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The most astonishing fact in 'Crumb,' Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary about the underground comic book artist Robert Crumb, was that Crumb was the closest thing to normal in his own family. And that's saying something, because by his own admission, Crumb is one odd character. For the past four decades, since his first successes in the countercultural underground 'comix' of the 1960s, Crumb 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, mad for music recorded before World War II, Crumb has never been afraid to draw and write about his own foibles and fantasies. What's noteworthy about his efforts is that he manages to draw his viewers in, he makes us keep turning pages. He shocks us, but he makes us laugh. He repels us, but he makes us realize that we're just as much a part of this sleazy, baggy-pants world he's drawing as he is. And if he reads this, he'll probably throw up. Crumb never met a compliment he couldn't distrust.
In the closing chapter of a new book about his life's work, 'The R. Crumb Handbook' ( MQ Publications), he writes, 'As a matter of survival I've created the anti-hero alter-ego, a guy in an ill-fitting suit-part homunculus and part clown. Yep, that's me alright ... I could never relate to he-roes. I have no interest in drawing heroic characters. It's not my thing, man. I'm more inclined toward the sordid underbelly of lifE.' It goes on like that for another couple of pages, but you get the ideA.Not a happy guy, our R. What's left out of this description, though, is the drawing, and that's the key to it all. Whatever else he is, Crumb is a first-rate draftsman and a highly original stylist.
It's startling when you finally realize it, but no one drew like Crumb before he diD.Now he's so copied ( not well) that you think his stylE.has been around forever. But in fact he sort of com- piled it a piece at a time: the arrows and lettering look lifted from those cheesy ads in the back of comic books; the pen-and-ink drawing borrowed from old rotogravure engraving. His characters have those 'planet of the rubber people' physiques from the Sunday funnies. And while his nearly obsessive crosshatching adds detail and shadow and depth, the final effect is that of a stitched together world with its own kind of built-in shakiness. It could all fly apart in an instant. In Zwigoff's fill, the art critic Robert Hughes compares Crumb to Brueghel and Goya, and this is not just heavy-breathing nonsensE.Like those old masters, Crumb stares unblinkingly at the crimes of humanity, then translates what he sees and feels into visual images that make us want to look at it his way. Crumb, of course, thinks all this is baloney.
According to the passage, what kind of people did Crumb like to draw most in his comics?
A.ordinary peoplE.
B.his family members.
C.anti-heroic figures
D.himselF.