R. Crumb’s “tales” (even filtered through psychedelics and cannabinoids) weren’t always so paranoid—though they were frequently calamitous. The street-hip graphic domain Crumb freely improvised during the 1960s and 1970s across densely cross-hatched black-andwhite panels, was borne out of a counter-cultural stew as manic as it was laid-back—occasionally approaching the catastrophic—suggesting that paranoia was never more than one bad acid trip away. In the decades since those early picaresque romps and darkly surreal chronicles, human history has seemingly overtaken its potential for pathological distortion. It’s always worse than we think.
It is also frequently more complicated than we think. Crumb’s current exhibition at David Zwirner is essentially given over to the original artwork for the contents (and covers) of his latest Fantagraphics book, Tales of Paranoia, along with a separate Crumb Family Covid Exposé drawn and scripted jointly by Crumb and his late wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, in 2021, as well as a number of thematically related comic pages.
The trigger here is the COVID-19 virus, but more crucially, the vaccines for it. Crumb compulsively gathers facts, but even as he acknowledges the innate complexity of disentangling such a genetic puzzle—of vaccine synthesis—he remains inclined to attribute the lot of it (and certainly the public narrative around it) to all-encompassing conspiracy. What part of that adds up to paranoia? Or is Crumb just “BATSHIT CRAZY”—as he seems to inquire from the book’s cover, in one of his most densely crosshatched self-portraits to date, gazing over his shoulder at a cell tower with an almost palpable sense of apprehension?
The work is hung more or less sequentially around the walls of the second Zwirner gallery (at 616 N. Western), interspersed with recent portraits and studies (a few of which stand with his very best work). The title is blown up and fairly vibrating off the taxicab-yellow painted rear wall, and there’s a table of Crumbauthored publications to actually sit down and read in the center of the gallery space. The show closes almost nostalgically with work scanned from a late-20th-century sketchbook and recent etchings from drawings. (A few from decades ago, including a great and thoroughly unforgiving self-portrait.)
He introduces three characters of dubious origin, plus a more generic “Bunch”—standing in for the mass of conspiracy-avid and rabid ruminators and fabricators—to his Tales. They include a presumably medical “Doctor” friend, a “Deep State Woman” (based on an actual person—a distinguished Harvard-trained physician, former FDA Commissioner, and public health expert he chooses to leave unnamed), and a former would-be LSD guru/drug dealer, identified as Pete Cornell. But each of them is really nothing more than “triggers” for the presumably real panic that sets in as his sense of connection, control, and certainty slips from his grasp. This is concisely conveyed in just a few frames on the second page: a remembered domestic incident gone very dark and closing in on him as imagined prying eyes judge him from behind the black scrim of his imagination.
