"It don't mean shit": A Freudian analysis of the comics of Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman
Nazi cats, giant asses, and what they have to do with the id, ego, and super-ego
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Long before the New York Times declared that comics weren't just for kids anymore, Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman were producing surreal, stark, introspective work that rattled the sensibilities of even its most adult readers. While Superman was leaping tall buildings in a single bound, and Spider-Man was standing up Mary Jane Watson yet again, characters created by Spiegelman and Crumb were having mental breakdowns, indulging their sexual peccadillos, and generally plumbing the seedy depths of the collective unconscious. Before these two underground comics icons unleash their combined neuroses at a Nov. 13 roundtable discussion at Bass Hall—moderated by New Yorker editor (and Spiegelman’s wife) Françoise Mouly—The A.V. Club got them on the proverbial couch for some old-fashioned Freudian analysis, tracing the roots of their pent-up misanthropy and deep-seated mommy issues to their origins in the human psyche.
The id
Robert Crumb once said, "I'm not political. God, I don't what it is. I'm instinctive. I just let it come." One look at Crumb's grotesque, crosshatched drawings of women, African-Americans, and anthropomorphic, sexually abusive hippies is all a psychoanalyst would need to see irrefutable influence of Crumb’s id run amok. What Freud called "the dark, inaccessible part of our personality" has pretty much been the focal point of R. Crumb's animated introspection for over 40 years—and what most of us would be ashamed to confess to a priest, Crumb has catalogued in exhausting detail in comics with telling titles like Snatch, Big Ass, and Weirdo. (And judging from the loving detail Crumb puts into his many, many drawings of women's hefty posteriors, it's obvious he experienced some sort of transformative event during the "anal stage" of his development.)
Though comparatively tame next to Crumb’s unrestrained fetishism, Spiegelman has also rolled up his sleeves to investigate the socially unacceptable. His most obvious dalliance with the ugly side of the psyche wasn't in comics, however: It was during his 20-year tenure at Topps, where he brainstormed the Garbage Pail Kids, including such perversions as "Bert Squirt" (who popped his facial acne to release anthropomorphic pus) and "Rock E. Horror" (a transvestite baby with eye shadow, stubble, and a garter belt), characters that subliminally spoke to lingering adolescent fears about puberty and sexual identity.
The ego
Both Spiegelman and Crumb were pioneers in "autobiographical comics," using their pages to explore the ego through astonishingly revealing narratives. These days, penning a comic about your first crush or your childhood experiences in Iran all but guarantees critical acclaim, but when Spiegelman and Mouly first launched their seminal underground anthology, RAW, the idea of comics exploring reality was laughable. Home to luminaries of the medium like Charles Burns (Black Hole), Gary Panter (Jimbo), and Ben Katchor (Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer), RAW lived up to its name with emotionally unguarded experiments in self-analysis—whether the results were inspirational and moving or willingly repulsive.
Modern artists like Jeffrey Brown (Clumsy), Ivan Brunetti (Schizo), and Peter Bagge (Hate) continue to ape RAW’s warts-and-all approach, as well as the self-deprecating honesty of Crumb's late-’60s work. While everyone else was high on free love and flower power, Robert Crumb presented himself as an awkward, bespectacled outsider constantly at odds with the swinging scenes around him. Tempering the ego's realism with his uncontrollable id's manic urges, Crumb's comics about self-promoting gurus, hypocritical hippies, and the dark side of LSD continue to provide a grounding counterpoint to starry-eyed baby boomer nostalgia.
The super-ego
The super-ego is the part of the personality that focuses on our highest ideals—and until an art form addresses those lofty goals, its scope will always be limited. Spiegelman elevated the entire medium of comics by demonstrating that it could be used to poignantly address the deepest, darkest issues of the soul with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, a heartfelt and earnest look at the horrors of the Holocaust and the lingering frustrations of its survivors. In retelling his cantankerous father's story, Spiegelman cast the timid Jews as mice and the evil Nazis as cats, symbolically bridging the gap between comics' cartoon-y past and its future as a legitimate place for commenting on society at large. (Though Spiegelman would lose some of his super-ego’s focus while chronicling post-9/11 trauma for In The Shadow Of No Towers, where his paranoia manifested itself in jarring splashes of scattershot drawing styles and other examples of unrestrained neuroses.)
Crumb's statements on society, of course, were usually too obsessed with vulgar, id-like functions to be taken as seriously—or to replicate Spiegelman’s crossover success. In fact, the closest Crumb has come to imitating the super-ego’s flawless voice of reason in his 40-plus-year career is his most recent work, a faithful illustrated version of The Book Of Genesis that goes straight to the source of our sense of morality. When left to his own devices, Crumb’s general thoughts about gods, gurus, and existential goals are best epitomized by his flawed fount of spiritual wisdom, Mr. Natural—who, when questioned about the meaning of life, replies, “It don’t mean shit.”
