, "Fair Warning: For Adult Intellectuals Only!" Zap heralded the arrival of the west coast underground comix movement with its outrageously unhinged conflation of cartoon imagery, irreverent humor and themes of drug abuse, sexual taboos and the underlying absurdity of contemporary life. The first issue was famously sold on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco out of a baby stroller pushed by Crumb's then-wife, Dana. Zap featured some of the ludicrous and begrudgingly loveable anti-heroes that would appear throughout Crumb’s work: the hapless holy man, Mr. Natural, his slightly disturbed disciple, Flakey Foont, and the irreverently racist Angelfood McSpade, an extremely offensive caricature of black femininity. Crumb’s ethnic malapropisms and parodic pratfalls served to skewer the whole spectrum of middle-class American anxieties with sly, acerbic dexterity. As Crumb tellingly explained in 2010 after having emigrated to the south of France some twenty years previously, “When I go back to America, after a few days I am once again filled with this kind of angry alienation and disgust with this thing there that America has got… When I’m over here, I look at America and think, ‘Why are people not more angry about what’s going on? Why are the people not more up in arms?’” (R. Crumb, quoted in D. Vankin, “R. Crumb on greed, senior sex and life in France: ‘I’m not less angry’,” Los Angeles Times: Hero Complex, 10 November 2010). Crumb channels this sense of indignant alienation with boisterous enthusiasm, creating works that are at once hilarious, profane and transcendental.
The present comic strip, The Adventures of 'Wichita' the Rat Dancer was originally published in the magazine, Weirdo, no. 24, 1988 as a satirical sendup up of the obscure erotic comic, "Omaha" the Cat Dancer. The strip presents several vignettes about modern intimacy, ranging from a marijuana-addled threesome botched by unexpected kink, an apparently married couple’s completely mundane dinner date and a sadomasochistic romp between anthropomorphic pig-man and bird-woman. Crumb flies his freak flag defiantly high, plowing through sexual mores with reckless abandon—and yet, at the heart of his ridiculous slapstick are subtly profound observations about the human condition and our attempts, however clumsy, to connect with one another in a meaningful way. For example, shortly after the revelation of his fetish for exotic body odor, Dave, a leather-clad Cat-man, asks Wichita to dance, and she accepts with obvious hesitation. Dave, picking up on Wichita’s uneasy vibes, asks, “You’re still bummed about what happened earlier, huh? Do you see me as a sicko perv now??” to which she awkwardly replies, “No, it’s only… You know, people are never, you know, quite what you think they are… or something… I don’t know.” Wichita’s awkward vulnerability and ineloquence in this moment are exemplary of Crumb’s unique ability to embed dead-serious psychological insight within otherwise asinine hijinks.