Crumb certamente é um dos maiores cartunistas de todos os tempos. Aos 72 e morando numa pequena vila no sul da França desde os anos 90, Crumb é controverso e paradoxal como quase todo artista acima da média normalmente é.  Nesta entrevistaça que cedeu para o Observer, Crumb fala longamente sobre suas taras sexuais e o fardo do sexo, a cultura undergound, as benesses e os inconvenientes da fama, algumas escolhas da carreira, as implicâncias, o público, o feminismo, influências, as simpatias políticas e sua nostalgia cultural do início do século 20, especialmente na música. É leitura divertidíssima, enriquecedora e brilhante. Vale a pena reservar um pouco do seu tempo para ler. Selecionei alguns momentos:

SEX

“I have tried to talk to women about that very issue of male domination, power and feminism many times before to no avail. They don’t wanna hear about it. One rejection and that’s it for me. That just kills me,” said Mr. Crumb. “I couldn’t take all those nos so I don’t do anything. I’m just paralyzed. Women expect men to take the initiative, to be forceful, assertive; they expect to be courted and seduced. In spite of feminism, women still want to be the object of attraction, and the male’s confidence in courting her is a test that he must pass in order to win her.”

“So, before you became famous, how did you get laid?”

“I didn’t.”

“You must have a big ego,” I told him.

“Gigantic, but fame changed all of this,” he said, “I got married to the first overweight woman passing by, this deeply neurotic, insecure woman. I was living the life of a wage slave in Cleveland and then one day in January, 1967, I just hitched a ride to San Francisco without telling her, and left my job in the greeting card business. The hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury, where it all started for me, was full of men doing nothing all day and expecting women to bring them food. The ‘chick’ had to provide a home for them, cook meals for them, even pay the rent. It was still very much ingrained from the earlier patriarchal mentality of our fathers, except that our fathers, generally, were providers. Free love meant free sex and food for men. Sure, women enjoyed it, too, and had a lot of sex, but then they served men. Even among left-wing political groups, women were always relegated to secretarial, menial jobs. We were all on LSD, so it took a few years for the smoke to dissipate and for women to realize what a raw deal they were getting with the ne’er-do-well hippie male. Men who acquired preeminence at the time were all frauds, fake gurus who were paying lip service to peace and love, charismatic cons who just wanted to fuck all their adoring disciples. Timothy Leary was like that. A big phony.”

“With fame you didn’t have to avoid rejection and jerk off forever,” I observed.

“It was the most remarkable change in my life,” he agreed, “and it came very suddenly, too. All of a sudden beautiful women started flocking to me. It happened, like, overnight, in the year 1968. It took my breath away.”

“When you have sex in your drawings, like in the bus story, it is usually from behind,” I observed. “But we never see if it’s anal sex or vaginal.”

“I’ve never been asked that before,” Mr. Crumb said. “It’s vaginal, although the act of penetration itself is not the main event for me. It’s the psychological stuff around it, what’s called ‘foreplay,’ I guess you might say. That’s where the big thrills are for me. Intercourse for me is just, you know, the icing on the cake, or something. These things are hard to talk about. Anyway, it’s all in the comics.”

(…)

What is your favorite sexual position?” I asked him.

“Mr. Crumb giggled nervously and shifted in his chair. “I dunno… Is that something I really have to…? I can’t really talk about it. I can draw it in my comics, but I can’t actually talk about it… It’s embarrassing. Then how was I able to draw it for all the world to see, you might ask? I don’t know the answer. I like to be sucked while I’m sitting on a chair with the woman kneeling, all spread out sprawling so I can slap her big ass,” he said. “A big ass is just heaven. Like two giant basketballs.

MEDIA & READERS

“Have you ever thought of actually committing suicide?” I asked.

“Yes. The last time I came close was 1986,” Mr. Crumb said, “I was at the peak of my fame. The BBC came to my house to make a documentary on me and I got a tribute at this comic convention, the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France. All of these ordeals had to do with being famous. I needed money, so I accepted the BBC offer. They invaded my house with their cameras, lights and their shit — it was awful. Then I went to this big comics convention in France, where I was the main event. They built a giant head of me, people could actually walk through it. All my comic stuff was pasted inside this giant head. It was torture. There were journalists, photographers everywhere. I felt disgusted with life.

“So who buys your shit? Some fat, balding wanker guy in mommy’s basement?”

“Yes,” Mr. Crumb said.

“No wonder you want to kill yourself.” I said.

“I see them at conventions,” Mr. Crumb said. “Nerdy guys or fat, aging hippies. One time I was signing books next to this guy Peter Bagge, who had young cute teenage girls lining up for him. His comics are very funny stories about young punk rock-type kids, a very sympathetic portrayal of their world. My work creeps women out. The very thing that you are talking about that you think should make it sympathetic to them, they find very creepy. This introspective, self-loathing guy who then wants to dominate and do all these crazy things to women. In real life, some women might respond to that sort of man, but believe me, it’s not what they want in their entertainment. They want Fifty Shades of Grey, which sold 50 million copies, all to women.”

POLITICS

“Peripherally, I had left-wing sympathies,” Mr. Crumb said, “but a lot of these extreme left-wing groups became hopelessly doctrinaire to the point where they became rigid and dogmatic and unattractive. Life is not that simple…when people start spewing Marxist doctrine around, I just fade out. One of my best friends, the cartoonist Spain Rodriguez, was a very committed Marxist, and his point of view was subtle enough that he gave me a lot of clarity regarding class allegiance. The difference between the value systems of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie used to be much clearer than it is nowadays. Spain would always bring it back to that class difference. Who are you going to align yourself with? The values of the working class or the bourgeoisie? That was very enlightening; it helped me a lot because the bourgeoisie is always trying to erode the other side away, to obfuscate it.”

(…)

“We should still bomb motherfucking banks,” he said.

“What did you make of Occupy Wall Street?” I asked him.

“I thought it was a worthy effort,” he said.

“I walked through Zuccotti Park and these fools were calling for ‘good’ banks, the church and Thomas Jefferson’s ideals.”

“That’s sad. 2008 was the biggest robbery in history and who goes to jail? Some poor black kid who stole some sneakers at a fucking Wal-Mart if he gets lucky enough to not get shot in the back on his way there,” Mr Crumb said,

“A black kid recently in New York ended up at Rikers Island for stealing a backpack. He couldn’t make bond, always denied the charges, stayed at Rikers for years and after he finally got out, killed himself. Obama, in his final year in office, finally realizes that he spent his presidency trying to please the white man who hates him on sight, he did nothing to help black people.”

“Yes. He’s a house Negro,” Crumb said.

“That’s what Osama bin Laden said about Obama.”

“Really? Wow! I didn’t know that. And the bankers and corporations keep on raping America and most of the poor don’t vote at all, and when they do, they keep on voting their shills into office. I’m so glad I don’t live there anymore. I haven’t had a boss since 1967, when I quit the greeting card company. I’m an exceptionally free agent in this world. Ninety-nine percent of the population lives in fear of losing their job. I’ve been lucky that way I’m free to speak my mind and not fear for my livelihood,” Mr. Crumb said.

MUSIC & AMERICA

“The America that I missed died in about 1935. That’s why I have all this old stuff, all these old 78 records from that era. It was the golden age of recorded music, before the music business poisoned the people’s music, the same way that ‘agribusiness’ poisoned the very soil of the earth. In the old days, music was produced by common people, the music they produced to entertain themselves. The record industry took it and resold it, repackaged and killed it, spewed it out in a bland, artificial, ersatz version of itself. This goes along with the rise of the mass media, the spread of radio. My mother, born in the 1920s, remembered walking in the street in the summertime in Philadelphia, and in every other house, people were playing some kind of live music. Her parents played music and sang together. In her generation, her brothers didn’t want to play an instrument anymore. It was the swing era and all they wanted to do was to listen to Benny Goodman on the radio. The takeover of radio happened much later. In places like Africa, you can still find great recorded music from the ’50s. I have many 78s from Africa at that time that sound like some great rural music from America in the ’20s. In the U.S at that time there were thousands and thousands of bands, dance halls, ballrooms in hotels, restaurants had dance floors, school auditoriums, clubs in small towns. A small town of 10,000 would have a least a hundred bands. In the mid 30’s radio spread very fast in America and the depression killed a lot of the venues where live music was performed. You could go to the movies for 10 cents. Then in the 50’s TV finished it all off. Mass media makes you stay home, passive. In the 20’s there was live music everywhere in the States.”