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The Book of Weirdo: A Retrospective of R. Crumb's Legendary Humor Comics Anthology
The Book of Weirdo is the definitive (as well as hugely entertaining) examination of Weirdo magazine, renowned underground comix cartoonist Robert Crumb's legendary humor comics anthology from the 1980s. Crumb himself has called the retrospective “a great book” and “the definitive work on the subject.”
A "low-brow" counterpoint to Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's rather high-falootin' RAW, Weirdo influenced an entire generation of cartoonists, and served as a creative refuge for underground comix veterans and training ground for new creators, and this book features the comprehensive story of the fondly-recalled magazine, along with testimonials from over 130 of the mag's contributors, plus interviews with Weirdo's three editors ― R. “Keep on Truckin'” Crumb, Peter “Hate” Bagge, and Aline “The Bunch” Kominsky-Crumb ― as well as publisher “Baba Ron” Turner.
This 288-page hardcover book is as much a comprehensive history of the alternative comics scene of the 1980s and early '90s ― from New York City punk to Seattle grunge ― as it is the story of a single magazine, an exhaustive retrospective that includes rare and unseen artwork from that era, as well as new comics from modern-day artists paying homage to the great oddball mag. In its time, the periodical featured the finest work of many artists, particularly the best material by R. Crumb himself, Weirdo's founder and best known for ZAP Comix, Fritz the Cat, and Mr. Natural, and a man widely heralded as the greatest cartoonist of all time.
In 1981, amidst a seismic shift to the right in the country, Crumb responded by unleashing the savagely irreverent and satirical Weirdo onto the great multitude, and he generously welcomed to its pages not just his ZAP Comix underground cohorts, but also an entirely new generation of iconoclastic cartoonists. It was an irreverent, outrageous, often politically-incorrect, and taboo-challenging anthology that showcased Crumb's finest ― and most controversial ― material. It was gut-busting, hysterical, and frequently offensive. But, most of all, it was FUNNY! Though it finally gave up the ghost by 1993, in its time, Weirdo was one of the very best of its kind… a showcase for outsiders, freaks, and (naturally) weirdos. In fact, truth to tell, it's the ONLY one of its kind!
A "low-brow" counterpoint to Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's rather high-falootin' RAW, Weirdo influenced an entire generation of cartoonists, and served as a creative refuge for underground comix veterans and training ground for new creators, and this book features the comprehensive story of the fondly-recalled magazine, along with testimonials from over 130 of the mag's contributors, plus interviews with Weirdo's three editors ― R. “Keep on Truckin'” Crumb, Peter “Hate” Bagge, and Aline “The Bunch” Kominsky-Crumb ― as well as publisher “Baba Ron” Turner.
This 288-page hardcover book is as much a comprehensive history of the alternative comics scene of the 1980s and early '90s ― from New York City punk to Seattle grunge ― as it is the story of a single magazine, an exhaustive retrospective that includes rare and unseen artwork from that era, as well as new comics from modern-day artists paying homage to the great oddball mag. In its time, the periodical featured the finest work of many artists, particularly the best material by R. Crumb himself, Weirdo's founder and best known for ZAP Comix, Fritz the Cat, and Mr. Natural, and a man widely heralded as the greatest cartoonist of all time.
In 1981, amidst a seismic shift to the right in the country, Crumb responded by unleashing the savagely irreverent and satirical Weirdo onto the great multitude, and he generously welcomed to its pages not just his ZAP Comix underground cohorts, but also an entirely new generation of iconoclastic cartoonists. It was an irreverent, outrageous, often politically-incorrect, and taboo-challenging anthology that showcased Crumb's finest ― and most controversial ― material. It was gut-busting, hysterical, and frequently offensive. But, most of all, it was FUNNY! Though it finally gave up the ghost by 1993, in its time, Weirdo was one of the very best of its kind… a showcase for outsiders, freaks, and (naturally) weirdos. In fact, truth to tell, it's the ONLY one of its kind!
288 pages, Hardcover
Published May 1, 2019
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June 11, 2019
From 1981 to 1993, 28 issues of a comics anthology magazine called Weirdo (featuring covers by Robert Crumb) were published. Crumb edited the first 9 issues, then Peter Bagge the next 8, and then Aline Kominsky became the editor (except for issue 25, which Bagge came in to guest edit).The first issue I bought was issue 9 (the winter, 1983-84 issue). I had pretty much discovered underground comics around then. I knew they existed--I had flipped through A History of Underground Comics at my local B. Dalton many times, looking for the sexy parts, natch--but it wasn't until college that I started reading them as comics as opposed to as transmitters of forbidden images!
When I picked up my first issue of Weirdo, I didn't know how Crumb's personal history (as well as the history of underground comics as a whole) informed its existence. The next two paragraphs are a very brief history of underground comics. In the early 50s, EC Comics made big waves with their science fiction and horror comics. They also had a huge hit with their humor anthology, MAD, which started off as a comic book before becoming the well-known magazine that it is today.. During a moral panic over juvenile delinquency, which found America casting around for causes for this rising problem, comics came in for blame because of their lurid, violent contents and because they were popular with children. In 1954, the comics industry adopted a self-censorship regime called the Comics Code, which essentially made the gory, morally-ambiguous stories that EC was pumping out verboten. EC almost went under, but it converted MAD comics into a magazine (exempted from the Comics Code) and thus continued to thrive for decades. But the fans of EC and the original MAD saw how a bunch of censorious busy-bodies ruined their fun and nurtured a grievance that would stick with them until the 60s. In the 60s, these young guys (and it was almost all guys) had developed their drawing and writing chops in the world of fanzines, then became hippies and dropped out. They started drawing their own comics, not only ignoring the Comics Code, but ignoring any sense of what was socially acceptable by straight, bourgeois America--their comics had sex, drugs, radical politics, foul language, etc. The first to make a big impact was Robert Crumb, selling his first issue of Zap from a baby carriage in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, the center of hippiedom on Earth. He was instantly successful. These comics were distributed around the country and around the world through completely alternative avenues. There really was a counter culture--even a counter economy--and underground comics were part of it.
But they were successful, and American capitalism doesn't like to leave money just laying on the sidewalk. Crumb was almost immediately bombarded with offers from hustlers to repackage and otherwise market his work. He said yes to a few, but he had no inclination to become a success in the ordinary sense of American striving. He had in mind a man he considered a mentor, Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman was the founder of MAD, and after he left MAD, he made a couple of attempts at humor magazines with modest success at best--Humbug and Help!, the latter of which Crumb contributed occasionally before joining the counterculture. Kurtzman was brilliant, but ended up writing Little Annie Fanny for Playboy, a job that Crumb considered a total sellout gig. It's hard to disagree with this assessment, and Crumb's fear was to become another Kurtzman--someone who gets trapped into selling out in such a way that he can't escape. Crumb wanted to drop out permanently. It took him a while, including years of tax problems, but by the early 80s he had largely succeeded.
By this time, underground comics were a nostalgia item, as relevant to the culture at large as love beads and fringed ponchos. Some of the cartoonists kept on trying to keep the flame alive. One example was Arcade, a short-lived anthology edited by Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman. They wanted to create a professional magazine with high editorial standards that the editors hoped would act as a life-raft for underground cartoonists as well as other, newer comics talents. It lasted less than a year in 1975 and 1976, with 7 issues produced. (Arcade was a stone-cold classic in my opinion.) In a way, it is the direct predecessor of Weirdo and Weirdo's main competitor, RAW, a comics magazine that ran from 1980 to 1991. Weirdo was quite nearly simultaneous--1981 to 1993.
The editors of RAW were Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly while the editors of Weirdo were Robert Crumb, Peter Bagge, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. The two magazines had very different styles--Raw was a gorgeous, over-sized art object (until the final three issues which were published more like trade paperback literary journals) and was filled with artsy European comics. Weirdo was initially inspired by crappy early American humor magazines and had an open filter for contributors, some of whom seemed literally insane. But the two magazines shared a lot of contributors: Drew Friedman (who provided the cover to The Book of Weirdo above), Kaz, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Mark Newgarden, Gary Panter, Krystine Kryttre and most important, Robert Crumb.
Weirdo finally ended when the Crumb family moved to France. They produced one last issue (which was retitled "Verre D'Eau"--a bilingual pun meaning "glass of water" in French) which featured work by a variety of then relatively young French artists who would in time become giants of French comics--Edmond Baudoin, J. Cristoph Menu, Willem, etc. In this way, the final issue of Wierdo was more like RAW than it had ever been.
The Book of Weirdo is an extremely fannish compendium of Jon Cooke's research on Weirdo. I say "fannish" not as an insult, but because it is largely uncritical and mainly concerned with the minutia of the magazine's history. Every contributor to Weirdo gets an opportunity to write about their contribution, how they ended up in Weirdo, and anything else that comes to mind. Some are extremely laconic (like Doug Allen, who's one-paragraph essay seems just right for his one contribution to the magazine). But some went quite long. As I was flipping through and saw how long Michael Dougan's essay was, I blanched. But his lengthy essay about how he got into comics and into Weirdo turned out to be excellent. He described what the comics scene in Seattle was like before Fantagraphics (and I) arrived. And he describes the way he thought that comics were going to be a big deal that he could make a living from. (Obviously it's not for even cartoonists as massively talented as Michael Dougan. He related a joke told to him by Rocket art director Mark Michaelson: "Did you hear about the Polish cartoonist? He was in it for the money.") But Dougan's piece could have used some editing, as could the rest of the book.
Like many of the publications of hard-core fans in the past, this one is little more than a straight-ahead history/checklist. I have a theory about how subcultural criticism happens. First come the fans and their exhaustive checklists and timelines. Only after they have cleared the ground can the scholars come in and start looking at the work critically and within the context of various artistic, literary and cultural theories.
I'm a fan of Weirdo, having read the magazine religiously since issue 9 (1981) until it folded up shop. One of the appeals were the covers drawn by Robert Crumb for every issue. At fist he based them on certain MAD and Humbug covers--a strong central image with a border of related smaller pages that commented in some way on the central image. But starting with issue 10 (Peter Bagge's first issue as editor), he stopped doing the borders. He would return to that design occasionally over the remainder of the run.
What is astonishing about this book is how Cooke dug up some of the weirdest and most mysterious contributors and got them to describe their work for the magazine. The most amazing, in my opinion, is Elinore Norfluss. She did three completely insane comics for Weirdo, and my assumption about her was that she was a deeply troubled person. She comes off in her essay as eccentric but not insane.
Cooke digs up almost cultural reference in Weirdo. For instance, the cover Weirdo #4 is a visual quote of Heironymous Bosch's "Christ Carrying the Cross," and Crumb included work by Pieter Bruegel in issue 1. But somehow he failed to notice or comment on Crumb's parody of painter Philip Guston on the covers of Weirdo #7.
Missing Philip Guston was the only omission that I noticed. On the contrary, the primary fault of the book is that it is overstuffed and repetitious. You read about the same things over and over. And including a whole section on Mineshaft (a poetry and art 'zine that got started in the late 90s, long after the demise of Weirdo that published a number of Weirdo alumni) was excessive. But if you read and liked Weirdo, this is the book for you.
When I picked up my first issue of Weirdo, I didn't know how Crumb's personal history (as well as the history of underground comics as a whole) informed its existence. The next two paragraphs are a very brief history of underground comics. In the early 50s, EC Comics made big waves with their science fiction and horror comics. They also had a huge hit with their humor anthology, MAD, which started off as a comic book before becoming the well-known magazine that it is today.. During a moral panic over juvenile delinquency, which found America casting around for causes for this rising problem, comics came in for blame because of their lurid, violent contents and because they were popular with children. In 1954, the comics industry adopted a self-censorship regime called the Comics Code, which essentially made the gory, morally-ambiguous stories that EC was pumping out verboten. EC almost went under, but it converted MAD comics into a magazine (exempted from the Comics Code) and thus continued to thrive for decades. But the fans of EC and the original MAD saw how a bunch of censorious busy-bodies ruined their fun and nurtured a grievance that would stick with them until the 60s. In the 60s, these young guys (and it was almost all guys) had developed their drawing and writing chops in the world of fanzines, then became hippies and dropped out. They started drawing their own comics, not only ignoring the Comics Code, but ignoring any sense of what was socially acceptable by straight, bourgeois America--their comics had sex, drugs, radical politics, foul language, etc. The first to make a big impact was Robert Crumb, selling his first issue of Zap from a baby carriage in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, the center of hippiedom on Earth. He was instantly successful. These comics were distributed around the country and around the world through completely alternative avenues. There really was a counter culture--even a counter economy--and underground comics were part of it.
But they were successful, and American capitalism doesn't like to leave money just laying on the sidewalk. Crumb was almost immediately bombarded with offers from hustlers to repackage and otherwise market his work. He said yes to a few, but he had no inclination to become a success in the ordinary sense of American striving. He had in mind a man he considered a mentor, Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman was the founder of MAD, and after he left MAD, he made a couple of attempts at humor magazines with modest success at best--Humbug and Help!, the latter of which Crumb contributed occasionally before joining the counterculture. Kurtzman was brilliant, but ended up writing Little Annie Fanny for Playboy, a job that Crumb considered a total sellout gig. It's hard to disagree with this assessment, and Crumb's fear was to become another Kurtzman--someone who gets trapped into selling out in such a way that he can't escape. Crumb wanted to drop out permanently. It took him a while, including years of tax problems, but by the early 80s he had largely succeeded.
By this time, underground comics were a nostalgia item, as relevant to the culture at large as love beads and fringed ponchos. Some of the cartoonists kept on trying to keep the flame alive. One example was Arcade, a short-lived anthology edited by Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman. They wanted to create a professional magazine with high editorial standards that the editors hoped would act as a life-raft for underground cartoonists as well as other, newer comics talents. It lasted less than a year in 1975 and 1976, with 7 issues produced. (Arcade was a stone-cold classic in my opinion.) In a way, it is the direct predecessor of Weirdo and Weirdo's main competitor, RAW, a comics magazine that ran from 1980 to 1991. Weirdo was quite nearly simultaneous--1981 to 1993.
The editors of RAW were Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly while the editors of Weirdo were Robert Crumb, Peter Bagge, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. The two magazines had very different styles--Raw was a gorgeous, over-sized art object (until the final three issues which were published more like trade paperback literary journals) and was filled with artsy European comics. Weirdo was initially inspired by crappy early American humor magazines and had an open filter for contributors, some of whom seemed literally insane. But the two magazines shared a lot of contributors: Drew Friedman (who provided the cover to The Book of Weirdo above), Kaz, Justin Green, Bill Griffith, Mark Newgarden, Gary Panter, Krystine Kryttre and most important, Robert Crumb.
Weirdo finally ended when the Crumb family moved to France. They produced one last issue (which was retitled "Verre D'Eau"--a bilingual pun meaning "glass of water" in French) which featured work by a variety of then relatively young French artists who would in time become giants of French comics--Edmond Baudoin, J. Cristoph Menu, Willem, etc. In this way, the final issue of Wierdo was more like RAW than it had ever been.
The Book of Weirdo is an extremely fannish compendium of Jon Cooke's research on Weirdo. I say "fannish" not as an insult, but because it is largely uncritical and mainly concerned with the minutia of the magazine's history. Every contributor to Weirdo gets an opportunity to write about their contribution, how they ended up in Weirdo, and anything else that comes to mind. Some are extremely laconic (like Doug Allen, who's one-paragraph essay seems just right for his one contribution to the magazine). But some went quite long. As I was flipping through and saw how long Michael Dougan's essay was, I blanched. But his lengthy essay about how he got into comics and into Weirdo turned out to be excellent. He described what the comics scene in Seattle was like before Fantagraphics (and I) arrived. And he describes the way he thought that comics were going to be a big deal that he could make a living from. (Obviously it's not for even cartoonists as massively talented as Michael Dougan. He related a joke told to him by Rocket art director Mark Michaelson: "Did you hear about the Polish cartoonist? He was in it for the money.") But Dougan's piece could have used some editing, as could the rest of the book.
Like many of the publications of hard-core fans in the past, this one is little more than a straight-ahead history/checklist. I have a theory about how subcultural criticism happens. First come the fans and their exhaustive checklists and timelines. Only after they have cleared the ground can the scholars come in and start looking at the work critically and within the context of various artistic, literary and cultural theories.
I'm a fan of Weirdo, having read the magazine religiously since issue 9 (1981) until it folded up shop. One of the appeals were the covers drawn by Robert Crumb for every issue. At fist he based them on certain MAD and Humbug covers--a strong central image with a border of related smaller pages that commented in some way on the central image. But starting with issue 10 (Peter Bagge's first issue as editor), he stopped doing the borders. He would return to that design occasionally over the remainder of the run.
What is astonishing about this book is how Cooke dug up some of the weirdest and most mysterious contributors and got them to describe their work for the magazine. The most amazing, in my opinion, is Elinore Norfluss. She did three completely insane comics for Weirdo, and my assumption about her was that she was a deeply troubled person. She comes off in her essay as eccentric but not insane.
Cooke digs up almost cultural reference in Weirdo. For instance, the cover Weirdo #4 is a visual quote of Heironymous Bosch's "Christ Carrying the Cross," and Crumb included work by Pieter Bruegel in issue 1. But somehow he failed to notice or comment on Crumb's parody of painter Philip Guston on the covers of Weirdo #7.
Missing Philip Guston was the only omission that I noticed. On the contrary, the primary fault of the book is that it is overstuffed and repetitious. You read about the same things over and over. And including a whole section on Mineshaft (a poetry and art 'zine that got started in the late 90s, long after the demise of Weirdo that published a number of Weirdo alumni) was excessive. But if you read and liked Weirdo, this is the book for you.
August 23, 2019
The book is light on art, heavy on “my interactions with Crumb.”
There are good reasons for both. Crumb, who prior to this magazine had never edited anything more commercial than his brothers’ homemade comic books, put himself at the helm of Weirdo and declared that all contributing artists would retain complete and exclusive rights to their work. FWIW I am on board with this element of the Weirdo credo. Unfortunately, that means the book I would love to read — an anthology of Weirdo anthologies — would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, this lovely bound book of high-stock glossy paper offers us little more than (heh!) crumbs of what made Weirdo weird.
We get photos of the various contributors, some samples of the work, more than a few brand-spanking-new artistic tributes to the magazine and the people who made it. And lots and lots of stories about what it was like to work for and with Robert Crumb.
Crumb’s a legitimate draw — larger-than-life and twice as charming/hideous. But anyone who has followed his grotesquely confessional work or watched Terry Zwigoff’s documentary is already intimately familiar with the direction these accounts take.
In the best of all possible worlds the magazine rack would be regularly larded with anthologies of Weirdo, the way MAD re-packaged and saturated the market with content from the 60s into the early 90s. In this world, Gaines was the savvier publisher, who paid his artists top-market value — and not a penny more. We make do with this, because we have to.
There are good reasons for both. Crumb, who prior to this magazine had never edited anything more commercial than his brothers’ homemade comic books, put himself at the helm of Weirdo and declared that all contributing artists would retain complete and exclusive rights to their work. FWIW I am on board with this element of the Weirdo credo. Unfortunately, that means the book I would love to read — an anthology of Weirdo anthologies — would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, this lovely bound book of high-stock glossy paper offers us little more than (heh!) crumbs of what made Weirdo weird.
We get photos of the various contributors, some samples of the work, more than a few brand-spanking-new artistic tributes to the magazine and the people who made it. And lots and lots of stories about what it was like to work for and with Robert Crumb.
Crumb’s a legitimate draw — larger-than-life and twice as charming/hideous. But anyone who has followed his grotesquely confessional work or watched Terry Zwigoff’s documentary is already intimately familiar with the direction these accounts take.
In the best of all possible worlds the magazine rack would be regularly larded with anthologies of Weirdo, the way MAD re-packaged and saturated the market with content from the 60s into the early 90s. In this world, Gaines was the savvier publisher, who paid his artists top-market value — and not a penny more. We make do with this, because we have to.
October 20, 2019
A highpoint (although some would contend it was a low-mark) of the alternative comix scene, Weirdo was the low-brow corrorllary to RAW magazine.
The indie comics scene had a lot of notable successes including Elf Quest, A Distant Soil, Cerebus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bone, Love and Rockets, Groo, The Crow, Usagi Yojimbo et cetera all were serialized stories that celebrated creators.
Weirdo, RAW, EC Comics and MAD were all a bit more along the lines of experimental jam sessions.
This is more of a fan celebration of this moment in time, rather than a critical examination nor even a reprinting of materials.
The indie comics scene had a lot of notable successes including Elf Quest, A Distant Soil, Cerebus, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bone, Love and Rockets, Groo, The Crow, Usagi Yojimbo et cetera all were serialized stories that celebrated creators.
Weirdo, RAW, EC Comics and MAD were all a bit more along the lines of experimental jam sessions.
This is more of a fan celebration of this moment in time, rather than a critical examination nor even a reprinting of materials.
June 23, 2019
Such a comprehensive and awesome history of Weirdo ‘zine. So many great stories and the path to Seattle.
Read
August 1, 2019741.5973 W4259 2019
December 18, 2021
Incredibly researched and meticulously compiled. To have reprinted selections from the series would have been great, and some of the things printed could have been good but full marks none the less.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews