Chasing R. Crumb...

I was sketching in the Gypsy Den in Santa Ana a few months ago. I got there early so I could sketch for several hours before the gallery next door opened at noon. They were featuring a traveling show that included original work by R. Crumb, and I waited like an anxious fanboy for the chance to see one of my hero's works up close.

I came to be a fan of Crumb very late, but it was never for the perverse subject matter, the sexism or the racism that he detailed (with scathing irony and dark humor), it was solely about technique and the masterful way he handled the page.

My earliest influence (apart from Michelangelo) was Dr. Seuss. If you went beyond the whimsical poetry and studied his intricate, energetic cross-hatching...wow, the man was a force to be reckoned with. Such masterful pen strokes...such expression and verve. Every mark was joyous and funny and deft. Seeing his work up close at a gallery made me weep. A true master.

Then it was Maurice Sendak, who was much quieter, but a master, nonetheless, of pen-and-ink crosshatching. And then I got warped by the "MAD" geniuses, especially Jack Davis and Mort Drucker. I think they warped a lot of young artist's minds in the 70's and 80's.

But Crumb...there was something about Crumb that made me connect with him more fervently than any other cartoonist outside of Winsor McCay. There was something that was tragically human about the skinny geek, something that I felt brought us into a spiritual kinship.

I'm sketching at the Gypsy Den, and the atmosphere is thrift-store bohemian. There are cheap Persian rugs on the wall along with hanging paper lanterns, nick-knacks and dusty student art, hanging with frames and without, in a chaotic quest to balance the negative spaces. The coffee comes in heavy, bulbous cups that warm and soothe. The food is organic and healthy. And the waitresses seem like ultra-hip art students that pass by, taking orders, aloof and harried.

They take no notice of me...but when I break out the sketchbook, I attract attention. It's not always good, kind of like people who have interesting tattoos or piercings attract fans of those things. It's an immediate conversation starter. It buffers those awkward social moments and gives me an "in" to begin interacting with people that normally wouldn't give me the time of day.

That's what draws me to Crumb, I think. I remember seeing the documentary, Crumb, by Terry Zwigoff, his friend, and seeing that socially inept, geeky persona was not just a persona. There was some deep and dark hurt that isolated him. He was constantly being hounded by anauthoritarian father, a self-medicating mother, fucked-up siblings, and a bullying world that took one look at the scrawny, bird-like, weakling and tried to crush him at every opportunity.

I relate to that, being endomorph to Crumb's ectomorph. I'm the fat guy who no one pays attention to until they see me drawing. I related to that need to slink away and to escape into sketchbooks, without the pressure of doing fine, exact work, but letting the mind open up to explorations of the moment. I pictured him in cafes, drawing, keeping things internal...letting in only those that understood that same isolation or that same need for expression.

So when I heard those same dusty sketchbooks were traded to Fantagraphics publishing for a villa in France (where he still resides) and his sketches that he scribbles on napkins when he waits for food in French cafes command thousands in galleries, I think that his career was more about self-preservation than anything else. He struggled to find that bit of respect and dignity and live a creative life without apology. And he succeeded. I admire that.

As the gallery opens, I view Crumb's work; from his crude, linear early sketchbooks to his high point in the late 60's and early 70's, to his quieter moments of American nostalgia and deep love for the blues, jazz and early roots music, it is a good sampling of his career. It wasn't always the pornographic, prurient Crumb that enticed me...it was the artist that explored all facets of his psyche as well as keeping a keen eye on American society and dared to tell all of our dirty secrets.

But seeing the control of his medium, the delicate cross-hatching he mastered, he could be in league with Hogarth or Durer. I look at his work and it inspires me...but mostly, I see the skinny man, with the heart of a wounded child, entirely alone with his thoughts of the world, armed with only a sketchbook and a rapidograph pen...sketching to fill in the many voids of his life.