HOW MANY TREES HAD TO BE CUT DOWN FOR THIS ESSAY?

Abstract

Despite a reputation for unsentimental, sardonic, sex-based satire, Robert Crumb has consistently voiced distress over the state of the natural world over the course of his career, and especially the role of modern consumerism in its destruction. As he told an interviewer in 2015, “all that stuff, the whole ecological crisis and all that. That worries me.” Part of an under-studied environmentalist strain in US underground comix, reflected in the work of, among others, Ron Cobb and Ron Turner’s series Slow Death Funnies (1970), Crumb’s “ecological angst” appears throughout his oeuvre, in both explicit and figurative forms. In this chapter, José Alaniz explores how Robert Crumb can be viewed as an ironic elegist for nature’s collapse in the Anthropocene.