Nadel’s gripping and essential book makes good on this claim; his biography is the story of how one highly flawed and preternaturally gifted man augured a revolution in comic book storytelling with his discomfiting, sexually frank, intensely personal oeuvre ... Moving.
A definitive and ideal biography — pound for pound, one of the sleekest and most judicious I’ve ever read. He’s latched onto a fascinating and complicated figure, which helps ... Nadel...is an instinctive storyteller, one with a command of the facts and a relaxed tone that also happens to be grainy, penetrating, interested in everything, alive ... There are a lot of road trips in this biography ... Nadel is a canny visual reader of comics, and he traces Crumb’s influence on a long line of cartoonists.
Comprehensive and lucid ... Nadel is at his best when he is laying out the cultural, personal and artistic forces that led to the qualities and work that Crumb would come to be best known for ... [Nadel] never seems to fully grapple with the pushback Crumb has so regularly received for his work ... Though the biography may not be outright hagiography, it often hews too closely to the story of Crumb’s life as told by Crumb, which leaves little room for the ways that his behavior and work may have affected others — especially but not only those in his own industry — for the worse ... Fans of Crumb and those invested in learning more about the history of underground comics will find much to embrace.
You may want to dismiss Crumb as a morsel of some strange loaf, fallen to the ground to be swept away. But today he is shown by David Zwirner, among the bluest of the blue-chip galleries, and his pieces command six figures. The perverts won.
A loving biography ... Crumb’s gawky, eccentric persona was first revealed to the wider public in a 1994 documentary made by his friend Terry Zwigoff ... If the documentary presented him as a sort of accidental artist, with little other than his id propelling him from drawing to drawing, a more intentional drive emerges in the biography.
Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life also functions as both a travelogue through America’s ’60s counterculture and a brilliantly concise history of the underground comics scene that sprang from it ... Nadel excels when critiquing Crumb’s work, scrutinizing his use of racist tropes that clashed with his otherwise earthy, progressive ideals, and smartly describes the artist’s technique free of jargon ... Lavishly illustrated, with personal photos...and numerous examples of his work, Crumb is a terrific biography that just misses being a great one. It’s let down, as too many books are these days, by lax copy-editing, which invites errors, clichés and grammatical mishaps onto the pages.
Nadel capably lays it all out for us to see, creating a nuanced picture of an influential figure, whose work shaped the landscape of comics to come. Incorporating interviews with Crumb, his family, and the artists who work with or were inspired by him, this first major biography of the iconic cartoonist is unsparing in its detail, acutely aware of social and historical context, and unapologetically in awe of Crumb’s artistic talent. A revealing portrait of an artist, yes, but also of an art form.
Intimate ... Nadel deftly contextualizes the artist’s salacious output within a finely rendered record of the artist’s private life and within an electric chronicle of the underground comics wave. Essential history for art and comics aficionados.
