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A Libidinal Legacy

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Somewhere, most likely in the former CEO of Nike’s basement, stands a statue of a woman with her legs in the air. She is wearing a red bra, black panties and Mary Janes with schoolgirl socks. Her legs appear to invite; her arms are lifeless, more reticent. At first glance she appears headless, her breasts, abdomen and crotch jutted out upwards. A closer look and we see her head, contorted impossibly parallel to her chest and dragged under the curve of her bottom, so that she faces the heel of her right leg. The woman is comics artist R. Crumb’s Devil Girl, one of his most iconic characters, all ‘outrageous tongue and zaftig body’. She has all of the hallmarks of Crumb’s now-infamous women: emphasised breasts, buttocks and legs. The statue renders her a human checkmark.

Once I knew I was writing about Crumb, I knew I wanted to write about perversion. The situations that perverts imagine or purport are often murky, as is the appellation itself. While perversion may have a long history of depiction in art, and indeed benefitted from the internet bursting the floodgates of the Overton window, there are few artists that have made it their identity so singularly as Crumb. He is famous for his depictions of big-breasted, big-legged women like his beloved Devil Girl. He is also famous for depicting himself in his comics, usually a diminutive, salivating type with his hands all over the former. A cut-out dartboard from one of his comics depicts him leering towards an assumed female viewer: ‘Hey, where ya goin’ doll?! – C’mere, I wanna talk to ya!’

A lot of his work is autobiographical, with some of his most famous strips depicting LSD trips, sexual escapades or interesting people he sees walking down the street. The rest is the fantastical kind, bed-tricks with a bizarro twist, set in the dream-worlds where the likes of Cheryl Borck, Mr Natural, the Snoid and the rest of Crumb’s Freudian avatars reside.

‘He depicts his id in pure form,’ says Aline Kominsky-Crumb in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary on Crumb’s life and family. And at ‘There’s No End to the Nonsense’, an exhibition showcasing some sixty years of work at David Zwirner in London, Crumb’s id is contained politely across two floors. There’s a sweating Crumb hanging off of the gargantuan thighs of a mildly perturbed woman. There’s a ‘Horny Harriet’ strip centered around a beastiality episode. Excerpts from Tales of Paranoia detailing his scepticism of vaccines are kept upstairs, where they were centre stage at his exhibition at David Zwirner LA last year. But I’m drawn to a spasm of intimate, everyday studies rounding a corner on the ground floor, featuring a piece called ‘The Forehead’. It’s a drawing of Aline, dated to New Year’s Day, 1975. Light bounces off long curls, petering out at her forehead, which is signposted to us with a tongue-in-cheek arrow. We don’t get the sense that she’s one of Crumb’s spectacular, big-legged girls, though it’s been said that she may have inspired the Devil Girl. There’s too much of a genuine intimacy in how he draws Aline, in the loving mundanity of knowing someone’s face well. It almost makes me want to take my dart off of the bullseye.

Someone like Crumb, we might think, should hate women. He’s confessed to as much, at least a kind of misogynistic impulse, several times. ‘I have this hostility towards women, I admit it,’ he tells a woman journalist in Crumb, Zwigoff’s documentary. ‘Sometimes I think it’s a mistake … but somehow revealing that truth about myself is helpful. I hope it is. Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to do it, maybe I should be locked up and my pencils taken away from me.’ And yet he maintained healthy friendships with women, a loving relationship with Aline for many decades until her death, and, in 2019, told the Guardian that he had stopped drawing women altogether. Some chalk up the fixated nature of his drawings of women to a fetish, rather than sexual exploitation. Some even call it love. A story from his nineties comic serial Hup, aptly titled ‘You Can’t Have Them All’, is a visual encyclopaedia of beautiful women he had spotted in daily life. In the penultimate panel, he calls feminine beauty ‘a gift of nature’ – that it’s ‘a joy to behold an attractive woman’.

Crumb presents his enjoyment of women’s bodies as totally consuming. His male characters go wild over women, seethe over them, at the cost of appearing lecherous. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s his underlying love for women bubbling beneath illustrations of head-crushing thighs. There’s still the issue of undivided attention – it’s clear that he has spent time observing, dissecting and drawing these bodies. One of the more mundane aspects of Crumb’s sexual fascinations suggests that his mind is imagining the naked body even when his figures are clothed, even when going about everyday life. But his appreciation of the female form, fetishistic or not, lands somewhat nostalgic today.

Looking at some of the figure studies in ‘There’s No End to the Nonsense’, I’m reminded of Renaissance nudes. The Renaissance period carved out a distinction between mimetic and allegorical functions for the nude. To see and respond to a naked body in a painting was distinguishable from seeing a real body. There is certainly the repetitive labour of getting bodies right in this period, which mirrors Crumb’s disciplined practice. But there is also the matter of enquiry into selfhood, identity and how bodies reflect and counter their environments that feels so central to Crumb’s art. A nude could symbolise virtue, purity, untouchedness – it could also be a container of ugliness, external or internal. Naked portraits allowed for a subjective, reciprocal intimacy; a more active participation between artist and sitter could be suggested through gaze and gesture. It’s this subjectivity that Crumb uses to elucidate drama and desire in his work.

Take ‘What O’ Hail’, displayed at the London show. Foreground: two women responding to a catcall or leery gaze. They wear tight tank tops, denim shorts and heels. Background: a blank pastiche of an American strip, the silhouettes of street signage and telephone poles, who could care less where they are? The sunny glow emanating from the centre leads us back to the women, the real focus. The woman in front looks back out at the observer and exclaims, ‘What o’hail yew starin’ at!?’ Despite the affect of anger, she’s smiling. The woman behind her, whose face is obscured, listens in and takes a similar pleasure: ‘Tee hee!’ Crumb’s interested in how his subject reacts, in a subject that is awake. He assumes a playful, bottom-line reciprocity between observer and subject.

His desire is aesthetically constrained but discursive. Perhaps that’s what distinguishes Crumb’s sexual depictions from those of today. Arguably, the manosphere dominates contemporary sexual counterculture – it may as well be considered a closed discourse of desire. The leading figures of the manosphere promote sexless sex, sex without ambiguity, sex without play, power-based rather than erotic or reciprocal – sex becomes something to commodify and accumulate, as though it’s just another pyramid-scheme product. A hot girlfriend in the house does the same symbolic work for manosphere types as a piano, AGA or cockapoo might do for upper-middle class British suburbanites.

As opposed to Crumb, who frames his desires through a prism of ambiguity, self-questioning and play, I have difficulty believing that these men prioritise any kind of desire that isn’t narcissistic and ultimately serving capitalist ends. In Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, influencer and lifestyle investment mogul HSTikkyTokky calls OnlyFans creators ‘disgusting’ while running an adult content house. He has a girlfriend, has sex with other women and employs various adult content creators, yet we get little sense of a cogent desire for women or sex on his part – a common occurrence in the manosphere. Crumb is not this brand of desexualised, capitalist misogynist. His men are imps and goons, with glazed-over eyes and greedy hands. The men he draws, wizard Mr Natural and the bizarrely named pest Snoid, are not fantastical manifestations of the man he wants to be. They slot in neatly to being avatars for the man he believes he is, a perverted outsider.

While it’s difficult to see a real desire for sex or women in the manosphere, there is an analogue to Crumb’s approach in this impulse to situate oneself on the outside. Last year, Daniel Kolitz wrote ‘The Goon Squad’ for Harper’s, profiling a community of mostly men and teenage boys that identify themselves via a shared affinity to ‘goal-oriented’ masturbation, with hopes of eventually reaching a transcendental ‘goonstate’. Proliferating on anonymous forums and gaming platforms, the community situates itself on the extremes of sexual culture, producing hours of porn compilations for masturbation marathons, often including scenes of increasingly violent sex. 

It seems like a nightmare but also a logical consequence of the commodification of sex. I’m reminded of the headless Devil Girl and Crumb’s refusal to shy away from the grotesquerie of desire. The issues he made into confessional art misunderstood – or, more terrifyingly, perfectly understood – by a new generation of outsiders. Except they’ve punctured culture without ever leaving the bedroom.

I was curious to see what Crumb thought of it, and whether, as I hoped, he viewed his work differently. Aware of his reputation as a notoriously recalcitrant interviewee, I admit that I didn’t expect much from his answers, apart from, perhaps, the likelihood that I’d be called a schmuck. To my surprise, however, he responded to the enquiry with five A4 pages of handwritten answers. They had been scanned and sent off by someone he ‘pay[s] to send and receive emails’, foregrounded with the earnest promise to ‘try and respond to them as best I can and not just make flippant wise-ass comebacks’. 

In my initial questions, I wrote that I didn’t get the sense that he was ever speaking for anybody other than himself. I wanted to know how he channelled his libido into his work, and how he believed it differed, if at all, from what the kids are up to now.

‘You are correct: I was never speaking for anybody other than myself in my work,’ Crumb responded. He continued: 

I wouldn’t presume to speak for some segment of the population. I could only speak for myself, for better or worse. My sex fantasy comics were all – virtually all – exercises in masturbation! I was a chronic masturbator my whole life. Most of us don’t have that easy access to real live women. And masturbation only takes you deeper into your fantasies, deeper into some quirky idea of sex that might be far removed from relating to real live female human beings […] The cruel fact of life is that the few alpha males have their pick of the women and the rest of us have to scramble and struggle as best we can with our sexual desires, ’cause nature isn’t fair and doesn’t need all these excess males to impregnate the females and carry on the survival of the species. And nature doesn’t give a hoot if your feelings are hurt.

Dashing my naïve hopes, his ‘cruel fact of life’ sounded straight out of the pages of an incel forum. But it’s also the kind of babble common to locker-room talk, pub chats, The Howard Stern Show. It was purported by the mainstream and the counterculture alike in the LSD-addled period Crumb came up in. In his blog k-punk, Mark Fisher wrote at length about his hatred of the hippie movement (Crumb, while benefitting from it, didn’t identify with the movement itself): ‘It was about males being allowed to regress to that state of His Majesty the Ego, hedonic infantilism, with women on hand to service all their needs.’

A survivalist view on women and sex might explain the sexual mania of Crumb’s work, but not the weirdness, controversy or pathological potential. What drives a person to make a statue like that? His honesty about masturbation proves a bit more interesting. He talks about shame, inwardness and how it drives people away from ‘real live female human beings’. There’s an ambivalence to masturbation that engages with eroticism in a perfunctory way – the directedness of the act, retaining the erotic energy back into the self. Perhaps his ‘sex fantasy comics’ are not about love or hate of sex at all, nor love or hate of women, but are attempting to imitate the onanistic process of dreaming up a sexual fantasy. They’re about loneliness and loss.

The confessional comic is, in some ways, a perfect format for masturbatory talk. You can devote pages, and squares within pages, to presenting and dissecting your own life. The bodies you might have observed and studied from in real life can be distorted, packed into frames, parts emphasised or diminished at will. The play-by-play style of the comic linearises your thoughts without asking you to clean them up, moralise, make it ‘high art’. 

That doesn’t help stop people from close reading. Crumb might be a psychoanalyst’s dream since his comics do the job of narrativising his own perversion. Both authoritative secondary works about his life, Zwigoff’s documentary and Dan Nadel’s 2024 biography, emphasise his long, tumultuous family history, and seem committed to pointing out several moments that could have been ‘the start’. Nadel writes of the incompatibility of the Crumb family’s ‘unflagging work ethic and strict morality’ with their tumultuous lives: abusive parenting, secret children, a younger brother convicted of molestation, an older brother repressing homosexual and possibly paedophilic desires. Crumb’s first orgasm happened ‘by surprise’ during a ‘hormone-charged wrestling game’ with his sister. In the film, Zwigoff encourages Crumb to pinpoint the beginning himself, resulting in the relievingly light-hearted confession that he was ‘sexually attracted to Bugs Bunny’ as a child. Dian Hanson, ‘Sexy Books’ editor at Taschen, has her own go in the documentary. Wearing a schoolgirl uniform and speaking with vocal fry over twenty years before the Red Scare podcast, Hanson gives Crumb’s love for big legs a Freudian analysis:

The mind of a person who’s interested in legs and feet is very different from the mind of a person who’s interested in breasts. Breast men tend to be aggressive, outgoing, athletic, whereas people who like the lower body tend to be frightened, introverted. It all has to do with being down on the floor when you’re a scared little child, you know, looking at that big tower of Mommy. What’s down there? The feet and the legs. That’s where the security is. Women go around feeling victimised by men all the time, they feel like the men have the power, and the area where women can take the power from men is through sex. Men, because they have that fetishistic twist to their minds, because they have that ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of all else, can really be manipulated sexually, whereas women are not as susceptible.

‘You are so frightening,’ Crumb replies. ‘Jesus.’

The act of laying all of these thoughts on paper for people to read and project on might seem exhibitionist and therefore perverted in itself. To me, it seems more a reconciliatory project. The autobiographical comic seems to be convincing himself of himself with every frame. Where thoughts and memories emerge spontaneously, the comic works them into digestible story: neatly, authoritatively, it lays them out, imbues within them a sense of fundamentalness and untouchability. I might be someone who desires, someone who can. I might not know myself, but I know I can be consumed by the beauty of the Other. I can assume control if I lay it all out.

In recent years, his scepticism has surpassed his sexual desires as the main driver of his work. When I ask him about his criticism of Big Pharma, and his particularly controversial opinion on vaccines, he is open about his anti-vax stance: 

Sure enough, the vaccination propaganda was so powerful that to resist it was viewed as anti-social, crazy, paranoid, conspiracy-theory nuttiness. Even my dear wife thought I’d gone off the deep end. She submitted to the SARS-COV-2 vaccine four times. I felt bad for her, but nothing I could say had any effect on her.

Pervading beyond this, though, are those throughlines of control and outsiderdom: 

I would say that since I was around 15–16, I began questioning everything I’d been taught. Why was that? It had something to do with the pain of being a social outcast, I guess. It didn’t take me long to break through a few obvious things: Catholic church; the mass entertainment machine of the time; the relentless political propaganda. By age 17, I was already finished with the Catholic faith, already finished with capitalism, already viewing most of my peers as brainwashed, unthinking dummies. I grew up in the lower middle class. Almost NOBODY in my immediate environment questioned anything coming from authoritative sources, neither the adults, parents, teachers, aunts, uncles, nor anyone in my own age group.

Self-acknowledgement seems to be a long-running practice throughout Crumb’s work. It might also be his way of resisting easy summation, and controlling his stories when he is, or once was, in the business of sharing so much about himself. Like Crumb, I grew up in a working class Catholic family – the indoctrination of accepting God as an authoritative, encroaching, surveillant force undeniably affected me for life. When I read that paragraph, I think of my seventeen-year-old self lying in bed in Thornton Heath, misreading Kierkegaard, waiting for it all to change. Assuming deference for so long is difficult for anybody. 

But it’s too easy, too linear, to read Crumb’s views – not just on vaccines but on sex, on control, on women, on art, on selling out, on not selling out – as some predetermined tragic exodus. That would be pandering and disrespectful of the agency he has tried to uphold his entire life. The sceptic, the malcontent, is hyperaware of positionality. They know what they’re doing. The periphery is the perfect place to observe, to comment, to examine, to depict, to imagine, to fetishise, but not to act.

So much of what I find difficult about consuming Crumb’s work is to do with the reverential treatment he receives – as though his work isn’t at its best when it leans into its ambivalence. His difficulty with the world, and with himself, comes to odds on the page for all to see. It’s interesting to imagine whether the pervert persona was hammed up as a means of evading, or more likely playing with, the prodding gaze of critics and psychoanalysts and other moralists, such as the ‘liberal, well-educated class’ that Crumb abhors.

I come back to the picture of the aforementioned Devil Girl Statue, where a smiling Crumb sits on her raised foot like a masted flag. Like he knows we’re asking if that’s all there is. In an aside on his life, he writes to me: ‘I’m fulfilled, I’m fulfilled. I’m grateful to the fates that rule our destinies. I will go to my grave with no regrets; only remorse for all the stupid, thoughtless things I did, over and over again. Hundreds of times. Jesus, what a schmuck!’

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Gabrielle Sicam is a writer from Croydon.

Cover image details: Detail of Self Portrait (Gun), R. Crumb, 2025, Etching on paper © Robert Crumb, 2025. Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner.

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