30 years ago: ‘Crumb’ was one of the best biographical documentaries ever made

Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 film looked at the life and work of the world’s most peculiar cartoonist.

Crumb, director Terry Zwigoff’s nonfiction portrayal of the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, is one of the best kinds of documentaries. It depicts the life of a fascinating subject, spends a lot of time with him, explores his life and career, and then peels back the layers to give us some insight into how he got the way he is.

Often called R. Crumb, he was a pivotal figure in the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s, doing work that was subversive and often described as pornographic (and occasionally, misogynistic and racist).

Crumb debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1994, but reached theaters in April of 1995, 30 years ago this week. It’s one of the best documentaries of the 1990s, and one of the most important biographical docs in the history of the medium.

Terry Zwigoff was a friend of Crumb’s from the Underground Comix scene, and the two even played together in a string band called R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders. He worked on the film for nearly a decade, although Zwigoff remains an unabtrusive prescence.

R. Crumb is still alive now, at age 81, but even by the time of the documentary in the mid-1990s, he was already sort of edging towards an elder statesman role, if such a thing is possible in the world of subversive comics. The film follows Crumb in his travels, as he revisits his hometown of Philadelphia, speaks to art students, and prepares to move to France.

There’s a lot of R. Crumb being interviewed on camera, and he emerges as a troubled but mostly sympathetic oddball. We also learn a lot about his family, and the nightmarish, abusive home from which he emerged. Did this bring about lifelong issues with women? Crumb cops to that on camera, even admitting at one point to a youthful childhood fixation on Bugs Bunny.

More is gleaned through interviews with his two even stranger, more troubled brothers, one of whom admits on camera to molesting women on the subway, and the other of whom died by suicide in between his interview and the release of the film.