A Cartoonist Life
By Dan Nadel

"Very few get the biographer they deserve—Robert Crumb got lucky. Dan Nadel's rigorously researched & wonderfully candid chronicle does not recoil, moralize, or whitewash. While exhibiting deep sympathy and admiration for the artist—in glory and crisis—Nadel navigates the many minefields of troubled and troubling biographical and artistic episodes with tenacity, backbone, and a much needed sense of irony. Generously illustrated with images and teeming with a fascinating cast of characters, Nadel’s biography is an excellent study of the artist as misfit. The book is an admirable achievement of ardent exploration, and a bona fide page-turner.“
–Herbert Pföstl

Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, delivers a “gripping and essential account” (The Boston Globe) of how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact.

Braiding biography with “cultural history and criticism...that honors the complexity of [its] subject, even, perhaps particularly, when it gets ugly” (Los Angeles Times), Crumb is the story of a richly complex life at the forefront of both the underground and popular cultures of post-war America. Including forty-five stunning black-and-white images throughout and a sixteen-page color insert featuring images both iconic and obscure, Crumb spans the pressures of 1950s suburban America and Crumb’s highly dysfunctional early family life; the history of comics and graphic satire; 20th-century popular music; the world of the counterculture; the birth of underground comic books in 1960s San Francisco with Crumb’s Zap Comix; the economic challenges and dissolution of the hippie dream; and the path Robert Crumb blazed through it all.

Written with Crumb’s cooperation, this fascinating, rollicking book takes in seven decades of Crumb’s iconic works, including Fritz the Cat, Weirdo, and his adaptation of The Book of Genesis and “floats Crumb on the rapids of his times” (Harper’s Magazine), capturing, in the process, the essence of an extraordinary artist.

2025; hardcover; 6" x 9"; 480 pages; ISBN: 9781982144005.

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