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Okay, let's start the show.
This is Fresh Air.
I'm David Bianculli.
R. Crum is the most renowned of the underground cartoonists who emerged in the 1960s.
He created Zap Comics featuring an entire menagerie of his characters, such as Fritz the Cat, Mr Natural the Snoid and Devil Girl.
His comics were eccentric, and so was he, as a 1994 documentary by Terry Zweigoff makes clear.
Crum wrote a memoir in 2005 titled The R. Crum Handbook.
Reviewing the book.
Then in Newsweek Malcolm Jones wrote Crum has made strange and hilarious art out of his own neuroses.
Insecure and paranoid, obsessed with sex in general and women with big behinds in particular, Crum has never been afraid to draw and write about his own foibles and fantasies.
His work is like an id unleashed with no thought for propriety."
R. Crumb's work has been controversial, considered racist and misogynistic.
Now there's a new biography of Crumb by fellow cartoonist and founder of the Pictureboxx comics, Dan Nadel.
Crumb is now 81 years old and lives in France, where he's resided for decades.
We're going to listen back to Terry's 2005 interview with R. Crumb.
Arkram, welcome to Fresh Air.
Do you think your early comics, some of the ones that anthologized in your new book?
Do you think they look different out of the time period than they did to you in their time?
Different from this perspective of nowadays?
Yeah.
Well...
They're kind of timeless, you know, because they looked out of time then.
When I did them in the beginning in 66 67, 68 people looked at them and said hey, these look like old comics from the 30s.
And some people, when they met me, were surprised that I was a young man at the time.
They thought I would be some old guy.
So they already looked out of time then, and so they just kind of still look like their own thing.
And I think a lot of young people that pick them up when they first see them don't realize how old they are.
They just don't seem to be part of the 60s, as it's known stylistically to such stuff as Peter Max or psychedelic posters and all that stuff.
It doesn't fit in with that.
It's kind of its own thing.
In your new book, The Arkham Handbook, you describe how you started some aspects of your style after a bad LSD trip.
What were the images that you saw when you were tripping that made their way into your cartoons?
Whoa.
That's a tough question.
What were the images on LSD?
What did they look like?
Well, I don't know.
For some reason, I don't know why or how it happened.
I just, on this one really strange LSD trip that I took, there was something wrong with the drug.
I got trapped in some level of the mental collective consciousness that was very tawdry and carnival-like in a kind of a cheap, gaudy way.
It just stuck there.
I was stuck there for months until actually what cleared it up was taking another dose of LSD made it go away.
How do you think your drawing style was actually changed by this hallucinogenic imagery?
It was changed vastly.
Well before that I was trying to be in order to get work as an artist and a cartoonist.
I was trying to be contemporary and with it and I looked at the work of people like Jules Feiffer and the LSD just blew all that away completely and I was always drawing in my sketchbooks all the time and I was just drawing these images that were coming from my brain all the time.
In that two months uncontrollably just completely changed my whole approach to what I was doing to cartooning and took on this older 30s, 40s kind of, And I started looking more closely at these kind of brand X, third-rate comics from the 40s that were drawn in that style by these artists that never achieved, you know, renown even among comics people.
They were a third-rate artist, but they had this working-class, proletarian, funky... crude, vulgar.
These comics were very vulgar, violent.
So what are some of the characters that you started drawing in this period after taking the LSD?
That was my first two-month period when my ego was completely fragmented by that bad LSD.
I drew Mr Natural Flaky Funt Angel Food McSpade, the Snoids, the Vulture Goddesses, Vulture Demonesses, whatever you want to call them.
I know lots of characters.
The old Pooperoo.
Mr. Natural is this kind of guru kind of figure with a really long beard.
Was he based on anybody who you knew or a type that you knew?
It was actually more or less a combination of the mysticism of LSD experiences combined with this old cartoon stereotype of the little old man with the long beard.
There's several of these kind of like standard cartoon figure and old comic strips going back to the 20s, even earlier, probably that little old, funny little old man with the long beard.
I didn't invent anything out of whole cloth.
It all has antecedents in the popular culture, all of it.
And Angel Food McSpade.
I mean, this is an African-American woman who is drawn like some of the black people in your early comics.
Look like the African cannibals in the Betty Boop cartoon where they have her in a big pot.
Yeah, exactly.
Precisely.
Why did you draw them that way?
Because they were there and they were part of the whole experience, of all that tawdry, low-class imagery that was boiling in my brain.
That was part of it, is that jungle bunny image.
That was there.
It was part of it.
It wasn't there before, but it boiled up.
So it was obviously in the collective subconscious, and I just didn't have any control.
I just had to draw what was there.
And I don't think Angel Flew McSpade can really legitimately be called an African-American woman.
It's a cartoon stereotype, crazy image of something that's in the imaginations of people.
It's not actually a representation of an African-American woman.
Did you worry that people would misconstrue it?
Because certainly a lot of people didn't see it that way.
They just saw it as a crude stereotype.
Yes, they did.
A lot of people just took it at face value.
I can't let that stop me.
It has to come out.
What's in there had to come out.
I really couldn't stop it.
If I worried about how it was going to be construed too much.
Obviously I had some concern of that, but I didn't want to be too hurtful but at the same time I had to.
I had to put on the paper.
I had this direct line from the brain stem to the paper.
There was no super ego, the socialized self.
All that was just swept away.
And it was swept away in your sexual imagery, too.
You betcha, yeah.
So, you know, I have no secrets.
I'm probably one of the few human beings on the planet that I have no secrets.
Everybody who looks at my comics knows exactly what I'm about.
It's all there.
Everybody knows what your sexual fetishes are and everything.
The darkest side of me, it's all on paper.
So that allows me to be a pretty nice guy in real life.
It's all out there on paper, foisted on the public.
Was there ever a part of you that wanted to censor that part of your mind or at least keep it private and hidden, which is what most people do with those?
Of course.
Yeah, sure.
I'm a normal person that way.
Before those LSD experiences and I just decided to let that all out.
I used to make those drawings and tear them up and flush them down the toilet.
Oh, this is terrible.
What's wrong with you?
What is it?
Why?
You know, but and also the.
As I started doing it for publication, then the floodgates opened.
The crack just got wider and wider until I just let it all out.
Let it all out there, all the dark side of myself.
It's all out there.
I have less of that impulse now.
I think I got out of my system a lot of it.
What was it like for you to go from like loner eccentric weirdo to like in-demand popular person who everybody wants to publish and buy and know?
Right, Mr. Cool Guy.
It was very disorienting because I was quite young.
I was only, like, 25, 26 when all that happened originally.
This whole element of people that I'd never, ever had any dealings with before were suddenly there, interested in me, wanting to hustle me, wanting this and that everything.
Sign me to a five-year exclusive contract.
These people are trying to cash in on the hippie culture and the youth movement and make money off it.
I was so young, I didn't know how to deal with all that.
But at the same time, it made me more attractive to women, so that part of it was nice.
Yeah.
It was.
Before that, I was like this, you know, nerd that at a party no woman even noticed.
I was just part of the shrubbery or something.
But after that, oh, there's our crumb.
You know, suddenly they were interested and that was nice.
Well, you were also like suddenly you were an important part of like the hippie counterculture.
Did you identify with that culture?
Did you feel like a part of it?
Well, I guess the elements of that culture like the music and the stylistic stuff.
No, I didn't identify with that at all.
I identified with some of the values, like the political values, some of the Eastern religious stuff that people were into.
I was attracted to that.
And, you know, the drug thing, the psychedelic drugs, I was into that part of it.
And I also got caught up in the general optimism and hopefulness and idealism of that time, the late 60s, you know.
But stylistically, I was always alienated from it.
I hated the music.
You write that puppet and marionette kid shows made a deep impression on you.
You say the adult assumption was that these puppets were cute and lovable, but they were actually grotesque.
And the shows tried to tell kids that life could be fun and exciting.
But the unconscious message was that the adult world is strange twisted perverse threatening, sinister.
What was it about Howdy, Doody or the other Kukla, Fran and Ollie, that you found grotesque and sinister?
Oh, especially Howdy Doody.
Howdy Doody was really grotesque.
Hi, kids.
And Clarabelle the Clown and all.
It was all very, very sinister and scary.
And Buffalo Bob Smith.
Did you ever see that stuff?
You bet.
I sure did.
My wife, Aileen, actually, she grew up in New York.
She actually got to be in the peanut gallery when she was a kid on the Buffalo Bob show and the Howdy Doody show.
And she said it was a defining moment in her life.
She was like eight years old or something, seven years old.
And she saw the adult world behind the scenes of the Howdy Doody show and how people were all kind of cranky and stressed.
And she said the seat of the pants of Bob Smith's outfit was kind of frayed and, you know.
And he was, like, real mean to the kids when it was off camera.
Kukla Farinalli was cuter, though.
Kukla Farinalli, that was a little bit better than Howdy Doody that way.
It was more lovable.
You know, Kukla was kind of a cute little lovable guy, a little hand puppet.
And Fran, the woman, she was, like, talking to the puppets.
So it was a little more reassuring.
It was cuter.
Did the frozen smile on Howdy Doody's face strike you as deranged?
It was just creepy and weird.
What the heck?
What does that have to do with anything?
It didn't look like a kid.
He was supposed to be like a kid in a cowboy suit, but he didn't come off that way.
He just came off as a creature, like from Mars.
There's some underlying thing you can't quite define that was just disturbing and sinister and scary about it.
All all that stuff.
Okay, the things that you say about these puppet shows, that they show that the adult world is strange twisted perverse threatening, sinister.
That's the kind of description of what your cartoons became like.
Strange, twisted, perverse, threatening, sinister.
It's like, that's what you set out to do.
Well, yeah, but I guess... Not for children, of course.
I mean, it wasn't for children.
Yeah.
What I was trying to do was to uncover that sinister quality, the dark sinister strange, disturbing part of things, and not hide it, not keep it hidden.
You know i started doing that in 68 69, putting it out there.
The snoids you know they were these little creepy gnome creatures that i at lsd i would catch out of the corner of my eye sneaking around and giggling in the background of my life.
You know, I just had to show that.
I wanted to show that sinister aspect, that noir, dark side of things, and how it's.
I guess it's almost like making fun of the veneer of cuteness or whatever it is that they think covers that.
It's just all a veneer.
It's not real cuteness.
It's a completely fake attempt to cover up what life is really about.
The whole mass media thing...
We're all growing up in America.
You're a child of the mass media, of the pop culture, unless your parents guard you and protect you from that very conscientiously.
My parents didn't.
They shoved us in front of the TV and there's products of pop culture.
So that's what you have to work with.
We've talked a little bit about how your visual imagery was changed by LSD.
What about your sexual fantasies?
I mean, so much of the comics that you've done have had to do with sexual fantasy.
Hi, girls.
Were those fantasies as dark before LSD as they were after?
Yeah, unfortunately the LSD didn't really change much in my sexual fantasies, but I found a way to express them, made them metaphorical to me.
I could solve them more metaphorically.
On LSD, you see that life, everything in our world is a metaphor.
Or as Allen Ginsberg said, things are symbols of themselves.
And so I saw my own sexual fantasies that way and tried to understand what they meant metaphorically.
Otherwise, we just feel helpless in the face that things don't mean anything.
We feel helpless.
What does it mean?
What do these fantasies mean?
Where do they come from?
Why do I have them?
I don't understand or express that somehow in some way.
I got off drawing those things.
I got off drawing them.
I admit it.
I confess.
I wanted to ask you about that.
Did you want your more sexually oriented comic to function as turn-ons, to be like pornography in the lives of its readers?
No, I didn't.
It was only for myself.
I had no motive to turn other people on to my sexual fantasies or my sexual preferences at all.
It was just expressing what was inside myself in some way that that revealed hopefully, the metaphor that it was.
You know, in many variations of that.
You know, the angel food McSpade, the vulture demonesses or the Bigfoot Sasquatch character that I did, the big hairy female or the devil girl character.
These are all... And when feminists complain, say, these aren't real women.
These are Crumb's fantasies.
They're absolutely right.
Right.
I got no argument with that.
Yeah, that's what it is.
It all comes out of my mind.
Well, in your new book, you describe yourself as sexually in a state of arrested development.
You say, all my natural compulsions are perverted and twisted.
Right, right.
I see myself as a very negative person, actually.
I'm almost like a negative of the normal well-adjusted guy.
You know, I'm the, everything that he is is I'm not, and everything I am he's not.
You know, it's almost how I see myself, maybe not a hundred percent, but you know I'm like the person of the night, he's a guy of the day.
You know blah etc, etc.
You know Now, when you were young, you went for a while to Catholic school.
For a while, you went regularly to church.
You say you went through a period of being fervent and devout.
Religious, yeah.
What happened to all those fantasies that you had during this period, when these fantasies would have just been horrifying to you?
Horrible guilt.
Horrible guilt, of course.
Praying desperately.
Please, God, what is this about?
Yes.
Did you pray to get rid of these thoughts?
You know, it's a funny thing.
At the same time, the thoughts were, those fantasies were attractive and gave me pleasure, and at the same time I was deeply disturbed by their sinfulness.
So something had to go, and what went was the church and the whole sin thing.
That had to go.
Now you quote one woman in your book as accusing you of ruining underground comics by encouraging all the younger boy artists to be bad and do comics about their own horrible sex fantasies.
Right.
Do you feel like your comics inspired a lot of other comics of yeah, of kind of, you know, bad sexual Yeah, I did.
Misogynist.
Yeah.
Well, just you know, opened the gates for other young boys who had these, who probably were also comic nerds when they grew up.
That's why they're drawing comics.
I never saw anybody else draw precisely the same kind of stuff that I drew about sex.
But, you know, similar things or just...
It allowed them, it permitted them when they saw my work, Crumbs, he's cool and he's doing it.
So, you know, I guess I can draw stuff that puts women in this position too.
But, you know, of having violent acts committed against women.
But I don't think, I can't think of any artist offhand who was like totally obsessed with just drawing brutal violence against women.
I don't know.
I think this is you know, but you know feminists and other people that are involved in any kind of, you know, political obsession like that and you can't blame them for it.
There's no, they're looking for that.
So they're looking, oh, here's one right here.
Look, here's an example of you know somebody being violent to women, or here's somebody abusing a woman you know, so they're looking for that.
And yeah, I'm sure you can find it.
It's there.
Yeah.
But one of my defenses is that I don't think I ever drew it in such a way as it could be taken as propaganda for behavior like that.
I don't make that sort of behavior towards women look heroic or commendable.
The characters that are doing those things are always creepy, little twisted guys.
They're not heroic, virtuous images that someone would want to emulate.
Right.
R. Crum speaking with Terry Gross in 2005.
We'll continue their conversation after a break and we'll also listen to a later interview in which the cartoonist is joined by another cartoonist, his wife Aileen Kaminsky Crum.
And film critic Justin Chang reviews Thunderbolts, the newest superhero movie from Marvel.
I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air.
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Before you started doing underground comics, you worked for American Greetings.
Right.
Were you doing greeting cards?
Yes.
Yes, I drew hundreds and hundreds of greeting cards.
Gosh, I'd like to see those.
Have they been exhibited?
Yes.
No.
What were they like?
They're pretty bland.
They're bland.
I didn't write them.
I just did the drawings.
They had a staff of writers.
And you went to work.
It was a 9 to 5 job.
You punched a time clock.
It was in Cleveland.
I got up at 6 o'clock in the morning and took the rapid transit to work every day.
I went to the bar after work and drank with the guys and then went home and asked myself is this my life?
Is this what my life is going to be from now on?
So what are some of the things that you drew for the greeting cards?
This is what, birthday cards, get well soon cards, stuff like that?
No, they had this department that in the late 50s they started making these kind of more hip-looking greeting cards.
They were tall and thin, you know?
Yes, I sure do.
I was in that department.
And they were funny or funny in quotes?
They were funny.
Yeah, they were funny.
And some of them actually were funny.
They had a couple of writers who actually were gifted comedy writers, who just got stuck in Cleveland because they were alcoholics or whatever.
But they wrote very funny cards.
Often their best cards were censored and never used because everything had to pass by the approval of the wife of the guy who owned the Walgreen drug chain.
And if she didn't like the cards, then they couldn't be distributed.
So some of the best stuff never actually got distributed.
Now, we've talked a little bit about how influenced you feel you were by early comics.
And musically, so much of the music you love is from the 20s and 30s.
How were you first exposed to graphics of that period and music of that period?
Right, right.
Well...
As a kid in the 50s, the comics were in decline.
The TV wasn't that great.
So I started looking for older stuff.
And the first older stuff that peaked my interest was older comic books that you could find in Salvation Army stores and also old stuff on the kiddie shows on television.
On TV, on these kiddie shows, they showed old cartoons from the 30s.
You know, old Betty Boop and Popeye and all that stuff.
And the music was great.
The drawing style was great.
They were very, very appealing to me as a kid.
This is like 53, 54, 55 in there.
And the music was... I don't know, just grabbed me somehow.
And then also you could see these really old Hal Roach comedies.
Lauren Hardy, this Our Gang, Little Rascals stuff.
I loved that stuff when I was a kid.
And as I got into my later teens, I...
Always looked for really early movies that were on TV, on the late show.
Movies from 1930, 31, 32.
I just loved the whole style of the period.
Somehow it attracted me deeply, the music and everything.
And then I started looking for some other way to find the music of that period, because I loved hearing it in those tv.
You know runs of those old films.
And uh, then i discovered old 78 records.
I discovered that this old music was actually on these records that were sitting around these same places that the old comic books were and other old stuff.
And so i started buying old 78s and and uh, still collecting them today.
And how did you start playing banjo?
I had musical inclinations from childhood and at first I tried to make myself a cigar box ukulele, but that didn't play so well.
I couldn't really make it play efficiently and effectively.
So then, my mother, for Christmas, when I was 12 years old, gave me a plastic ukulele which was playable.
I could actually tune it and play it, so I learned to play that.
And then I graduated to the banjo later.
I was attracted to old music, you know.
I was kind of out of it, nerd.
I wasn't really much into rock and roll or things of my contemporaries.
I don't know.
Like I said, I'm not going to go negative.
I'm kind of an oddball character.
R. Crumb speaking to Terry Gross in 2005.
Let's listen to the 1929 song Singing in the Bathtub, covered by R Crumb and his cheap-suit serenaders from the album of the same name.
Singing in the bathtub, sitting alone, tearing out a tonsil just like a baritone.
When we return, we'll listen to another of their conversations from 2007, in which the cartoonist is joined by his wife, Aileen Kaminsky-Krum, who was a cartoonist also.
This is Fresh Air.
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This is Fresh Air.
In 2007, Terry spoke with R. Crum and his wife Aileen Kaminsky Crum.
She was one of the first women to create autobiographical comics back in the 1960s.
They married in 1978 and moved to the south of France in the early 90s.
R. Crum created Zap Comics in the 1960s.
Aileen first became known for her contributions to women's comics and Twisted Sisters.
She died in 2022.
The Crumbs sometimes worked together on joint autobiographical cartoons for The New Yorker.
When Terry spoke with them, she asked if their personas in those New Yorker cartoons were much different from who they really were.
It's kind of an exaggeration of who we really are, but not that far.
It doesn't deviate that far from who we really are.
We get into our George and Gracie bit when we're doing that.
I feel like I'm playing my role somewhat and you kind of feed me lines and I react in a way that I don't necessarily do in our real life.
So what are your personas like in the cartoons?
He's the straight man.
He's George.
He feeds the lines and I like take him up and run with him and I'm like the fool, you know.
But also you're flamboyant, you're gaudy, you're crass, you know Jewish Long Island thing that you have.
And you're bold and you're.
And I'm more kind of gray and goyish.
Yeah.
The Jew and the goy.
Right.
You know he's like from a Minnesota farm family and I'm from like a long line of schmata sales people, you know.
Would you tell the story of how you both met?
Who tells it, me or you, Robert?
You tell your version, I'll tell my version.
Okay well, I was like being a Jewish cowgirl in Arizona at the time and I thought I was completely unique.
What year is this?
This is like in the late 60s, maybe around 69, 70.
And I thought I was the only Jewish girl being a cowgirl at the time.
I thought I was really being a wild adventurist.
And then I saw a comic book called Dale Steinberger The Jewish Cowgirl, done by an artist named R Crum, and I thought this guy's like stolen my life here.
How can this be?
And at the same time I also saw a character called Honey Bunch Kaminsky, and my last name is Kaminsky.
And I thought, no, wait a minute, this is really weird.
And then I met a bunch of other cartoonists who met me and said you look just like an R Crumb character.
We have to introduce you to him.
So after I finished art school in Arizona, I moved to San Francisco.
And then two weeks later, I met Robert.
And I had a strange sinking feeling that my destiny was sort of going to be forever entwined with his.
And he looked at me and said you have cute knees.
And all he felt was lust and didn't think anything more.
That's my version.
Well, that's pretty much how it was, yeah.
Robert, when you met Aileen, did you think that she looked like one of your comic characters?
I was drawn to her strongly, yeah.
She had all the requirements.
But, yeah, my initial interest in her was strictly, you know, oh, here's a cute hippie Jewish slut.
She'd probably easy, you know.
Robert, when did you first see her work and what did you think of it?
Shortly after I met her, because she had just started drawing comics at that time and she showed me this stuff that she had done and this first comics and they were so crazy and expressionistic.
I immediately found them very interesting and compelling and so deeply personal.
And I'd never seen any...
Comics like that drawn by a woman before, deeply personal.
There was a few women at that time Trina Robbins and others who were drawing kind of feminist comics.
But to me, there was two kinds.
There was Trina's stuff which was like feminist fighting hero types, you know, girl detectives and things.
And then there was the hippie flowery stuff that someone like Willie Mendez was doing that's very sweet, with unicorns and stuff like that.
And here's Aileen.
It's like ugly.
It's self-deprecating.
It was...
It was just very confessional.
That was the first time I ever saw a woman do that, ever.
And it probably was the first time a woman ever did that in comics.
She's like the Jean Reese of comics there.
Donna Rickles.
Donna Rickles, right.
You know, and as we talked about Robert, the last time you were on Fresh Air, you know, when you were doing your comics in the 60s, they were kind of very controversial among women.
I mean, some women thought they were great, but a lot of women thought that they were really, you know, kind of sexist.
Very, very few women thought they were great.
Very few women thought they were great.
I got a hard time from the other feminist cartoonists for going out with Robert.
That was like a disaster.
Yeah, tell us what that was like.
What kind of comments did you get about that?
And what did you think of the way he drew women?
Were you ever offended by his emphasis on large breasts and behinds and the kind of sexual obsessions that were described in the comics?
Tell the truth, Aileen.
Well, I was really happy that somebody liked my physical type, finally.
I was really flattered that that was his ideal woman.
What about all the sick sadism and all that stuff?
Well, it corresponded with my own sick masochism.
But aside from that, I thought that feminists had cartoonists had no right to tell me who to go out with and how to conduct my personal life.
And in real life, Robert was my best fan, the most supportive person ever.
I could have ever been with in terms of my work.
And even though being with him may have affected the public's perception of my work, it didn't affect my desire to work at all because he was such a supportive person to live with always.
He laughs at my stories more than anybody and harder.
He falls on the ground laughing so hard.
I do.
It's true.
She makes me fall on the ground.
But the feminist cartoonist... She'll say, I'll be falling on the ground.
She'll say, well, what's wrong?
You get up.
Get off the ground.
What are you doing down there?
But in the early women comics there were some very angry women and they really hated and resented Robert's work.
When I started going out with him, they started to ice me out.
And then they started to reject my comics from their books, saying that they weren't feminist enough.
My feminist consciousness was not evolved enough.
And Diane Newman was also in that group.
I brought her into that early group also.
We met and I really liked her and I liked her work.
And then she started going out with Bill Griffith, so she was also iced out.
They called us camp followers, as a matter of fact, in an article in the Berkeley Barb.
So Diane and I then broke off from the group and started Twisted Sisters.
And we saw ourselves as feminists, but we were more like bad girl feminists that wanted to have sex with men and dress in sexy clothes and play it for all we could get out of it and still be totally in control of ourselves.
We thought of ourselves more as sexy Amazons, which also went along with the way Robert saw women.
So when he'd do things like vulture demonesses, I said, yeah, I could go with that.
I kind of feel like that.
Or devil girl, yeah, I'm devil girl.
There's a part of me that really likes that.
I'm really strong.
I like to show my strength.
I was always like that.
I never felt victimized.
I never felt afraid of anything.
So I'm much more fearful and feel more victimized than Aileen does.
Absolutely.
You know, so there was something that really appealed to me in his depiction of women.
He was kind of the wimpy guy that was, like you know, idolized and was tortured by and fearful of women.
All of those things wrapped up into one, you know, and I could relate to it.
Well, Aileen, you write about how when you met Robert, he was like really famous.
At that time, I was only really known in the hippie subculture.
Well, that eventually maybe.
Eventually he became famous.
But you say he didn't handle it well and you saw what fame did to him.
What did it do?
Well, you know, since he was a reject all through high school, when he was younger, he was missing his front teeth and he was kind of funny looking and no woman would ever look at him.
And then all of a sudden, when he got famous like all these women wanted to have sex with him, he was like completely overwhelmed and he just wanted it all and he couldn't handle any of it.
And he said yes to everybody.
So there would be like tons of people around who didn't know what they were supposed to be doing and were just sort of like hanging around him and it was – created a terrible kind of chaos.
And some of those people were actually mentally unbalanced.
And it was the 60s, and everybody was taking drugs, too, so it was just a complete chaotic scene.
And plus there was a certain amount of money coming in, and then rock stars were hanging around him.
The money was completely mismanaged.
It was a very decadent, very chaotic, disgusting, unclear...
For me, it was an uncomfortable scene.
I actually fled from that at one point and then Robert came and sought me out afterwards because I think that he realized he had to get out of that.
It was like some kind of survival thing.
But I felt that he was sinking in that, and I felt that it was going to destroy him.
Robert, is that an accurate picture?
I'm afraid so.
So yeah, when Aileen fled from it in 74, I went after her because I realized that she's like the life raft.
I was involved with all these crazy women.
They were all crazy.
Aileen seemed to have her feet on the ground somehow.
I needed someone like that.
She was the only one that cared enough about me or was willing to take me on.
I needed someone like that.
Aww, that's so cute.
Aline, is that a revert?
Aline, you have all these demons and crazinesses of your own, but it sounds like in the relationship you have to be the sane one.
No, no, no, it's not like that.
No, no, it's not like that, okay.
I'll throw them out.
Eileen will throw them out.
I said, well, okay, yeah.
And this last week in France, some journalists came there to talk to me.
And I let them in, and I'm sitting at the kitchen table.
Eileen comes downstairs.
She looks around and says, what is this?
Who are these people?
How did you get in here?
Robert told me he didn't want to talk to any more journalists.
I said, Robert, what are you doing?
I was so embarrassed.
I got up and fled the room.
And Eileen just told those people, dégagé, you should kick them out.
And I couldn't do that.
I can't do it.
I'm weak.
But going back to the beginning, I have to say that I think that you know I was 23 when I met Robert.
He was in his late 20s.
And I think that we both came from very dysfunctional I hate to use that word families in that area.
I think we parented each other.
I think that we both completed each other's childhoods in a positive way, so that then we functioned much better as adults as time went on.
And I think that we did that for each other.
We did, yeah.
We parented each other.
You were my life raft, too.
You were the kind father that I never had.
And you were my best fan.
Oh, I'm going to cry.
And you really supported me as an artist, too.
So I feel it's completely mutual.
Thank you, dear.
Well, I want to thank you both so much for talking with us.
Thank you.
Love the laughs.
Thanks, Terry.
It was fun.
Cartoonists R. Crum and his wife Aileen Kaminsky Crum speaking to Terry Gross in 2007.
A new biography of R. Crum is out by Dan Nadel called Crum, A Cartoonist's Life.
And many of Crum's original comics, drawings, and scrapbooks have been published by Tashin.
Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the latest Marvel superhero movie, Thunderbolts.
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When you're in the hospital and need to be in the hospital, it's critically important to do so.
But frankly, you want to be in the hospital for as little time as possible.
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Our film critic, Justin Chang, says that Thunderbolts, which topped the box office last weekend, is the first Marvel superhero movie in some time.
That's actually worth seeing.
Florence Pugh reprises her role from Black Widow as the CIA operative Yelena Belova, and there also are return appearances by some Marvel franchise veterans, including Sebastian Stan and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
Here is Justin's review.
Trauma has become so overused as a plot device that I'm grateful I went into Thunderbolts not knowing that it would plunge so deeply into its characters' mental health issues.
The movie directed by Jake Schreier from a script by Eric Pearson and Joanna Kahlo may not be the most original treatment of those issues, but it's sincere and heartfelt in the way it approaches them.
It also happens to be the most enjoyable Marvel adventure in some time.
It isn't a self-satisfied joke like Deadpool and Wolverine, or a forgettable slog like this year's Captain America.
Brave New World.
Thunderbolts is an unwieldy jumble, to be sure, and it's been designed, like all Marvel films, to help extend the brand unto infinity.
But for an impressive stretch.
It actually looks and feels like a real movie – with solid action, vivid emotional stakes and characters memorable enough that you won't mind seeing them again in the inevitable sequel.
The star is the terrific Florence Pugh, who was introduced several movies back as Yelena Belova, the younger sister of Scarlett Johansson's now-deceased Natasha Romanoff.
Like Natasha, Yelena is the product of a top-secret Russian program that turned innocent children into spies and assassins.
Years later, Yelena still can't shake off the grim memories of her indoctrination or her grief over Natasha's death.
There's something wrong with me.
An emptiness.
I thought it started when my sister died, but now it feels like something bigger.
Just a void.
Yelena now works as undercover muscle for CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who's played by a breezily menacing Julia Louis-Dreyfus, with a touch of Veep-style incompetence.
Valentina is bad news and before long.
Yelena is betrayed and trapped in a deadly lair in the middle of nowhere.
To get out alive, she must join forces with a few other similarly betrayed and trapped operatives, some of whom have special powers.
Hannah John Common plays Ghost, who can pass through walls.
Wyatt Russell is enhanced super soldier John Walker, who's kind of like a surlier Captain America.
And then there's a random nice guy named Bob, played by Lewis Pullman, who has no idea why he's there and appears to have no powers of any kind.
But both he and the movie have a few surprises in store.
In time, Yelena, Ghost, Walker, and Bob escape Valentina's clutches.
But the danger never lets up, and they must work together to take her down.
Fortunately for them, their ranks soon expand to include the Marvel mainstay Bucky Barnes, a formidable fighter with his own physical and psychological scars, well played, as always, by recent Oscar nominee Sebastian Stan.
And then there's Yelena's boisterous adoptive father, a Russian expat limo driver who goes by the superhero moniker of Red Guardian.
He's played by a bumbling, scene-stealing David Harbour.
In time, this ragtag crew began calling themselves the Thunderbolts, a name inspired by a youth soccer team that Yelena was a part of years ago.
Like that team, Yelena and her unlikely comrades are a scrappy bunch of underperformers, basically a third-rate Avengers.
The story is unapologetically formulaic.
Valentina's scheme, which involves turning the Thunderbolts into a public enemy, smacks a bit of Pixar's The Incredibles and every other Marvel movie that has featured a cataclysmic assault on a major city.
But even amid such familiar mayhem, Schreier finds fresh, vivid angles.
The action is clear and coherent.
The character dynamics strike the right balance of earnest sincerity and glib humor.
And it's oddly moving to see the characters put their bickering ways aside and team up to protect as many innocent bystanders as they can.
For a brief moment, I was reminded of what made superhero movies fun in the first place, before they became Hollywood's dominant export.
But Thunderbolts does have more than fun on its mind, and here's where that trauma element comes in.
Yelena is continually haunted by reminders of her past, when she was forced as a child to become a ruthless killing machine.
But she isn't the only character here confronting emotional pain and a profound sense of emptiness.
The movie builds to a surreal sequence, an almost Being John Malkovich-style romp through the subconscious.
That floats some fascinating questions.
What if loneliness were the single most destructive force in existence –
And what if human connection really was powerful enough to save the world?
That may sound like a trite sentiment, but it's nonetheless worth repeating.
And for two hours or so, Thunderbolts just about makes you believe it.
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker.
He reviewed the new Marvel movie, Thunderbolts.
On Monday's show, actor Danny McBride talks about the final season of HBO's The Righteous Gemstones and his journey from Hollywood to South Carolina, where he co-founded Rough House Pictures.
He'll tell us about how he's built a unique comic empire, blending sharp satire with Southern charm.
Hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Sam Brigger is our managing producer.
Our senior producer today is Roberta Shura.
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld and Charlie Kyer.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram.
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