I
t’s Fête Médiévale time in this tiny, sweltering southern French backwater, not far from where Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey Modestine made their famous trek in the Cévennes mountains nearly 150 years ago. Today, the village is awash with women dressed in 15th-century woolen tunics, men in pseudo-Robin Hood gear. They’re roasting whole pigs on spits, fake minstrels are serenading the crowd with remodeled ancient lutes, jester-jugglers with peaked caps are tossing animal bones in the air, macho knights are jousting. And just at the margins of all these festivities, on the terrace of a local bistro, his battered American straw boater blocking the sun from his eyes, drawing random sketches on the placemats (which sharp-eyed patrons will collect and sell for good money later on the art market), sits — in his own words — “a nerd with thick glasses” fixed in his own private time-warp: Robert Crumb, 1960s rebel comics-artist icon and a somewhat reluctant local resident for over 30 years now.
It is a baffling backdrop for someone once at the center of the American avant-garde in California, his provocative posters everywhere to be seen in the Haight-Ashbury of the Sixties; his ubiquitous “Keep On Truckin’” cartoon co-opted onto T-shirts and burned into tattoos; an early swallower and proponent of LSD (good and bad trips). The progenitor of indelible characters such as the crackpot guru Mr. Natural, neurotic everyman Flakey Foont, horny feline Fritz the Cat, and zaftig temptress Devil Girl, among others, his own tortured family life was the subject of a critically acclaimed documentary (1994’s Crumb). There’s even a Star Wars figure based on him, the Kowakian monkey-lizard called Salacious B. Crumb.
A Weirdo comics cover from 1981
© Lora Fountain
An unused Zap cover mock-up.
© Lora Fountain
Most lastingly, Crumb, 82, is still considered the godfather of personal-story (his own) underground comics that emerged from the counterculture era. Starting with his Zap Comix series, first published in 1968, Crumb moved out of the notion of the cartoonist-entertainer and instead created comics as open, uncensored self-expression. While inventing his many other characters, he also planted his own antihero persona in his work, usually in self-derogatory fashion. And this inspired a later wave of personalized comic writing, culminating in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, as well as many of the autobiographical graphic novels that flood the market today.
Crumb’s rising fame was not without controversy. His personal drawings were often sexually explicit, if not brazenly pornographic, earning him public condemnation as a misogynist. Then, in the 1990s came the purposefully outrageous “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America!” or “When the [N-—rs] Take Over America!” — savage tongue-in-cheek satires that appeared in his Weirdo comics and brought him powerful negative feedback. He also knowingly played with racist stereotypes in his character Angelfood McSpade, an oversexed African American woman one would have seen in chauvinistic cartoons out of the 1920s. Crumb defended the work as criticism of those stereotypes, presuming that people familiar with his art would get the point. Many didn’t.
A self-portrait of Crumb, right, with the author, from their book Kafka.
My own relationship with Crumb began in the 1990s, when he was press-ganged into moving to these French boondocks by his second wife, the cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. A fellow American expat, I was introduced to the couple by mutual friends. There followed several years when our kids grew up together, spent Christmases together, and we all faced our alien status together. In 1993, Crumb and I collaborated on a book variously known as Kafka for Beginners, Introducing Kafka, or just plain Kafka, which has since been translated into about 20 languages. We worked on it intensively for a year, with him suggesting changes to my text and me amendments to his drawings. This cemented our friendship (although it’s practically impossible to get emotionally close to him) and brought about mutual respect.
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When my partner, the Polish artist and radio producer Malgorzata Żerwe, and I visited Crumb in the spring, I hadn’t seen him for several years, in large part for reasons of personal geography. We had come explicitly to record him for a proposed new audio feature, to talk about aging without being ageist or condescending — after all, he and I were born in the same year. A new authorized biography was due out (Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life by Dan Nadel, released in April), and we were hoping to find him in a reflective mood.
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For five hours, we walked the medieval pathways of the village, where the Vidourle River winds its ancient curve before plunging into the Mediterranean at the resort town Le Grau-du-Roi. Our conversation similarly wandered, covering his sexual appetites, his friendship with Janis Joplin, his mistakes of the past, his new preoccupation with conspiracy theories, his (surprisingly sympathetic) feelings about RFK Jr. and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Outdoors, for some reason, you become even more aware of Crumb’s high-pitched, nervous laugh, which clings onto nearly every utterance, whether humorous or bleak. When we asked how it feels to be in the winter of his life, his reply was as unvarnished and self-aware as his cartoons.
Crumb in a 2024 photo taken by the author. Today, he says, he feels like “a horse and buggy man” out of step with modern life.
David Zane Mairowitz
“It feels old. Like, half of my friends are dead. You know, my companions, old guys I hung out with. All the girls I knew that are now old ladies. And I’m completely out of touch with what the kids are into and all the electronic devices and all that stuff. I just feel like when I was a kid where you’d meet some old person, and they’d say, ‘Yeah, well, I’m from the horse and buggy days.’ That’s kind of what I feel like, you know, from the horse and buggy days.”
THE ROAD FROM HAIGHT-ASHBURY to the foothills of the Cévennes is not merely geographically long, but also a historical and cultural time machine for Crumb. We’re standing on the terrace of his ancient stone house in the Occitanie region, with its pervasive Roman ruins, looking at the river below, and noting that the entire village was originally built as a fortress. When I was living here in the 1980s, someone rebuilding an old house pulled down a false ceiling, and a gaggle of skeletons came crashing to the ground. These were found to be Huguenots hiding from Catholic persecution, cemented in for their own safety during the religious wars of the early 18th century.
Crumb has not exactly adapted to these surroundings. Over 32 years in this village, he has not learned to speak French. And yet, he has no intention of leaving.
“I’m kind of passive that way, I guess,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to die here. This is it. Die here with all my junk in this big house.”
A drawing by Crumb of the walls of the French village he calls home.
The “big house” could well serve as the movie set for a gothic horror fantasy. On three floors, with precariously creaky staircases, it’s somberly dark, as classic Midi stone houses are supposed to be for keeping out the sunlight. Crumb has lived alone here since the death of Aline, his partner of 50 years, in 2022. Except that she is still everywhere to be seen and met on every floor, in every winding hallway and side corner. On the walls are what she referred to as her “shrines,” baroque objects filled with plastic dolls, saints, miniature figurines, animals, and plastic flowers, all overwhelmed with a shower of pearls, as well as her own collages depicting herself. Nothing has been touched or displaced since her disappearance, and Crumb refuses to clear her away. Her ghost touches him at every step of the way up to the top of the vast edifice.
All those years together, it was Aline who principally dealt with daily life, with the infuriating French bureaucracy, with taxes, with registering their daughter, Sophie, at the local school, while Crumb sat in his dark studio drawing Self-Loathing Comics or Sex Obsessions or his bestselling take on the Old Testament. Most important, especially out here in the sticks, she could speak the language. This is not Paris, where you can bump into someone who might speak something resembling English; in this corner of France, Crumb needs a translator.
“The organization of the wording is so different from the logic of English,” he says, explaining his befuddlement. “In English, you know, you’re the subject. Then there’s a verb, then there’s the object. And that makes sense. ‘I want to go to the store.’ The store is the thing you want to go to. You don’t say it like that in French; you say, ‘I the store to go want’ or something. It’s completely some other logic that I just can’t get past.”
Malgorzata and I spot a thick book in French on the dinner table, coupled with a French-English dictionary. It turns out to be the obscure autobiography of an obscure musician from the Auvergne region who started an obscure record company in the 1920s. Classical Crumb terrain. A musician himself (chiefly banjo), he loves to draw portraits of bygone musical artists nobody’s ever heard of, whether they be from the American Deep South or la France profonde. The book itself is covered, line by line, with penciled-in translations that come from his constantly looking up the meaning of nearly every word. We ask how long has it taken him to read this book.
“Fifteen years.”
Added to Crumb’s geographical isolation is his refusal to own a computer, to have access to the internet, or to use a cell phone. There is a television on the top floor of the house, but he doesn’t know how it works. He craves the simple station-changing dial of the old days, and is somewhat terrorized by the very idea of a remote control. In a concession to modernity, he does email people, in a manner of speaking: He writes out messages by hand, in pencil (the old-fashioned kind with detachable erasers, which he mail-orders from the U.S.), then gives them to his secretary, Maggie, to type and send. When he receives a response, she prints it out for him to read.
“The pencil is a great invention,” Crumb says, holding one up. “Beautiful. Look at that. You don’t need a machine. You get this thing; you have a pencil sharpener you can carry around with you. Yeah, very fine invention. I hope they don’t stop making them.”
TODAY, I’VE BROUGHT MY COPY of Cheap Thrills, the Big Brother and the Holding Company vinyl from 1968, for Crumb to sign. He shot to prominence designing its famous cover on 24 hours’ notice in a Methedrine-induced frenzy.
The original cover disappeared — in fact, was kept and sold clandestinely by a CBS executive for around $25,000 and later re-sold by Anonymous for over $250,000. It’s beyond imagination what it would sell for on today’s high-end R. Crumb market. He has often been exploited in this way and always counted on Aline to set things straight.
Crumb in San Francisco in 1969. He describes himself as “a nerd with thick glasses” at the time who was “tongue-tied” in front women.
aron Wolman Collection/Rock & Roll Hall of Fame/Getty Images
Crumb says he agreed to the job chiefly because he needed the money at the time. (Yet when Mick Jagger tried to hire him for a Stones album, he refused. “I didn’t like him.” Simple as that.) He was also seduced to the gig because of Big Brother band member Janis Joplin, whose singing he admired, and who later became a friend. In the early Sixties, in Texas, he’d heard some private tapes of her, made before she mutated into a rock & roll artist.
“She was singing like Bessie Smith, old-time blues, and it was great. And later I saw some old films of her from the early Sixties, singing with a country bluegrass-type band, and she was like a hillbilly shouter. That’s what came naturally to her. Then she got involved in rock & roll, and she really got lost. Got lost.”
Later, in the Haight-Ashbury, they linked up. “She liked the underground comics,” Crumb says. “She would come and hang out and smoke pot and stuff.”
Crumb, at the time, would be dressed unremarkably casually, in banal pants and sweater, with thick glasses, looking more or less like a geek. And, essentially, terrified of women. Janis attempted to intervene.
“She gave me advice to say, ‘Crumb, you know, there’s all these beautiful girls out there. Come on. What’s your problem? Just let your hair grow long. Get these billowy satin shirts and some bell-bottoms. You’ll do fine.’ I said, ‘I don’t fit in with those hippies.’ I couldn’t do that. I would feel like a clown if I did that. I’d feel like I was faking it completely.”
While conservative in his fashion tastes, Crumb is fanatical about music. He sits and listens to 78 rpm records every day. His treasured collection, gathered over decades, personally packed and transported across the Atlantic, now numbers 9,000 discs. Each single one, individually, methodically, lovingly placed in its own cardboard sleeve after meticulous washing with liquid soap and a toothbrush to get all the dust out of the grooves. Which can have unforeseen consequences.
“I got a Louis Armstrong record from an auction, with his name written in white ink on the label. He autographed it. Autographed by Louis! There’s his signature on there. So I was going to wash it because it was dirty, and the autograph completely washed off. But who cares? It’s the music that counts.”
And just what is the advantage of listening to 78 records?
“The strongest presence of any recorded technology. There’s a lot going on in those grooves. If you transfer to any other technology, CD or whatever, the presence is not as strong.”
“OK,” he concedes, “they’re cumbersome, they’re fragile. They take up a lot of room. They’re heavy.” But: “There’s the ritual that every time you want to hear something, you got to go and fetch it. Put it on the machine, put the needle on it. When it’s over, you got to get up. Take it off, put it away. Get another one out. And that focuses your attention on what you’re listening to. Before 78s, if you wanted to hear music, you had to hear it live.”
Robert Crumb at home circa 2010. He has been living in the same medieval village in France for more than 30 years — and still doesn’t speak French.
Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto/Getty Images
As a devout collector, he also admires these objects as artifacts in themselves. (“There’s ancient objects from the Egyptian tombs made out of shellac or coated with shellac, and they’re still perfectly intact,” he marvels.) And he won’t tolerate the idea of remastering those old discs.
“There’s two or three things they’re trying to do. One is, they’re trying to eliminate all surface noise as much as possible. The other thing is to keep the range in order — that is, the bass, treble, and mid-range — as they should sound, because with modern equipment, the stuff’s so sensitive that you can lose the warmth of the old recording quality. It gets too high-endy sounding and it can become shrill. Modern recording engineers don’t have the ear tuned to the old sound. They’ve got a different ear.”
WHEN I GOT MY CONTRACT for the Kafka book, I thought it would be tough bringing the legendary Crumb on board. But it turns out he felt a “mystical” connection to the writer.
“Kafka was a very alienated person,” he says. “Like me. Sort of passive, kinda shy, obviously neurotic about sex and women and all that. A part of Kafka that I felt a soulmate with, it’s that aspect of alienation and self-loathing … At some point he compares himself to a worm.”
This fusion went so far that, for his conception of Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist,” Crumb drew the skinny self-starving, self-abusing circus performer with his own (younger) face. But it’s probably Kafka’s famous human-transformed-overnight-into-insect from The Metamorphosis, which mostly appealed to the weirdo drawingboard of R. Crumb.
“For me, the bug was not particularly horrifying,” he says, “although people are repulsed by this giant insect. But he’s not a menacing insect. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody. So then, to me, he becomes almost a lovable bug. So I made him a kind of big, fat beetle. It’s a very Jewish self-hatred kind of humor. Which you find in Lenny Bruce and other types of Jewish humor, where they paint themselves as something really repulsive. That all comes out of alienation. The pain of alienation. You can turn it into humor, but it’s a dark humor.”
It was definitely an existential love affair.
“Someone has reached out and touched you from the grave,” as he puts it. “Kafka’s been dead since 1924. That you can feel so close with someone who’s been dead for a couple generations back. Before you were born. And touch something universal, this alienation — that there’s something loathsome about you, and it’s a social thing. Part of you knows that you’re not loathsome, but part of you feels loathsome in relation to society, to other people.“
What basically links them is this strong streak of self-denigration. Self-loathing for Robert Crumb is definitely intertwined with his ambiguous (to understate!) lifelong take on women. He has been vilified for his notorious drawings of oversized women with ample rumps and thick, powerful legs, definitely objectified and more or less turned into meat-at-the-ready. (One of the most famous of these is his irreverent Clinton-era poster Monica Delivers the Pizza, with its derisive caption, “That Bill’s a lucky guy!”) He rides on the backs of his big women figures, contorts their bodies, distends their thighs into pliable shapes. Yet what makes Crumb unique in this world of crypto-porno is his own ferocious self-deprecation in the shadows of these Amazonian figures. The subtitle of his tome Sex Obsessions is Absurd Hi-Jinx With Big Beautiful Girls ‘n’ Creepy Little Guys. And sure enough, the “creepy little guys” are often gnome-sized self-portraits, clinging like ugly trolls to the vast architecture of female limbs, terrified and sweating guiltily. And sometimes ending in mea culpa like the 1988 cartoon Memories Are Made of This. After pages of gross sexual abuse, the klutzy Crumb lookalike hero states, “I know I’m cutting my own throat as far as th’ opposite sex is concerned …. They’ll despise me now…. I’ll never get laid again!”
It’s quite obvious that this all comes from a deep measure of physical insecurity, clearly what Janis Joplin spotted in his comportment. His early dread of contact with women drove his fantasies, and, luckily, he was able to channel this into drawing rather than something more physically dangerous. According to Crumb, women took virtually no notice of him or avoided him like the plague until around 1968. Then suddenly fame intervened.
Crumb clinging to one of his Amazon women. The image covered the 2007 book Robert Crumb’s Sex Obsessions.
© Lora Fountain
“When Zap Comix came out and I started getting recognized, all of a sudden I became interesting to girls. Before that, I was tongue-tied in front of any woman that I was attracted to. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t speak. After I was famous, I didn’t have to say anything. Wow. Suddenly, night and day. The difference? Just fame in this little, cockamamie hippie culture. It wasn’t, you know, international movie-star fame. It was petty fame.”
Malgorzata is meeting him for the first time, and her X-chromosome vibrations easily win the day with the old bearded geezer. She asks him if he ever wrote love letters.
“I wrote love letters to my first wife when I was young. And she sold them! I wrote to the auction house in Texas that bought them and I said, ‘Please just let me have those love letters back, please.’ And so they said, ‘OK, we’ll sell them to you.’ I said, ‘Fuck you, fucking mercenary bastards!’ It was mushy stuff. I didn’t want those out there, but somebody bought them.”
With Malgorzata recording every word on our riverside trek, inevitably the subject comes up: How does this veteran of the sex wars look at all of that now?
“I was ruled by my dick. I cringe with embarrassment to think of the foolish behavior, the nonsense. Oh my God, chasing women. What a bad boy I was. I was bad, selfish, selfish, selfish, selfish. You know, I was lying to this one and running to another one and, you know, lying to that one and running back to the other one. Oh, terrible, terrible. What on Earth did I think I was doing? I was just ruled by the libido, you know, just couldn’t help myself… But, you know, my whole thing with women was always very odd and quirky and strange. Always, always.”
Which brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Politically, Crumb has no doubts about who she is: “The most low-level, sleazy, opportunistic politics of playing on the ignorance of her constituency, which is some remote mountain county of Georgia.”
Nevertheless…
“I saw her on TV, where she was talking. I thought, ‘Oh, she’s kind of good-looking.’ And she’s athletic. She goes to the gym, and she’s just looking terrific. Wow. So a kind of tough-looking blonde, you know? A shiksa from the South. Wow. I started getting the hots for her. Wow. And I thought I could change Marjorie Taylor Greene. I could, you know, if I was involved, I could raise her consciousness and convert her to something more like an ethical state of mind and become a better person as well as, you know, having a good time with her.”
I thought for a moment, on hearing this astonishing news, that we might be lucky enough to expect a new Reactionary Girl comic starring MTG following in the sleazy footsteps of Lenore Goldberg: Girl Commando, Honeybunch Kaminski, Devil Girl, and the other Crumb Amazons.
“I thought about that, but I don’t want to get in trouble,” he says. “Who knows what kind of nasty shit she’d be capable of? Who knows? Nasty. She’s nasty. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Great-looking, though. Boy, what a body! Wow. Tough. Tough body.”
CRUMB IS SURPRISINGLY au fait with the tempestuous political events of the last few years, despite his resistance to electronic input. Still, from all indications in our recent discussions, I can see he’s moved close to the danger zone of right-wing propaganda and conspiracy theory. This is a personal dilemma for me, never having lost an ounce of my lifelong political combat against the reactionary steamroller. Crumb and I have often been at odds politically. I remember, many years back, his giving ear to a moronic Holocaust-denier who had turned up on his doorstep (although RC later renounced this). He can be annoyingly gullible sometimes. Yet, in his favor, he seems to harbor a healthy natural skepticism that has often manifested itself in his artwork and which gnaws at him in his seclusion. Having virtually no one to argue with, he finds himself in natural dialogue with his own private, darker side, one that questions almost everything. On Ukraine:
“Everybody’s always talking about what a terrible guy Putin is. He’s a terrible monster like Hitler. Na da da da da. But I’m not sure the Americans are much better. So what do we know about what’s really going on? We just hear the Western propaganda — United States, Western Europe. And it has its program, its agenda, its interests. What do we really know?”
Crumb is also not vaccinated. He says he would have voted for RFK Jr. if the latter hadn’t gone over to Trump. Moreover, he powerfully backs the health secretary’s “medical” views.
“They’re not legally required to test vaccines the way they do other medicines,” Crumb says. “It’s a commercial enterprise for money. And as Kennedy points out, why does anybody trust Pfizer or any other large pharmaceutical company when they’ve repeatedly been indicted and convicted of fraud and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines? Why do you think they’d be clean about vaccination? So just to be critical or even open to suspicion of hanky-panky or shenanigans around vaccination is immediately shut down by The New York Times or anybody. That’s very suspicious. Something’s not right about that.”
A page from What Is Paranoia?, a book of new work by Crumb released in November.
© Lora Fountain
I can’t accuse him yet of having gone over to the enemy, but I’m compelled to point out to him that he’s flirting with positions taken by reactionaries. In response, he strongly defends his stand from what he sees as a common anti-authoritarian viewpoint.
“It’s nice to hear, to some degree, mistrust of anything coming from ‘authoritative’ sources, coming from the government, coming from the so-called liberal intellectual elite. I have friends who are still part of that liberal elite who don’t question anything that comes from what they think [are] authoritative science sources. To question it means you’re a crazy, right-wing nut. The problem with people on the right is that their thinking is just sloppy. They don’t develop deep powers of discrimination. That or their paranoia is just out of control. You know, they’re just so paranoid that their imagination can take them anywhere immediately.”
Yet he sees himself as integrated into that landscape. In his studio, on the drawing-board, is his latest brew of “paranoia” comics, published in November 2025, amounting to page after page of raw ranting — predominantly text — by the central self-portrait figure, all of it hand-lettered in Crumb’s inimitable all-caps block script:
“LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE NOW HARBOR SUSPICIONS THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING PHONY OR RIGGED ABOUT THE WHOLE PANDEMIC NARRATIVE …. THANKS TO THE ‘PLANDEMIC’ THERE IS NOW A SEVERELY PARANOID BELIEF GOING AROUND THAT THE EVIL CABAL WHICH RULES THE PLANET IS SCHEMING TO KILL OFF SOME UNSPECIFIED NUMBER OF THE ‘USELESS EATERS’! …. I HOPE IT’S NOT TRUE!”
All of this ending in a bold black 72-point spot-on exhortation to “QUESTION AUTHORITY.” And it’s the old geezer Crumb himself doling out these “lessons” which have to be taken with a grain of comic relief to avoid taking them as potential nutcase fodder.
So, for a famous partaker of the Sixties’ let’s-redo-the-planet mentality, where did it all get us?
“Oh, oh, oh. Very dangerous moment. It doesn’t look too good, because these dictators, they betray the trust of the common people. And that leads to bitterness, anger, confusion, violence, and could lead to large-scale organized violence. I hope things go in a positive direction because, you know, I have grandchildren.”
Being so cut off from the “sidetrackings” of city life, stuck within these dreary fortress walls, which, in winter, can seem like stage sets for a dark depression drama, there’s plenty of time for cogitation. Crumb acknowledges he’s “deeply, deeply immersed in conspiracies,” and struggling to find the humor in our current troubled times. A sign, perhaps, that the end is near?
DESPITE BEING A ‘TOTAL FOREIGNER,’ Crumb is content to spend his final days in his adopted homeland rather than return to America. “This medieval village suits my sensibilities just fine,” he says. “You know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” And ironically, since the passing of Aline, he manages to live like a sultan here, despite his isolation. His daughter Sophie helps to look after him, alongside a cadre of local caretakers.
“I’m very lucky. I got this big support group of women. I don’t have to cook for myself that often. They cook, they help me. Like Maggie helps me sort out my business stuff and the tax stuff and all that crap. And Julie takes me shopping. I got Rekha, who helps me clean the house, who lives right next door. It’s a funny thing, wow, when you get to be an old man, women run the world. When you’re young, men are out there messing everything up, always constantly causing turbulence and bullshit going on all the time.”
In this chastened state, Crumb is acutely aware of his mortality, and facing it with more clarity each day.
“Yeah, I’m ready for the box,” he tells us. “I’m ready to be put in a box, so to speak. You know, I’m not as creatively hot as I was in the old days. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. Who knows? Could drop dead tomorrow, have a stroke or something. You know, if I stand up too quickly and I feel woozy, I think maybe this is it, huh?”
This is when Malgorzata asks him if he believes in “life after life.” Knowing him as well as I do after 30 years, his response takes me by surprise.
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“Yes, I do. All I can tell you is a few months ago, I was wondering if Aline’s spirit is out there somewhere, still out there. And her voice came into my head. Suddenly her voice said, ‘Stop doubting, don’t doubt.’ And I stopped doubting instantly. Stopped doubting immediately at that moment.”
Until then, does he feel lost? “Lost? I’m never lost! I’m perfectly at home in my own world, my own little world, which I just carry around with me.”
