Crumb Bums

 

I'm about three-quarters of the way through Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life by Dan Nadel.  It's really good, highly recommended.

Reading it doesn't make me feel like I missed out on "the sixties" so much, but it does make it seem like it was a great time to be involved in comics fandom. As kids Crumb and his brother collect Carl Barks and Walt Kelly comics obsessively and contribute to comics fanzines.  Terry Zwigoff teaches classes on Barks comics before managing a comic shop, which he then quits to join a bluegrass band with Crumb and Robert Armstrong, creator of Mickey Rat.  The other Zap guys are all Barks-heads too; as idiosyncratic and unique as they are, the influence of the Good Duck Artist is clear as day.

 Neat to think that the hip, cutting-edge transgressive artistes of yore were all big Donald Duck and Little Lulu fans.

 

Hack Slash

 

The great Rick Griffin in the pages of Zap

Prometheus Unbound

Images from Promethean Enterprises (1969) 

Pics Or It Didn't Happen

 

I'm reading Dirty Pictures right now and the thing that leaps out at me is how young everybody was.

When I first became aware of Crumb and the gang it was the early 90's, post-Raw post-Weirdo, and all of these guys had been pretty much accepted by the mainstream and entering elder statesmen territory. I think I mentioned it on here before, but the Rick Griffin obituary in Surfer magazine was my first introduction to the world of comix, and by then Zap was firmly in Boomer-nostalgialand.  It's fun to read about all these legends as scrappy young fanzine kids, all trying to emulate their heroes John Stanley, Carl Barks, and The Usual Gang of Idiots.

I'm not looking forward to the inevitable personality clashes and infighting, but for now it's a really interesting look back, well worth a read.

Utopian Vision

 

Man From Utopia by Rick Griffin

Griffinology

 

I've always been fascinated by the psychedelic surf art of the great Rick Griffin. Here's some more of his Disney-inspired work:

Mickey Duck

Mickey Mouse Wants You (to die in Vietnam).

I had a photocopy of this Dylan Mouse on my bedroom wall all through high school.

This last image is from a really interesting article about the sixties and the symbolism of Mickey Mouse, a nice addendum to the Shary Flenniken talk at CXC.

These Mystic Eyes

I love everything about this Rick Griffin surfing strip

But I love the little Mickey guys in the next-to-last panel most of all.

Maui No Ka Oe

Nice Junior Woodchucks cameo in the Tales from the Tube story "Maui is Best"

Read the whole thing here.

Totally Tubular

 

 

 

 

Not Disney:  Rick Griffin's Tales from the Tube

 

 

 

 



Manna manna

Rick Griffin week continues with this Mickey-ish concert poster:

From Little By Little(hales)

Welp!

More Rick Griffin goodness, from Rolling Stone:

From Little By Littlehales