Robert Crumb (original) (raw)
Robert Crumb (after long and sustained applause): A couple of empty seats there. Not that popular, huh?
Steve Bell: Good evening. Well, I'm supposed to be interviewing you, Robert. I've been preparing for this for weeks, worrying about it.
RC: Man, that's pathetic.
SB: I realised how much of your work I haven't seen.
RC: That's because so much of it's been confiscated by Her Majesty's Customs over here. Tony Bennett here? He knows all about that.
SB: Yeah, Knockabout Comics, who publish you over here.
RC: Yes, also they imported books from the US, and often they had to deal with HM Customs, who are free to confiscate anything that they don't like. Then, you have to take them to court and prove, to the satisfaction of the court, whether the stuff is too obscene to be seen by the sensitive British public.
SB: I can't fathom that. But there you go, we live in a prudish time.
RC: This is a society steeped in tradition, you know.
SB: That's interesting, tradition, because I was going to talk to you about your style of work. It's traditional, isn't it? It's not modern.
RC: Stylistically, yes. I go with the old stuff, I like the old look.
SB: It makes you think of the early 20th century American newspaper strips.
RC: Yeah, there's that. There's also like 19th century, 18th century... I go all the way back.
SB: Inky stuff.
RC: Lots of crosshatching.
SB: One of your fans once told you that he enjoyed your crosshatching more than being stoned.
RC: More than getting high.
SB: Which is the ultimate compliment, isn't it?
RC: Totally the ultimate compliment. That goes all the way back to Hogarth, Gillray, all those guys had beautiful crosshatching technique.
SB: Were you aware of Hogarth and Gillray as a kid?
RC: No.
SB: So that was later.
RC: Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.
SB: Do you remember the Popeye cartoons?
RC: [Hums the theme tune]. Great stuff. Max Fleischer. Can't beat it.
SB: I was always in awe of that. Here it used to come on at 5.25 on Wednesdays and Fridays on TV. This was back in the 50s. There were two types of Popeye cartoons: one where he wore a black shirt - nothing to do with politics, he just had a black sailor suit. This was in the 30s. And then there were the ones where he wore a white suit, in the 40s during the war. And I used to hate the white suit.
RC: The earlier ones were much better.
SB: The 30s stuff were really crude.
RC: Yeah, Max Fleischer. Tremendous.
SB: I see a lot of that stuff in your stuff. Things like the Goons, in the faces. And Swee' Pea, the baby, crops up as Mr Natural's companion.
RC: Oh yeah, that goes back to EC Segar, the guy who invented the Popeye comic strip and the animated cartoon in the early 30s. Now, you can get all this stuff on video - it's one of the wonders of modern technology, you can see any of this stuff anytime you want. When we were kids, you had to wait for it to come on TV. You wouldn't know when one of the good ones would come on, or one of the bad ones. When I had my daughter, she's 23 now, I made sure to give her a classical education in this stuff. When videos became available in the 80s, instead of watching stupid modern crap on TV, I made her watch early Max Fleischer cartoons.
SB: A lot of that stuff was suppressed in the early years because it was considered either racist or too violent.
RC: That's right, in the 50s they censored a lot of that stuff. There was that series of Hal Roach comics, Our Gang, later called The Little Rascals. Did they show that in England?
SB: They might have done.
RC: They're these films of little kids made in the 30s and the ones we saw in the 50s were really choppy - something was wrong but you couldn't tell what. Now you can see the whole thing - they cut out huge bits of them which were thought to be too scary for kids in the 50s. Or stuff that was too racist, like little black kids who would get scared of ghosts and go running off with their eyes popping out. Stuff like that.
SB: I notice you don't draw Angelfood McSpade any more.
RC: Well, yes. It just got so damn touchy, you know. I was naive when I was young, I thought everybody would see the satire, this making fun of the racist images. But oh no. But I can understand it, I can see it can be hurtful, yes.
SB: The problem with irony is that sometimes people take it literally.
RC: Or, you know, what's called hard satire, which means it's so ... like that strip I did of When The Niggers Take Over America. Ooh... [sucks in breath] it's just too hard. Just the mention of the word "nigger", already people can't deal with that word. You can say "fuck" now, but you can't say "nigger". I understand. But you can't even use it for the purposes of satire, it's just too nasty.
SB: What are the purposes of satire?
RC: To give us all relief from these taboos and these nervous tensions where things can't be talked about. So humour and satire are a safety valve for releasing these nervous tensions. But there's such a thing as cruel humour. A lot of old time humour is based on making fun of some ethnic group - it's not so funny for us any more.
SB: Something I've always loved about your stuff, it's the way you write. I love the way you draw them, the drawing is exquisite...
RC: Thank you, sir.
SB: Yes, let's get that shit out of the way. I've always been in awe of you. But I like the way you write the strips, the way you start off, and once you're in the strip then you've got us by the eyeballs, as it were.
[Slide 1: Definitely A Case of Derangement]
I think this is autobiographical. The guy with glasses is sort of based on you. And the woman cringing in the background is, I think, based on your first wife.
RC: That's from way back in 1967.
SB: [Reading the strip aloud] "My wife cringes in the corner while I stalk the house like a raving lunatic. I want my money back! Phooey! Cripes! Nuts! Cancel my rhumba lessons!" That's what I love about your work - the way you just throw in ludicrous ... the way you shoot off the speech bubbles. They just seem completely random but that's what draws you in to these strips.
RC: Especially back then, when I was taking a lot of LSD.
SB: You poor sap.
RC: It was good for the comics, though it wasn't good for survival.
SB: I love that line there, "The truth is, I'm one of the world's last great medieval thinkers." It's sort of very true, isn't it?
RC: I copied Bosch there. There's a sort of pig with a book on his head and a strange exploding egg character.
SB: I love the way Robert captures speech patterns - "You might say I'm a mad scientist but my plans have been worked out quite methodically. Logically. The ends justify the means. Heh-heh. This comic book is part of that plan, but you've read too much already. I have you right where I want you. So kitchee-koo you bastards!" I wouldn't say you have contempt for your audience, but you do have them right where you want them.
RC: I was higher than a kite in those days, boy. Just reading it now makes me feel high again.
RC: I've really calmed down a lot since those days. My work's sombre now compared to that. It's been so long since I got high.
SB: How long?
RC: Thirty years. I'm sober as a judge.
SB: I'm glad one of us is.
[Voice from the audience: "You haven't calmed down."]
RC: What's that you're saying Aline? My wife says I haven't calmed down. Really? Well, if you say so. You know me better than anybody. That's a scary thought. She knows me better than... Aggh!
SB: My first experience of your stuff was in 1967. It was a page of Fritz the Cat which was in a book called The Penguin Book of Comics. Wonderful book, it had stuff going way back. Your page was right at the end of the book - it was like the future of comics.
RC: I vaguely remember that.
SB: It was a great strip. And it hooked me. Now, Fritz the Cat was made into a terrible animated film by Ralph Bakshi.
RC: It was embarrassing.
SB: But the strips are something special, and what I like about them is the looseness of your line.
[Slide 2: Fritz the Cat]
SB: Were you drawing this with a Rotring or a mechanical pen?
RC: Yeah, Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph. [brings it out]
SB: And you got that from when you worked at the American Greetings company? Do you still use it?
RC: Yeah.
SB: Don't they stick up?
RC: It's a pain in the ass. You have to maintain it, it's real touchy.
SB: You shake it.
RC: Yeah, you have to shake it, clean it, take it apart and get ink all over yourself. I used to have ink blots all over my shirts.
SB: Is that a 0.2 or a 0.4? Let's get technical about it.
RC: This is a 0.0.
SB: That's very thin.
RC: I've always used that. Throwaway pens are no good - I never liked them, I've tried them all. But the disposable ones they make now, they're all crap. They even have ones with a kind of Rapidograph point but they're just mushy, it's not the same.
SB: When you do a finished strip, presumably you use a dip pen.
RC: I use crow quill, yeah. You can still buy them but they're getting harder to find.
SB: You mean quills off a crow?
RC: That's what they were originally, but now it's just a steel point.
SB: Sorry about all the technical crap.
RC: All these art supplies - they're getting antique now. It's harder to find good paper, decent black drawing ink, the pens, any decent kind of white for white out. It's all becoming obscure, everyone's using fucking computers now. Do you use computers?
SB: Not to draw, no.
RC: You don't use Photoshop to colour them in or nothing? I'm proud of you, continuing the old ways. Old ways are best.
SB: But I do use Photoshop to scan them in and send them off. It's wonderful stuff - you don't have to fuck about taking artwork to the printers. I just scan it in, press a button and bingo, it's right where I want it to be. It doesn't affect the quality of the line - the line is manual.
RC: I know artists now who draw on a computer - they just don't bother with paper and pens and all that crap any more.
SB: But there's something about paper, and ink. Something about the "krrrrk"... You're a southpaw, you draw with your left hand. How do you hold the pen, can you show us?
RC: Oh come on.
RC: I'm sure when the printing press first came into existence, all those guys who did the beautiful, hand-drawn books were bitching and complaining: "Look at the quality, these printed books are shit! Compared to this beautiful thing that we do, this tradition, this fine thing, with all the hand-lettering, and beautiful capitals and floral designs. It's over. Finished.
SB: Sorry, I don't mean to drag you back to Fritz the Cat, but he was your own creation, very early on.
RC: Yes, it goes back to my teenage years.
SB: What I love about this is the simple, ludicrous way you write - it just drags you in. It's almost stream-of-consciousness. You weren't on acid when you did this, were you?
RC: No, this is actually from the acid period. Look at how sloppy the handwriting is. I turned that out really fast. I don't do anything like that any more, I never work that sloppy or fast any more.
SB: Are you sure? Some of the stuff in the [The R Crumb Handbook] which are quite...
RC: Sloppy?
SB: Loose. Some of the later stuff, like... [shows RC one of the back pages]
RC: That's nothing like as loose as that [Fritz slide]. And also, that's a placemat drawing I did in a restaurant.
SB: Loose is good, loose is nice.
RC: It can be. But sometimes people are too loose.
SB: Like Toulouse-Lautrec? You live close to Toulouse-Lautrec don't you?
RC: Yes. Wonderful artist.
SB: Toulouse-Lautrec was a great influence on me, too. That wonderful fluid line he had.
RC: Oh yeah.
SB: The way he could sum up a roomful of people laughing, dancing.
RC: Behind that is a lot of art education, you can tell just by looking at it. He's very sure about what the human figure looks like. He must have drawn thousands of them.
SB: But you never had a proper art education, did you? You got your art education from just doing it, working for the American Greetings card company.
RC: A lot of pencil mileage. Through the years, I've continued to educate myself and draw from life. Do you ever do that?
SB: I don't draw enough. The only time I seem to do that is when I go to party political conferences. You'd love them - like at the Conservative party conference, you can get to draw Margaret Thatcher close up.
RC: Wow, [whistles]. That's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.
SB: You don't give a shit about depicting politicians do you?
RC: I hate them so much that the bile would just rise up and overpower me. I couldn't do that.
SB: But you are very political, I can sense that.
RC: In some kind of existential way, I don't know.
SB: Your work is very existential.
RC: Yeah, that's right. Sure. Oh dear.
SB: This next slide [Slide 3] is Ducks Yas Yas.
RC: It's an old song. [sings] You never heard that? It was written by James Stump Jackson, a black guy, in 1929.
SB: Wonderful, and obviously you have all these records.
RC: Yes, I do.
SB: We were just talking about existentialism, and this strip is very existential.
RC: This is kind of making fun of the Jack Kerouac-Allen Ginsberg beatnik thing.
SB: I love that close-up of a spoon, like it has meaning or significance, when there's none at all. And this fabulous close-up of a face, and the eyeball. Honestly, I copy that drawing.
RC: That was very poorly printed, originally, because it was printed from a Xerox photocopy, not from original art, which had been stolen from me. Later the artwork turned up again for a little while, but was immediately sold off by my first wife and her lawyer. Anyway, I've been trying for decades to get someone to give me decent copies of that so that I can get that printed decently. It's gone, it's too hard.
SB: [reads strip aloud] "Smilin Ed is dead. Gone forever. Shit!"
RC: I guess you don't know who Smilin Ed is - he was an American personality, Smilin Ed McConnell. He was a TV kiddie show host in the early 50s.
SB: The other thing I love about your stuff is they don't go on for very long - they're short. You like short bursts.
RC: I lose patience with long stories. I get people who go, "Crumb, do some long stories, do a graphic novel." Novel-schmovel.
[Slide 4: Whiteman]
RC: This is all stuff from the same period - 67-68.
SB: This is the stuff that got to me, sorry, so I'm just going to talk about this stuff all night.
RC: [does whiney voice] What about my later stuff?
SB: Would it be presumptuous to say that Whiteman was based on your father.
RC: Kind of my father and a lot of men of that generation in America, those second world war guys. All of them were like that. He's kind of repressed.
SB: I don't want to bring you down, man... but I prepared for this for weeks, by studying your work, reading the books. And then I thought, what's the point, because you're an existentialist.
RC: Yeah, let's just be spontaneous.
SB: So, the real question I want to ask you - apart from nibs, which you've answered - when you write a strip, it's so good and so strong and it grabs you and holds you...
RC: Thank you. I just make it up as I go along.
SB: That's what I was going to ask you. Do you start with a blank page?
RC: I start at the upper left hand corner...
SB: And from that you get the nine frames?
RC: I roughly pencil them out on the page. I have a template which I can put on a piece of paper and mark off the edges.
SB: And do you work out the story in pencil first?
RC: I work out a couple of panels - two or three - at a time. I don't like to plan the whole thing, then it becomes boring, having to draw it when you know how it's going to end.
SB: Do you have to do it in a room on your own, or can you do it in a room full of people breathing down your neck?
RC: Originally I did it all alone, and that was fine. Then after I got kind of well known, I had to learn to do it in a room full of people, gradually over a period of decades. But I still prefer to do it alone. Cartooning is a lonely job. You have to sit by yourself in a room, masturbate and fool around with your stuff. Let the whole thing fester. You know. That's the creative process. It's sordid but that's how it is.
[Slide 5: Just Us Kids!]
SB: Ah, this is a childhood one, about you and your brother. Certain phrases stick in my mind. "Gwan back to Polack town. Your mother dresses you funny. You smell like shit, you bastards. .. Hope I don't get a lickin'. Oh well, tomorrow's Friday." Another existential strip.
RC: Nostalgia about childhood.
SB: There's no stalgia like old stalgia, is there?
[Slide 6: Anal Antics]
SB: Ah yes, now we're getting into sex.
RC: That's a good one.
SB: Mr Snoid. We couldn't avoid it.
RC: Some ladies are leaving the theatre already I see. Getting up in droves.
SB: You said somewhere that all your main characters came to you in a sort of acid-fuelled frenzy over a brief period in the late 60s. One of whom was Mr Snoid.
RC: That's right. I saw them, I saw the Snoids. I was totally crazy.
SB: I love the title, Anal Antics. And then you put the subtitle: More Sick Humour Which Serves No Purpose!
RC: That was what a lot of people said, so I went along. "No social redeeming value whatsoever." Let's move on.
[Slide 7: Get It On]
SB: This is the ultimate depiction of being stoned.
RC: I was smoking much too much pot in those days. I was losing my ability to keep my train of thought for more than five or six seconds.
SB: Do you think it permanently damaged you?
RC: I don't know. I often wonder. Since it doesn't cause you pain if your mind is damaged, you can't really tell. Did you ever go through a period where you smoked a lot of pot?
SB: Yeah. Still do. Not as much as I used to.
RC: Do you feel you're damaged from it?
SB: Yeah, but who cares.
RC: I think our intelligence and awareness and our ability to perceive is something that we should value. So sometimes I worry that forgetfulness and things like that are caused by things like smoking too much pot. I don't know.
SB: But it fulfils a basic human need to get out of it, doesn't it?
RC: Yeah, escape from normal life. What's that about? Why do we need to escape? It is hell on earth, but I don't see what the big deal is. [chuckles]
SB: Anyway, you're not interested in depicting politics and politicians.
RC: Not like you do. You got that whole thing covered really well. There's no need for anybody else.
SB: You are quite strongly political and you have worked for worthy political magazines in your time.
RC: I'm kind of disillusioned.
SB: What was the name of the magazine you worked on?
RC: There were several - one was called Winds of Change. They all meant well and they all had high ideals and all that, but God, what a pain in the ass they were. Was it John Waters who said, "Leftwing radicals tend to generally be humour-impaired"? You could never do anything to please them - they wanted everything changed. They wanted you to be their hand, for their very specific idea, which was usually pretty heavy-handed.
SB: But you went along with it.
RC: Because I had those ideals. It was a good cause.
SB: You still have those ideals?
RC: I don't know. I'm very disillusioned now.
SB: But you've been disillusioned all along in a way, haven't you?
RC: No, in 1970-71, I believed in all that stuff, that there should be a revolution to bring in the socialist paradise. I believed that, all my friends believed in that, the whole youth culture did. Just waiting for "the rev", we used to call it. It was very strong. Maybe you're too young to remember what it was like.
SB: Oh no, I remember. That was very much in vogue.
RC: I used to worry, was my work revolutionary enough? Was I too bourgeois? Was I just a bourgeois, self-indulgent, existentialist? I was very frowned upon by a lot of people. So they want you to be very specifically political in a very specific way. It was about making a very specific political statement. And if you held aloof from that - "Well, I'm an artist..." - that's not correct.
SB: And that artist thing...
RC: That's a bourgeois idea. Stalin did away with that in Russia. [Makes popping sound]
SB: You sort of see yourself in an ironic way. In that Arena film, you're shown sitting on a traffic island in an artist's smock and a beret. You have an ironic take on that sort of thing, don't you?
RC: I should certainly hope so. Otherwise you're doomed if you take yourself too seriously. It's a deadly trap - people try to put you into this role, you're the spokesman, you have to make this important statement about your generation, about politics, the world ... Oh boy. You're sitting there with your pen going, "I don't know what I'm doing. I'm scared." You either work through that or you don't. A lot of people get stymied and they quit.
SB: But the point of your being an artist is now coming to the fore. You've got a big show coming up at the Whitechapel, which is like proper art, isn't it? Presumably, it's because your stuff sells. You're Crumb, you're unique.
RC: It all comes down to money, yeah.
SB: I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I'm very glad that you're being recognised by the major galleries, so you should be. You're the Hogarth of our age. Who remembers Joshua Reynolds - he was some fuckwit who painted society portraits. But we remember Hogarth because he had a view of the world.
RC: Joshua Reynolds had his place.
SB: He was the guy who invented the Royal Academy and got the plaudits but Hogarth is the one everyone remembers, because he had a viewpoint.
RC: Have you seen his paintings in the Soane house?
SB: Yes, The Rake's Progress. They're gorgeous. He did the paintings first and then did the engravings from them. The paintings are wonderful, but then you look at the engravings - the way he carves the line out...
RC: Heartbreaking.
SB: You're the Hogarth de nos jours.
RC: Somebody in Germany, I think, after Robert Hughes called me the Brueghel of the last half of the last week or whatever; these people wanted to have this show and said, "Hey, we'll get these Brueghel prints and drawings, and we'll put them up next to yours." No way! Forget it! Suddenly it won't look so good. Those guys - we can't hold a candle to them any more. They just accepted the fact that their lives were about sitting at their boards and working all the time. They had much lower expectations than we do about having fun in life. Brueghel, he died when he was 49 or something? Can you imagine that, he did all that work before he was 49? Phew! We live in a different world now - we got too much fun, too many distractions. I don't believe in fun. I'm too obsessive-compulsive to have fun. Fun's for normal people. Sometimes I look around at a party and I go, "Look at those jerks over there, actually having fun." That's incredible. They're so fucking well adjusted that they're enjoying this situation with the loud music and too many people. To me, there are so many existential factors that are so deeply disturbing about that scene that I couldn't possibly imagine how people have fun at something like that. Aline, did you have fun at that party last night?
Aline [Kominsky-Crumb, Robert's wife], in the audience: I had a great time.
Robert: She's the most bold and optimistic spirit in the world.
AKC: I had a great outfit; I danced; I met some famous people; I got to keep the outfit that Stella McCartney designed.
RC: I had a miserable time last night.
RC: Nothing personal.
AKC: What was so terrible?
SB: They're talking about the Stella McCartney party. Would you like ...
RC: Let's get them up here.
[Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Peter Poplaski, co-author of The R Crumb Handbook, join RC and SB onstage]
RC: If I'd gone through the last three days that Pete and Aline have gone through, I'd be dead.
AKC: We've been here all week and having a really good time.
SB: I only recently discovered, Aline, that you're not the original for Honeybunch Kominsky because Robert conceived of the character before he even met you.
AKC: Yeah, so we were destined to meet. He drew this character, and I already existed.
RC: People called her Honeybunch before we even met because of that cartoon.
AKC: Because I even look like that type of woman. So this guy wanted to introduce me to Crumb and brought me to a party at [Robert's] ex-girlfriend's house - he also had another wife at the time, nice guy. And I met him and he said, "You have nice knees."
RC: You do.
AKC: Somehow I had this sinking feeling that our destinies were intertwined. I was having so much fun. The last thing I wanted was to be attached to him.
RC: She was the belle of the ball. Men were flocking to her. I used to go to her house and I'd sit in this waiting room with five other guys.
AKC: Take a ticket, dear.
RC: We'd see who could outwait the others and be the last one left there - one by one, they'd drop off and go home.
AKC: You were the last one left there, obviously.
SB: How long have you two been together?
RC: Too long.
AKC: Thirtysomething years. Oh my God.
RC: I guess we're to be congratulated. I don't know.
SB: Who masterminded the move to France? You left the States in 91, didn't you?
RC: She's the mastermind behind that whole deal, behind everything, basically.
AKC: That's not true. You act like that's true, but it's not.
RC: Riii-ght.
AKC: Yes, it was my midlife crisis that propelled us to France.
RC: I give you credit for admitting that.
AKC: I can give you rational arguments as to why we did, but it was my midlife crisis. We were fleeing from Christian fundamentalists who called me the wife of the child pornographer in the small town that we lived in California. We wanted to get our daughter out of California - she was nine, and we did not want to have this teenage child in California, to have her become a mall rat. And teenage kids were saying things like "Duhhh". I'd wanted to get my child out of America for a while - that was part of it. But in general, I just wanted a more exotic life. So I just made him pack everything and dragged him over there.
RC: To France.
AKC: Well, isn't it a better place to live? Come on.
RC: Well, yeah.
AKC: We've got a really big place with a lot of space to work; in California we had a really small house and it was so expensive so we couldn't really have anything bigger. So when we moved to France 14 years ago, it was really cheap. Our village was half falling down and we were able to get a big old place. Since we work at home ...
RC: I always half suspect that you moved me to France because women in France have skinny butts and just can't compete with you.
AKC: You were too distracted and over stimulated in the US and wouldn't stay at your drawing table and earn money.
RC: Riii-ght. I certainly don't get that outside stimulation down there.
AKC: We get some big Swedish tourists there, come on. Don't complain. I run in and I say, "Robert, quick, there's a couple of giant Swedes in the bakery. Get dressed, get out of your pyjamas!"
RC: I do go to the bakery in my pyjamas.
AKC: At least I put my grandmother's mink coat over my pyjamas before going out.
RC: It's very casual down there.
AKC: Also, there's a mental hospital in the next town and when people get out of there they move to our village.
RC: They walk around dressed very eccentrically.
AKC: It's a great place to be yourself. It's very laissez-faire. Don't you think we're better off?
RC: Better off than if we lived in some village in Germany, I guess.
SB: But you've sort of lost your subject matter. You're a commentator on the state of America. One of your strips, a lovely one, is called The History of America - it's a beautiful series of pictures which you see in the book. It starts off with an idyllic country scene which slowly erodes with the arrival of the horse and carriage, railroad and gradually gets built over.
RC: It ends up with a fastfood restaurant in the middle.
AKC: But isn't that happening everywhere in the world? We go back to America a lot and what we see is that corporate America coming through everywhere.
RC: It's okay, I don't mind moving to the south of France to die.
AKC: It's a good place to die, dear. He goes back and forth to the States all the time.
RC: I do landscape drawings in France, draw the pretty, old stone houses. [chuckles]
SB: But you have stone houses in the States.
RC: In the States? No way, dude! We got no fucking stone houses over there in America. We got wood, stucco, plastic exteriors and cardboard boxes.
SB: But you can draw it all from memory anyway.
AKC: But you go back all the time. He spends six weeks at a time there.
RC: I bitch and complain all the time because, I don't know, I feel insecure that I've lost that edge because I'm not there reacting to it every minute. Being outraged and feeling utter contempt every second I'm there.
AKC: But you do that anyway.
RC: In France I don't feel that every second. It's really kind of idyllic. When Pete came over for a visit, he said, "God, this town is like a movie set. I feel like I'm in Disneyland." Now he lives there and he loves it, too.
PP: I owe it all to Aline, too. If you get close enough into her gravitational force, you just get sucked through and end up in the south of France. I've been there for 10 years and I still don't speak French.
RC: People may get the wrong idea about Aline - they may see her as this sinister, dominant, controlling Jew or something. She does have a very powerful energy field but it's benevolent and I'd be dead if I wasn't inside her energy field, I know it. But I have to try to resonate at a certain distance so that she doesn't suck me totally down into her domination. At a certain distance it works - it's what has sustained us all these years. Right?
AKC: Yes, dear.
SB: You do strips together, don't you?
RC: Yeah, we do a bunch of collaborations. Aline does her own stuff, which is great, even though the drawings are kind of primitive and crude and puts a lot of people off, but ...
RC: ... she's a great cartoonist, a great storyteller.
AKC: Next year, my book's coming out.
RC: Right, same publisher, MQP. And eventually, we'll have Pete's book, too.
AKC: We had fun working for the New Yorker - they sent us to absurd places.
RC: Yeah, and they pay for everything.
AKC: Yeah, and we think, "What are we doing here? What are we going to say?"
RC: They sent us to the Cannes film festival last year... [sucks in breath]
AKC: He saw one film and had to go to bed and said, "Go out there and tell me what's going on."
RC: Aline met Harvey Weinstein.
AKC: And Michael Moore. I went right into the heart of the matter.
RC: Brave.
[Slide 8: Mode O'Day and her pals]
SB: I love Mode O'Day. I think she's wonderful.
RC: This is from the 80s.
SB: I love the way she says, "I could be going to parties with Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol instead of hanging around with this bunch of boring nonentities."
RC: I knew a lot of people like that in the 80s.
SB: What, you mean people who were trying to get into the art world?
RC: Yes, kind of ne'er-do-wells who had this delusion that they were something hot.
SB: And she has this friend called Doggo.
RC: A loser, a guy that she can barely stand to be around but she kind of feels so superior to him that she can't let him go.
SB: She's loathsome but she's really well drawn.
[Slide 9: Hypnagogic Hoodoo]
SB: Ah, now we're getting to the more recent stuff. Remember when I talked about your loose style. We've come back to it. Now this is from 97, is it?
RC: That's from Sketchbook. Yeah, it's looser, but it's from a sketch.
SB: So it's just done straight, sort of raw, unmediated.
RC: Lots of whiteout.
SB: Hypnagogic - that means drawn from dreams.
RC: No, it means the state where you're halfway between asleep and awake. Someone once said it's like being high. You can get a lot of revelations in that state. If you can catch them, they're very elusive.
SB: There's a whole group of cartoonists who are into that state, isn't there? There's a Serbian guy called Zograf. Wonderful stuff.
RC: Oh yeah, Zograf was really tuned into that dream state. I find that stuff really interesting.
SB: So was this a dream you had?
RC: This was a hypnagogic vision that I used to have very often. I don't have it any more. Thank God it went away. I started watching for it as I was falling asleep. These creatures were kind of invading my psychic self and it happened quite often. They were not showing themselves to me, they were sneaking into my psychic space. I don't know if it was some vestigial thing from taking LSD or what, but it's gone now.
SB: What about the man with the hat and the strange system of ribbons around his face? Is that the Invisible Man?
RC: That's how one of them looked. He had all these things wrapped around his head and so I couldn't tell who or what he was.
AKC: That's so creepy.
RC: It was disturbing and it was creepy and I used to have this vision a lot. It would only last a split-second, but I'd be aware of these entities invading my psychic realm. Pete, what's that about? Tell me.
PP: It all goes back to the Greeks: What is reality? What's appearance? What's illusion? It's all your LSD visions coming back to haunt you, I think. With me, I just watched too much television, I never took drugs. With you, acid trips, man. You're not running away, they're coming back for you.
RC: I've really come to believe it. Somehow, acid monkeyed with the balance between the different bodies - you know, there's the physical body, the astral body, and the mind - and acid scrambled the membranes between these bodies and somehow allowed these psychic leaks which, in normal people, are sealed off from each other.
AKC: It's kind of an advantage as an artist to have that sort of seeping in.
RC: Yeah, it is an advantage as an artist but it can kill you as a person who has to survive in the world. Artists with that kind of vulnerability and sensitivity often die young.
AKC: Hieronymous Bosch, you don't think he...
RC: That stuff's too old, you can't tell where it's coming from. Bosch probably looked at other stuff from that period, which has the same, fantastical kind of imagery. This is the way they expressed their myths and fears.
AKC: Or they could've all been taking drugs.
RC: Could be, but we don't know. There's been a lot of speculation about that.
[Slide 10: Don't Be Afraid... Look Death in the Face]
SB: Oh yes, this is your confrontation with death. We're playing the endgame now.
AKC: When did you draw that?
RC: A few years ago.
SB: Is death like a monkey to you? Death's face is a little ape-like.
RC: It's a scary, sinister face behind the word Death.
SB: Pretty grim. I love the crosshatching, though.
RC: I can crosshatch like a motherfucker.
SB: And then this bit here: There's nothing I fear so much as the dentist. What are you saying?
RC: No matter how close you get to death, until you're right in front of it, it's still an abstraction. But the dentist, that's more about extraction.
[Slide 11: The Heartbreak of the Old Cartoonist]
SB: This is terribly sad.
RC: It's supposed to be funny.
SB: What's happened to the background?
RC: I was trying to imitate the style of normal comic strips of modern times, keeping it minimal.
AKC: We've just been doing it for too long.
RC: Yeah, I think cartooning, for the most part, is a young man's game, or a young person's game, because there are a lot of women doing it now. There're a lot of old cartoonists still doing good work, but there's not too many.
SB: I'm getting on, but I'm not as old as you.
RC: Especially doing comics. There's not much money, not a lot of glamour, people get families.
SB: But there are people drawing well into their 80s.
RC: Doing comics? Not many.
AKC: There's Bill Griffith. [Art] Spiegelman.
RC: Spiegelman, maybe - but he's not really doing comics any more. Comics take a hell of a lot of focus but for most people there's not a lot of reward in it.
AKC: So what do you think of our daughter becoming a cartoonist?
RC: I'm going down, she's coming up. She's great. Let the young people do it, take centre stage. It's their time.