CRUMB AGONISTES

In this chapter, Paul Sheehan argues that Crumb’s unrestrained “working-through” of bizarre, grotesque, often obscene sexual imagery and situations—supposedly a way of articulating his darkest fantasies and desires—is not the touchstone or bedrock of his political awareness. Appearances to the contrary, the disturbing sexual politics implicit in the work is a symptom, rather than a cause, which conceals a more deep-seated concern. Crumb’s most extreme and confronting images and subject matter are attempts to reconcile his anarchist suspicion and skepticism of all forms of authority, and his despairing recognition that any challenge to these forms is doomed to fail—to be crushed, co-opted, watered down or deviously ‘absorbed’. In this reading Crumb is, then, a kind of disenchanted political utopian. His work is fired by the tension between a radical anti-authoritarianism that accords with the counter-cultural desire to find a space outside or beyond the reach of state power; and a resigned awareness that such a space cannot be established in the corrupt and corrupting world of capitalist modernity.