Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life

Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life

Nadel, Dan

Hardcover

ArtistsLiterary Figures

Publisher Price: $35.00

ISBN10: 1982144009
ISBN13: 9781982144005
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: Apr 15 2025
Pages: 480
Weight: 1.65
Height: 1.60 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and The New Yorker

Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Eisner Award Nominee for Best Comics-Related Book

A definitive and ideal biography--pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I've ever read. --The New York Times

A critical darling, Crumb is the first biography of Robert Crumb--one of the most profound and influential artists of the 20th century--whose frank and meticulously rendered cartoons and comics inspired generations of readers and cartoonists, from Art Spiegelman to Alison Bechdel.

Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel delivers a gripping and essential account (The Boston Globe) of how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact.

Braiding biography with cultural history and criticism...that honors the complexity of [its] subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly (Los Angeles Times), Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure at once nuanced and propulsive (The Times Literary Supplement, London), Crumb spans the pressures of 1950s suburban America and Crumb's highly dysfunctional early family life; the history of comics and graphic satire; 20th-century popular music; the world of the counterculture; the birth of underground comic books in 1960s San Francisco with Crumb's Zap Comix; the economic challenges and dissolution of the hippie dream; and the path Robert Crumb blazed through it all.

Written with Crumb's cooperation, this fascinating, rollicking book takes in seven decades of Crumb's iconic works, including Fritz the Cat, Weirdo, and his adaptation of The Book of Genesis and floats Crumb on the rapids of his times (Harper's Magazine), capturing, in the process, the essence of an extraordinary artist.

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