R. Crumb: Smut and Strength
Counter-cultural artist R. Crumb built a career on his lust, but his objectified women can still strut their own agency.
All images are drawings from the sketchbooks of R. Crumb. Courtesy the artist
Stormy Daniels looks in control, returning the viewer’s gaze in American cartoonist Robert Crumb’s respectful 2019 portrait of her – long hair flowing over her right shoulder, lips slightly parted. Donald Trump paid to keep those lips shut, and Daniels’ own lawyer was then convicted of defrauding the porn actress and director of more than twice as much as the former US president paid to her in hush money.
Philadelphia born Crumb, now 78 years old, has always been drawn to powerful women – though they usually have smaller breasts than Daniels, huge backsides, powerful muscular chunky legs and erect, nubile nipples.
In his 1987 comic Footsy, “the true story of how I became a teenage sex pervert!!,” Crumb recalls lusting after the beautiful Jeanette Bates who sat behind him in American history, “her gorgeous legs sprawled carelessly, surrounding me … pressed up against me, radiating powerful girl sex vibrations.” This was 1956, and Crumb was 13 years old. To Crumb’s right in the classroom sat “sultry, steaming” Dolly Hensley who also, in Crumb’s feverish recollection, positioned herself in “various lascivious sprawling slouches at her desk.” Teenage girls flocked to Crumb, as though he were a fountain of pheromone, but the Footsy illustrations often show female agency in the power of their sexuality.
Crumb can’t help problematising this favourable reading at regular intervals, however. In one panel, he shows an alpha male called “Wayne something-or-other” slapping a “passive” Dolly in public, “inciting everyone’s disapproval and secret envy.”
The hand of the author of such masturbatory material would be forgiven for shaking, but there’s ...Subscribe to read this article in full
