Woah, woah, woah, Fantagraphics. “The most well-respected cartoonist of all time”? I mean, sure, subculture-galvanizing, barrier-demolishing, graphically and thematically adventurous — I wouldn’t even quibble if you called him the greatest cartoonist of all time, because that’s a ridiculous thing to call anyone, and Barks and Kirby and Tezuka and Hergé and Herriman (and and and) are all different enough that they can all be the greatest in their own way and it be just as true of all of them, but the most well-respected? Of all time? Here’s two groups you didn’t poll when you decided that that was the advertising jingle you were going with: women and people of color. Which is to say, most people. People who would have huge barriers to respecting R. Crumb after only a couple panels’ worth of exposure to his work, no matter how “subversive” and “rawly honest” his use of misogyny and racism is. I have no doubt he’s respected, especially by younger cartoonists — I respect him greatly myself, and I mostly never want to read his work* — but let’s not pretend he’s universally beloved, or ever wanted or tried to be.
One anecdote from a long-digested article or thread somewhere or other has stuck with me for nearly a decade: during a roundtable between Al Hirschfeld, Jules Feiffer, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware, Crumb came up, and the reactions of the four cartoonists were instructive. Ware, of course, regarded him as a foundational master, like pretty much every alt- or art-cartoonist born after 1960. Spiegelman regarded him as a peer, one very much at the head of the class, but who was working in parallel, rather than in the same, stream. Feiffer knew who he was — one of those young upstarts — but wasn’t much impressed by his iconoclasm. And Hirschfeld had never heard of him at all. Of those four, Hirschfeld’s is, of course, the life I’d most like to have lived.
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*As opposed to looking at it; motherfucker can draw.
(Source: fantagraphics.com)
