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Here's a likely candidate -- years from now it will be widely circulated that the word "crummy" derives from the work of cartoonist Robert Crumb, a world-class malcontent of the late 20th century. Crumb surveyed the urban landscape of his era and pronounced his verdict: Everything sucks big time, including humanity and, most especially, Robert Crumb. "At least I hate myself as much as I hate anybody else," Crumb once said. Coming from the author of "Self-Loathing Comics," you can take that to the bank.

Also Today An R. Crumb gallery A selection of drawings by Robert Crumb. (Click to display images in a new browser window. Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0)

Crumb certainly did. His status as the bull-goose legend of underground cartooning meant that in the early '90s he was able to trade six of his sketchbooks for a house in the South of France. But Crumb's career has never been about maximizing financial possibilities -- that would mean signing on with mainstream pop culture, which Crumb, of course, despises. In fact, Crumb's repeated rejection of commercial opportunities (he once turned down an offer to do a Rolling Stones album cover because he hated the band) marks him as one of the last remaining exemplars of the egalitarian '60s hippie ethos he came to represent for so many people.

There's only one problem with this -- Crumb despised the '60s hippie ethos he came to represent for so many people. And the '70s sucked even worse and he's not that enthused about drawing and he really hates Bruce Springsteen. "The only burning passion I'm sure I have," he once said, "is the passion for sex."

Robert Crumb was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 30, 1943, to a Marine father and a devout Catholic mother. His first cartooning efforts were inspired not by love of the art form but by sibling dynamics -- as the third of five children young Robert inevitably fell under the sway of his oldest brother. "Charles forced me to draw comics," Crumb recalled in "The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book" (Back Bay Books). "If I didn't draw comics I was a worthless human being. It was tedious labor, so I worked fast to get it over with."

Crumb and his brothers soon became experts on the comic form, treasuring late '40s work like Little Lulu and, later, Walt Kelly's Pogo. The 1995 documentary "Crumb," directed by the cartoonist's friend Terry Zwigoff, unforgettably details the Crumbs' suburban gothic world -- a father described as a "sadistic bully" who broke Robert's collarbone at age 5, a mother hooked on amphetamines and, down in the trenches, a fierce three-way fraternal rivalry dominated by the increasingly reclusive and unbalanced Charles.

Crumb's burgeoning misanthropy was stoked, as is so often the case, by adolescence. "I realized I was a geek and I wasn't going to make it with the girls," Crumb wrote. "I felt so painfully isolated that I vowed I would get revenge on the world by becoming a famous cartoonist."

In the late '50s young Robert discovered Mad magazine and later Humbug, which introduced him to the work of Harvey Kurtzman. "I lived, breathed and ate the pages of his magazines," Crumb recounted in a 1989 cartoon called "Ode to Harvey Kurtzman." "I was truly in love."

In 1962 Crumb got his first real job as an illustrator at American Greetings in Cleveland. The tedious grunt work had him on the brink of quitting until he was elevated to the role of illustrator for the slightly edgier Hi-Brow line. (Crumb's boss was future Ziggy creator Tom Wilson, who encouraged Crumb to make his drawings "less grotesque." Crumb claims it took years to expunge the resulting "cuteness" from his work.) After sending an early Fritz the Cat cartoon to Kurtzman at Help! magazine, Crumb received the following note from his boyhood idol: "We really liked the cat cartoon, but we're not sure how we can print it and stay out of jail."

But print it they did. Soon Crumb was working as Kurtzman's assistant at the short-lived Help! (where the staff included future Monty Python animator and filmmaker Terry Gilliam).

"My dad always said I'd marry the first one who came along," Crumb remarks ruefully in one autobiographical strip. That turned out to be Dana Morgan. "Big mistake," Crumb later wrote -- the new husband was just 21 years old and chronically broke. Nearly destitute, the couple traveled in Europe while Crumb continued to do work for Kurtzman and American Greetings. Dana stole food.

The turning point in Crumb's career came in 1965 -- specifically, it came in a little glass vial. "LSD was legal the first time I took it," Crumb wrote. "The first trip was a completely mystical experience ... It was the Road to Damascus for me. It completely knocked me off my horse and altered the way I drew. I stopped drawing from life."

With the exception of Fritz the Cat, all of Crumb's best-known creations date from his post-acid phase, including his most inspired character, Mr. Natural. Crumb's bearded little guru is no con man -- he's too unapologetic for that. A straight-talking sybarite (booted out of heaven for telling God it's "a little corny" in "Mr. Natural Meets God"), Mr. Natural is chronically plagued by tight-ass neurotics like Flakey Foont and Schuman the Human, and may be the only Crumb creation who can genuinely be described as likable.

Zap Comics, consisting entirely of Crumb art, debuted in 1967, with the artist and his wife selling the first issue on San Francisco street corners. Underground comics are now remembered as an indispensable part of the era, but it was Zap that blazed the trail. "The people who ran the hippie shops looked at Zap and said, 'Comic book? What do we want with a comic book?'" Crumb recalled.

Next page | An icon of the hippie scene and a babe magnet