R. CRUMB: Documentary & His Work

Robert Crumb--“considered the father of underground comics”-- is a difficult man to comment on, he operates from the inside-out on such a large basis, from so practical a point-of-view, that his work and personality both demand to be left alone. Finding their own ways to operated, they’re gold mines for psychotherapy that are better off never being psychoanalyzed. His cards are laid out on the table, but not in consciously thought out duress—he’s anything but full-of-shit, but not necessarily on purpose--and his presence demands to be taken as it is—whether it’s gimpy and painful or not, which is exactly how his artwork functions as well: it would rather be like that than attempt to be something it’s not.





Consequently Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary on R. Crumb and his family (Crumb) is relevant in a way that’s almost entirely regardless of his presence and impact on cartoons, graphic novels, and visual-narrative as a whole. What it says, it says on a sensitive human level that has nothing to do with his celebrity. It’s like the only really important role his fame plays is getting the film crew to his door in the first place (though he already knew the director from elsewhere--I was surprised to see that David Lynch produced this).


Indeed, I would have to go look up some dissected history of any of the fore-mentioned mediums to be able to tell you exactly what the impact he had was in the first place. But it's easy to know from a quick overview of his work and placement of its context that he did have some huge kind of lasting and important role in getting those mediums to the place their in now. That impact probably ranges from presentation to illustrative style and subject matter, and its core has to be in the point-of-view that lies behind the way Crumb delivers his narrative images as serious, realistic, and accurate representations of feelings and observations in our social reality, with no self-consciousness about the medium or content whatsoever.



He made his comics un-apologetically because he wasn't thinking of them as anything less than necessary--almost as if they weren’t “comics” at all, but just the way he managed to project his subconscious into something external, something that functioned inside of the socio-cultural setting, and that kept him from going insane while in it himself. And I'm only talking about the style and presentation of the medium he used--the filter through which everything was rendered, but it’s even truer of the content that that medium held a dialogue with. Together they contributed to building a foundation that would push comics and cartooning into a realm where they can exist as they are now--from the Watchmen to Family Guy. It’s a hard thing to pin down, and operating off of an intuitive innately human drive in the first place, it asks not to be.


Crumb’s work operates at the base of human consciousness and shouldn’t be dissected, or even given too much credit for that matter—it should be taken for what it is. And all of this is of course, especially true of his sexually explicate content that’s often taken by some as "pornographic”, whatever that means—I guess even the most sarcastic and the most poetic of erotica would be considered porn when put in “cartoon” form, especially if done so by a man.



“R.Crumb Draws the Blues” works like that: all it is, is a biography with cultural background and information that he happened to care enough about to talk about and preserve, and which would probably have been lost disjointed from history otherwise. The fact that it's a comic was extremely significant to the medium of comics at in the time-period it was made, but totally irrelevant to the thing itself and to what it’s function is. R. Crumb wasn't trying to blast open the comic-book industry and revolutionize something or other with realistic, socially pertinent, or adult material. He was just writing what he felt like in comic-form, because that's what his pen did, that's what made sense to him, it’s what let whatever it was he had coming out of him come out. The end.


What I find most interesting at the core of this perspective he has on reality is the way that everything he writes and draws, to him is very un-exaggerated. If I had seen his work with no background context and sense of this perspective I wouldn't have liked the artistic style at all. I would have taken it as cartoony and uninviting to my tastes and walked the other way before I even got to the juicy stuff. Having that background context (or taking a lot of LSD) pulls you into Crumb’s almost magical lens on reality. After watching the documentary and being made aware of that perspective behind the art, I found myself looking around New York at eccentrically shaped characters, noticing visual character ticks, ranges of steatopygia, etc. etc. and seeing how un-exaggerated many cartoon depictions actually are. Once you have that kind of lens it’s easy to see how Crumb’s representations of people are realistic to him.



The place he resides in is one where those characteristics are at the forefront of perception as opposed to the linearly organized judgments, social cues, and definitive stances in social life, two-dimensional and photographic, that we get programmed into taking by the modern western world. A sensibility of the beauty of—not just the feminine form, but of all human images—under many different apparitions and frames is crossed out of our wiring by this two-dimensionality, and replaced by cookie cutter ideals that are actually…well, not so sexy. Crumb’s take on women, though it can be a bit ominous, is refreshing. It’s as much an admittance of the colossal strength and dominance of women as it is of totally objectifying and patronizing urges. Between the “Zohan-like” lack of superficial pickiness or constructed ideal of what's attractive, and the honesty in the objectifying, self-serving perspective of attraction—there's something very base and primal about the way he neurotically resides within our species—It’s in a very real and full-of-presence kind of way—It comes from that larger lack of bullshit sensitivity that lies behind Crumb’s perspective.



It seems to me that if the confrontational side of his work at once kind of bothers and kind of interests you its a good thing, and if it bothers you to the point you think it's distasteful and "bad", it says more about your flaws and issues as a natural human being than it does about his. I don’t think these themes should be questioned. They make sense. And they need to be ripped open and pulled out of people more than they are now. It’s a part of us that’s kept hidden and trampled by the idea of psychotherapy, of sinning, a big-brother mentality, and a sense of the Other peering over your shoulder in a world where things that shouldn't be repressed are—and that’s was inevitably causes the real problems. In a world where the symbolic concept of incest never comes out of the back of people’s heads, their personal monsters are going to continue to make them mal-function on a daily basis, and worse things will sneak out in the dark at night than incest.

THE SURROGATES: Flesh and Bone

Robert Venditti's prequel to his original series the Surrogates reads as a very well executed crime-drama. The story's neat and clean in its style, as is the art ...and it's all a bit disappointing. But I haven't read the original series, so perhaps this just reads better as a prequel and not a stand alone. Venditti created a fictional world that's extremely socially relevant, fun to interact with, and that has a natural affinity towards directly and actively engaging the reader whether its through new-media or the paper content itself (eg. see the Surrogate-world pamphlets and articles printed inside the book itself)--and even almost in a meta-fiction sense given its subject matter.

BUT, the formulaic crime-drama style seems to totally undermine the potential of that world--especially in terms of character development, thus (at least for those of us that reside on the human-connection side of the spectrum) hindering reader-identification. That pulls you out of the narrative in my book, and if you don't care too much about the characters in the story--no matter how great the conceptual-world is--you don't care too much about the narrative underway. Even if you have a wonderful conceptual backdrop I think its 95% necessary to have very identifiable uniquely driven characters to pull people in. But not just "pull people in": really do something significant and cathartic, to the point where they really do care, and can fall in love with the universe of circumstance that's surrounding those characters on a level that brings everything to life (Eg. Starwars, re-Star-Trek, District 9, Y the Last Man, Battlestar Galactica, pretty much everything Whedon has ever done (even kinda Toy Story & granted Dollhouse is just getting there), and on and on and on). I almost think that's what makes meaningful, successful Sci-Fi and Fantasy (at least when there are large socially/politically relevant circumstances at hand). The SUBJECTIVE human element is what makes it matter. When you have an impersonal, universal concept, you need a very personal ground-level place to set the focus.

Big concept, immediate meaningful subject---that's what it's all about right now, between Einstein, the economy, the politics, three-dimensional interactive television, and vacuum-robots that eat things you drop on the floor, it's what people need in our present socio-ecological situation. (eg. Pomo -> 'Altermo'?)

All of "The Surrogates" seems kind of impersonal and bland, formulaic, like Law and Order (<--everybody running around playing with dead people, and rapists, and murderers, and you never even see the inside or their apartments where they're probably drinking themselves to sleep at night). Perhaps this just isn't Vendetti's strong suit, and this will (hopefully, because there is so much great potential here) be a case where the movie adaption more successfully delivers, and at once expands, what's been offered up here. Interestingly enough, the way Vendetti's set the story up seems like it should be a movie, not a comic--and that it will work much better as such (--action driven, visual landscapes, core base-protagonist that's someone Bruce Willis can hop in and play--). If the marketing says anything about it, hopefully it will deliver--



--hopefully it will really manifest a concept and be able to get at people's throats while involving them in the 'play'. I just wish these marketing schemes behind wonderfully constructed corporate funded sci-fi endeavors would take it a step further. It's always just a marketing thing, for the buzz etc.--a business model--viral, guerrilla, new-media, whatever: it's never taken deeper into part of the actual medium and narrative, but remains a means to an end upon that mediums release ( 1 ).

Fans are still taking it upon their own initiative to 'involve in the media' on a visceral level, and in that atmosphere the involvement can only be taken seriously by the fanatical and the escapists, or by anyone ballsy enough to ignore reality and go the 'play' alone: (--all dressed up in your personalized Battlestar Galactica dogtags with nowhere legitimizing to go--). It's the kind of thing that's going to have to stem from one big breakthrough in the entertainment world (to alter people's sense of what's possible and legitimate), and from the ground up. Because even in the best of worlds, the 'Industry' and the people that work in it are either concerned with industry standards and deliverables (Eg. money for money) or too busy working their fingers to the bone inside of it to do their thing and create their creations the secure, reliable way.

But back to Surrogates.


Even if you give the author the benefit of the doubt, that he made conscious decisions to do things this way, it isn't working. An attempt to go over the top with impersonal edge..? Yeah, not so much. There's nothing to contrast the bland "personality take-over" to without at least one primary, uniquely driven and conflicted central starting point. You need to have some meaty good stuff before you can rip it open and spill those guts on the table--and you need a real-looking person, a real-feeling character before there's a response to it's face falling off (it's the moment Terminator cut into his forearm before the act of tearing up a human-looking android got it's own status quo).

Even the antagonist feels two dimensional. And I'm not sure what it was, or if it was even intentional, but the way black people were treated in the narrative was ishy. Maybe there's a larger political thing he's trying to say about minorities, or maybe it's an Atlanta, Georgia cultural context that I'm totally unaware of, but this didn't feel open ended enough, and I kept waiting for some conclusive punch to an end 'message' that was being set up but it never came...

The protagonist is real, not fictional, and becomes real to readers, when delivered by the right conductors--the right MEDIUMS that will balance the character of the content with our reality-based sensitivities, deliver their livliness to our concept of reality.

Thre is the same kind of de-sensitizing effect with the art-- it seems like an attempt to de-personalize the setting, literally wash it out, to only hop up the details on certain significant objects, etc. But it just doesn't work, especially given the new-media esque style of the story. You need genuine faces here (actors provide all that's missing without having to create it seperately--they give us a highly individualized empty cell, or vehicle for the character).

The whole point is that these Surrogates, these robots, are real simulations, and that the contrast between them and the 'Boners' (not a reference to what some people might be doing using the robots for, but a slang term in the series for real, physically present, human-bodied people) is their warm-blooded gritty reality. The loss of identity delt with here by the subject matter is a subtle and psychic one, not a visual one--it's of the individual and of living energy, maybe even going as far as raising questions of our 'souls' (where do they really live?!) in the face of avatars and technology.


Hence: artwork, story approach, general filter over the package: great package but when you get down to it...ERRRN-, not working. I'd like to see this become a larger more collaborative circuit (movies, tv would probably work well) or even just be expanded into a larger comic-series (sans Brett Weldele on the inside panels, as interesting and stylistically refined as he is).


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Notes!:

1. For example, Dollhouse had an alternate reality interactive video blog online (www.rprimelabs.com - recently taken down, hopefully because they're going to do something new) pre-release that went so far as to have an actor playing an unknown doll (Hazel/Foxtrot) interact with and rely on 'viewers' to get her out of a dramatic jam. But even many of the hard-core Joss Whedon fans still don't know about it while it was happening, and it's something that could have been extremely significant via viewer-participation not only for campaigning at a point of desperation when the show was almost canceled, but for building upon the narrative without the prime-time slot if it was canceled, and generating awareness and marketing virally throughout the time prior to this season. The older generation that's 'running the show' in the entertainment business just doesn't think this way. That is going to change.
   

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