On Robert Crumb's Work

Mr. Natural, by Robert Crumb, is an underground comic from the early 1970s. The nature of the titular character, Mr. Natural, allows for the telling of just about any story that Crumb could conceive; upon reading a few of the stories, it is more than apparent that he really did tell any story he could conceive. If the overall narrative of the story is not offensive, as in “Mr. Natural’s 719^th Meditation,” Crumb finds ways to insert characters with offensive design, conduct, or – in some cases – both. In the aforementioned story, Crumb just briefly hints at an unsympathetic, cowardly police officer. In “Mr. Natural and the Shuman Human in ‘Om Sweet Om,’” there is an extremely unflattering, racist portrayal of a number of African-American characters. However, in “On the Bum again,” Crumb does not stop at offensively portrayed characters and dives right into a convoluted approach to what Mr. Natural claims is not child molestation, but clearly is. The atrocious imagery is absolutely unnecessary, but Crumb basks in it not because he should, but simply because he could, one of the most defining aspects of most of the Underground comic artists. The needlessly repulsive nature of many of Crumb’s narratives reflect this fairly consistently, anchoring him as a perverted individual in an age in which comics of this “flavor” began to flourish, feeding a depraved audience who lived for the artists’ fetishes.