Robert Crumb

He was born on August 30, 1943 to Charles Crumb and Beatrice as one of their five children. His father had been a Combat Illustrator in the United States Marine Corps. His parents had an unhappy marriage because of which the children suffered.

He loved the animations of Walt Kelly and Fleischer Brothers, and started to draw his own comics along with his brothers. The boys even went door-to-door selling the comics they had made!

After graduating from high school he went to Cleveland where he found a job at American Greetings where his work was to draw novelty greeting cards. A bohemian at heart who never feared to steer clear of conventions, he met many likeminded individuals during this period.

The greeting card work did not thrill his young mind for long. He began drawing cartoons in his free time and tried selling them to comic book companies with little success.

The cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman printed some of Crumb’s works in 1965 in ‘Help!’ a humor magazine he edited. Encouraged by this, he moved to New York in the hopes of working with Kurtzman, but the magazine’s publication was stopped shortly afterwards.

A disappointed Crumb went on to illustrate bubblegum cards for Topps for a while. Failing to find any meaningful work, he returned to Cleveland and rejoined his old job.

In 1966, he began experimenting with LSD along with his wife, Dana. Using drugs severely altered his thinking, perception and attitude towards life. All this while he had been holding on to a job he hated, but the drug induced such a high that he was unable to cope with his mind numbing job any longer.

He is best known as the creator of the comic strip, ‘Fritz the Cat’, a feline con artist notorious for his sexual escapades. He gained immense popularity when the strip was made into an animated film which became the first ever animated film in the US to receive an ‘X’ rating.