“Students expressed their discomfort towards being assigned homework on an artist that is known for drawing racist cartoons,” one complaint read, referring to Crumb. “Students expressed their discomfort towards the depiction of the female body in the illustration, as they felt it was misogynistic and uncomfortable to draw.”
After the students complained, Gloeckner required them to watch a documentary on Crumb, “implying that our discomfort towards misogyny and racism is something to be fixed.”
That's bland — "a documentary on Crumb." The movie "Crumb" is one of the best documentaries ever.
“I don’t care if she likes Robert Crumb,” one student told [The Michigan Daily]. “It was more the fact that (she) was like, ‘You guys must like it, and if you don’t like it, there’s going to be consequences.’ And there were consequences.”...
The students had alleged that when they told Gloeckner content presented in class was racist or misogynistic, Gloeckner would answer with “but is it though?” They alleged this answer is “constantly invalidating the experience of marginalized groups.”
I'm glad the professor won this struggle. I wonder what Crumb thinks of this dispute. He drew underground comics and intended to unsettle people.
From the transcript of "Crumb" — R. Crumb says:
All that stuff I did in the late '60s... I didn't really know what it was about when I did it. It was all very instinctive. Somehow, the L.S.D. liberated me in this way... that allowed me to just put it down and not worry about what it meant. I had some vague idea that it meant something... but it's only later that I'd look at it and kind of analyze it and see what it's about. Somehow, the term "n***** hearts" just came into my mind... as a product, you know? It's like it's some black, deep thing... in American, you know, collective mind or something... that has to do with turning everything over for a buck. I don't know. I'm not sure exactly, but it has some message like that. Quite a number of people these days... would like this sort of nice, milky vision of culture... in which it's all rather improving and leads us all towards... this sort of nice little pie-in-the-sky moral heaven... where nobody's nasty to anybody else. But the only thing is that, you know, literature, culture, art... isn't put there in order to have that pleasant, normative effect. You know, conservatives like to think that great works of art lead us towards democracy. Bull, you know. I mean, there are speeches in Shakespeare that are so full of hatred for the mob. They're passionately elitist, passionately antidemocratic. What do you do with somebody like Céline, who was a Nazi sympathizer... but at the same time a great novelist? What do you do with - Well, what do you do with practically anybody... who's got a vision of the world that doesn't accord with the present standards of Berkeley?
Posts
67 comments:
“ Well, what do you do with practically anybody... who's got a vision of the world that doesn't accord with the present standards of Berkeley?”
Today’s Left cancels and destroys that person. Just ask Macy Gray!
Childhood lasts a few decades longer than it used to.
The students are entirely wrong… except for their anger to being asked to smile. I’m with them on that.
Crumb has gone from radical artist to reactionary in the span of 50 years.
Good for Michigan. Puritanism eventually burns itself out. Unlike the Shakers, this version won't even leave behind cool furniture.
Students teaching their Wokeness insanity to Professors is all that colleges are good for anymore. Maybe the colleges should be closed and sold off like Henry VII sold off the Catholic Church’s real estate in 16th century England.
At one time I thought these woke "students" would have serious issues with employment after college, you know, with the real world. Lately, however, I've come to realize that the working world I knew is no more and many of these wokesters will find a nice collegial home. Society may doomed...
I had a crusty old art teacher in college who adored R. Crumb who was controversial from his first "Keep on Truckin'" publication. I still to this day randomly doodle R. Crumb stylistic pieces absent mindedly. Anyway, this teacher once told me over beers in the boathouse about a complaint that he received from someone about something and he answered it with a pithy " Fuck em' if they can't take a joke" and ordered another beer. It was a great world we grew up in.
Three thoughts:
1. Crumb became a thing when the establishment was firm and set in its ways. He stretched discussions as countercultural, but couldn't exist without a comprehensive and predictable moral framework (WASP) to push against. Neither could John Waters or even Matt Groening (up to the early Simpsons era). Everyone knew about the "squares" and how racist/closed-minded they were. See the movie Animal House, the TV show MASH, etc. etc. etc. for the late versions of the same anti-establishment cartoons.
2. There was a complete loss of irony, black comedy, and nuance after the left's humor purge of the 1990s. See Jerry Seinfeld's comments on when he stopped going to college campuses. That was the start of mainstream "politically correct" stuff that morphed into woke stuff. So, these young'uns have no structure and crave the moral standards that their grandparents destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s. The irony and anti-racism goes clean over their heads.
3. "Microaggressions" aren't aggressions. They are merely facts outside yourself that you don't like or that make you uncomfortable. When you don't have a proper vocabulary everything becomes hostile to YOU. But, you merely reveal that you are an egocentric child with poor social skills and no sense of humor. You'll make great cannon fodder in the next Holy War.
I hope the administration responded with a thorough explanation of the add/drop process.
Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA, an article by Joseph Manson.
Manson's opening paragraphs:
I’ve been a professor in the Anthropology Department at UCLA since 1996; I received tenure in 2000. My research has spanned topics ranging from nonhuman primate behavior to human personality variation. For decades, anthropology has been notorious for conflict between the scientific and political activist factions in the field, leading many departments to split in two. But UCLA’s department remained unusually peaceful, cohesive, and intellectually inclusive until the late 2000s.
Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. leftist, postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty members recruited even more militant graduate students to work with them.
I can’t recount here even a representative sample of this faction’s penchant for mendacity and intimidation, because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions. But I can describe their public torment and humiliation of one of my colleagues, P. Jeffrey Brantingham.
Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of, among other counter-revolutionary sins, “entrench[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation. This document contained no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembled a religious proclamation of anathema.
As you won’t be surprised to hear, Jeff is not a racist, but a standard-issue liberal Democrat. The “referral” to the Vice-Chancellor never materialized, but the resolution and its aftermath achieved its real goal, which was to turn Jeff, who had been one of the most selfless citizens of the department, into a pariah. He taught—and still teaches—a course called “The Ecology of Crime,” which consistently drew more than 150 students and earned rave reviews. This course had a catalogue number that grouped it with sociocultural anthropology, and it fulfilled a sociocultural anthropology requirement for anthro majors.
In an act of petty spite, ritual moral purification, or both (take your pick), the woke faculty clique, which comprised a majority of the sociocultural anthro faculty, banned him from using—polluting?—any of their course numbers. (Jeff continued to offer the course, just under a different kind of number.)
Even though Jeff stopped attending faculty meetings, and in every other way accepted his punishment of permanent ostracism, his tormentors weren’t finished with him. ....
Poor widdle babies think the world's job is to leave them exactly where they are and never challenge any of their assumptions.
Not my thing at all, R Crumb. Not a single iota. But I am glad to live in a world with artists like Crumb. I feel the same way about Frank Zappa.
Sure sounds like those students resisted being challenged by work counter to prevailing ideology.
I understand resistance to material foreign to one's accustomed beliefs. We're all biased that way. But that rigorous science training in my youth constantly prompts me to steel myself, after all, the information that unnerves me is often precisely what I need to absorb to come to grips with a stark reality resembling truth.
How else do we "stretch" our intellectual bounds if not facing dissonant facts or points of view on the universe? Sure, do so makes us uncomfortable, maybe extremely uncomfortable.
But one thing is obvious, comfort is highly overrated. Nothing of any magnitude is ever accomplished when seeking comfort above all else. The students in the piece don't give a rip about misogyny, racism or whatever, they're whining about experiencing discomfort entering the world of a person not steeped in their preferred ideology.
Tell 'em how it is! Discomfort is necessary for learning, insistence on comfort is the gateway to lifelong ignorance.
These students thought that they get to "like" everything they're taught? I'm not going to say that optical mineralogy made me feel microaggressed against, but I can say without exception there was not one day of that class that I "liked." A good day was one I didn't hate.
They were "tired," poor dears. And the prof asked them to smile for her, and they, what, did it because they were afraid she would mark down their class participation grade or something, and then complained about it later? Or didn't do it but had to make sure everyone knew how outrageous it was that she'd ask them to "smile for her" like a brutal john demanding they say his name?
You're art students, kids. You're supposed to be learning how to evoke emotion - the emotion of your choice, if you can - in strangers. Most of you will have to compromise heavily with your present selves in the future in order to make a living in the world of art, but even if you haven't yet comes to terms with that fact, how can you possibly believe that it's your right to "like" everything about your chosen field?
Struck me as odd that the group R. Crumb chose to single out for criticism was "conservatives" who wanted everybody to be all nicey nicey and not say anything mean about anyone. That sounds like the political left overly PC crowd to me.
I'm glad this Professor was supported by the University. The students seem so fragile.
Serious Question
IF you have a course on the art of comics,HOW could you NOT study the work of R. Crumb.???
It's not “constantly invalidating the experience of marginalized groups.”
She's merely asking them to interrogate their biases.
The art of comix....
One wonders if the misogynistic, but wildly popular, Anime would be appropriate.
Or Peanuts... easy A.
From Crumb and transgressive art to anthropology. Great stuff. Yes, the doc on Crumb is great. I agree with a lot of the comments.
Great art always has the potential to be transgressive. That is why much of it is banned from the just city in Plato's Republic, although someone who speaks for Homer (not Homer himself) is eventually allowed to appear at some kind of hearing, and defend specific passages one at a time. This would be more like a liberal education, necessarily for the few, than a public debate. It's hard to believe now that the 70s was a golden age, but in a way it was. You could often point to someone who was getting away with something and say: if that person is free, then I guess I am too. Lots of sophisticated intellectuals would pontificate that nothing in art is likely to do actual harm to anyone. Surely that is ridiculous, and now the woke resort to a kind of puritanism to fight it.
Science is supposed to be different, and anthropology brings some issues to a head. In looking at "different" peoples, do we assume a scientific perspective which is free from culture, and can therefore look objectively at "cultures," all of which have their prejudices? Or is this just another culture/perspective? Why assume such a thing as objectivity is possible? Why assume the narrow specialist training of our universities is the best way to achieve it? Herodotus became aware of many non-Greek peoples, and tried to report carefully on their strange ways. Where he didn't know, he was willing to invent. He certainly doesn't assume the superiority of what is Greek, and I don't even know if he thought the weight of evidence was in favour of the Greeks. When the modern West explored even more of the world, the problem was perhaps bigger and more complex, but not essentially different. Who is enviable, even it is for a greatly simplified, perhaps stunted life? Who is admirable? And then we can turn our gaze to our own society, and discover cultures in the inner city and the suburbs. If our feelings are hurt, can we assume bad faith as Taylor Lorenz seems to ?
Maybe the problem is having university classes on comics. R. Crumb didn't take classes on comics, did he?
(A UM A&D BFA does require 3 credits in Race and Ethnicity, I just checked.)
If you don't like R. Crumb, don't take the class.
Challenge yourself with something more than comic books. You're in college to expand your horizons, not cement them in place.
R. Crumb is a sad, disgusting pervert. Even he says so. Love and Rockets is feminista porn. Comic books sometimes update ancient themes. There. Now go study something real.
Art is a "luxury" degree. No one with great talent needs a degree. The credential isn't required to sell art. If a student doesn't like a course, don't take it. Getting a teacher fired is censorship. The complainers have already taken the course. It's about keeping other people from taking it.
I thought R. Crumb was subversive of the establishment. Maybe it's the establishment that's subversive nowadays. I'm pretty sure that none of this was in R. Crumb's vision of the future. The sensibilities of these kids will help them fit right in at Disney and Marvel. As far as I know, we do not yet have a trans super hero. There is work yet to be done.....Peter Parker is trans-species. To date, they have papered over the fact that he enjoys eating flies. Perhaps a new generation of enlightened comic book artists can reveal this hidden facet of his being and dramatize the social obloquy that Peter has endured because of his eccentric eating habits. Those habits are, in fact, environmentally sound and the way of the future. It's time to take Peter out of the closet and normalize insect eating. These students are just the ones to do it. Forward forever. That so called abyss we're marching towards is an opportunity to escapre the surly bonds of gravity.
I just flashed on Zap #4 -- which we used to pass around Berkeley like samizdat because it was so hard to find.
I was going to link to a Substack article I read a few days ago, but I see Mike Sylwester already posted it at 6:45. None of it is news, but it is, nonetheless, shocking to realize just how fully diseased are both our K-12 and Higher Ed systems.
For those of us who came of age in the 60's to early 70s, R. Crumb was a standard. It's such a long devolution to go from youth reading Crumb and many copying Crumb's art, to youth cringing away and being afraid to even discuss Crumb.
This is not a small thing. This is a sea change. The future of Western Civilization is hanging on by a very thin thread at this point. And the thought that R. Crumb is my standard for Western Civilization is something my mind would have never conceived of in any earlier time.
Like most everyone else here I have no sympathy or empathy for the whiny little babies masquerading as college students. It does, however, add to my despair over the direction of the country. If this is an even half-fair example of the next generation, we are in deep trouble. On the other hand, Bob R made me laugh out loud (literally, it startled the dog).And, this is a rare occasion I agree with Howard.
@michaele
The R. Crumb quote about conservatives was made in the early 1990s, so it is not referring to the current cultural climate.
I don't like Crumb either, but it sounds like she was challenging them and trying to shake them out of their complacency, something teachers were once expected to do. Nowadays, you can go online and find reviews of professors (or you can just ask people who have taken the course), so it's easier to just avoid professors whose views you won't agree with, if that's what you want. Eventually (if not now) the possibility of getting credit for online courses will give you opportunities to learn about the history of comics from somebody you agree with.
Anime is almost as varied as film itself. Some of it goes a lot further than Disney in idealizing gay relationships, but the people watching know what they are getting. It's not insinuated into movies intended for children, so far as I know.
If you're going to study comics, and you're leaving out the sex, drugs, rock and roll of the '60's, to say nothing of the stereotypes and crudity of ALL of it..
You're NOT studying comics.. You're Whitewashing them, and THAT; is The Definition of RACISM!!
If a student applies to a university which puts a high value on intellectual curiosity, and then claims a professor is hurting them by challenging their existing beliefs or needing to view material they consider offensive, why wouldn't the university expel the student or put them on a probationary period?
If a student isn't interested in learning or challenging their existing beliefs, shouldnt that be evidence the student is not a good fit for the university?
At some point, a university is a business based upon reputation and needs to ensure its students protect and enhance that reputation.
Awesome that she asked them to smile.
Omigod...when I remember how shocked and discomfited I was by Zap comix when I was 18! Yikes. Yet I bought them.
Maybe lower division classes us too young for them?
I had been a great lover of comic books and Crumb obviously had absorbed all the classic comic art conventions. He was a genius!
Schumann the Human searches for God, finds him at last - and runs away!
I had four issues I kept with me for years, only to dump them out of guilt. Oy.
Phoebe asked us all to smile
Referring to a professor by her first name in a formal setting like this diminishes her as a woman. The complaint itself is offensive and an overt aggression.
Celine was not a Nazi. That's what the commies labeled him. He was a French patriot, who was anticommunist and was against WW II. He later said, the biggest mistake of his life was trying to keep the French from getting slaughtered in another World War. You can't go against the mob. Even when its a mob of sheep off to be sheared.
As for Bed Crumbs, his stuff never excited me. I guess you had to be there. Or maybe he was a rebel against a culture that died 40 years ago.
Imagine a university run by a committee of students. There would be no real learning, just a series of topics that make the students feel good. That is what was being tried here, but luckily the students don't run this University.
Mike Sylwester said...
Why I'm Giving Up Tenure at UCLA, an article by Joseph Manson.
Manson's opening paragraphs:
I sent that article to my daughter who has an honors degree in Anthro from UCLA. She is a recovering leftie and was horrified at what is happening there.
Crumb was incredibly influential and is worthy of study.
As a graphic design major with an art history interest, there were many artists I wasn't particularly drawn to (pun intended), but I realized their importance and was willing to at least learn about them without crying...
"The future of Western Civilization is hanging on by a very thin thread at this point. And the thought that R. Crumb is my standard for Western Civilization is something my mind would have never conceived of in any earlier time."
My feeling, too.
I agree the R. Crumb biopic was interesting. And extremely sad. I highly recommend "I Like Killing Flies" about a similar creative obsessive. Only this guy's a diner owner, and little of it is about flies. He channels his creativity into egg dishes. Good nostalgia about old New York, work ethic, closet size kitchens serving ungodly numbers of orders from an endless menu, loving families. You can practically smell it.
No, Performative (the word) tag for the student's quote? I think about a decade ago the word that was making it's way through the woke crowd to give the feeling of seriousness and deep thought was trope. I can no longer tell if students act this way because they really are that fragile or because they think it scores them virtue points.
'Maybe the problem is having university classes on comics.'
Comics and cartoons in general can be a very powerful medium for social criticism...
I wonder if they study Frederic Wertheim in the class?
He led a crusade in the 50's to make comics less dark.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
Crumb, to me, seems to worship women. Maybe that's misogyny.
I was old school in my classes. I only asked for applause and money at the end of the lecture.
Loved Crumb, without being a collector. Google provides little info on "Atomic, Biological, and Chemical Warfare" Comics, which I recall as Crumbesque if not his own work.
Jim Goad's "Trucker Fags In Denial" and other books keep the tradition alive to some degree.
I'd take a class in Crumb, or Gary Larsen.
"The students are entirely wrong… except for their anger to being asked to smile. I’m with them on that."
It's not mere condescension if you're looking at a wall of glowering faces.
I'd assume so!
30's comics Blondie Boopadoop—a carefree flapper girl who spent her days in dance halls
40's Comics Code Authority
50's Silver Age
60's Underground Comix
70's Seinen manga
leading up to Sailor Moon? Porn? or Porn?
This is an Old Guy moment. Every teacher (the good ones) wants to challenge their students, open their eyes, jumpstart their brains. Every generation of students needs a different form to that challenge. Society surrounds us with different inputs, different stimuli. Challenges change.
This teacher chose a topic that was an eye-opener a generation ago, and she hasn't updated her curriculum.
Jersey Fled said...
babies think the world's job is to leave them exactly where they are and never challenge any of their assumptions.
"So? Why do YOU want to go to college?"
"I want to be told what i already know, and be told that that is ALL there is TO know"
A university-level teacher has the moral right to demand study and to test the student's knowledge (or what passes for knowledge, let's not get all epistemological) derived from that study. For example, a professor teaching a course on Nazism, call it National Socialism 101, which ought to be really popular, all things considered, could require the study of the 25-point Plan (25-Punkte-Programm) of the NSDAP.
Most soi-disant Antifa black-block types would be shocked by how much they agree with most or all of it. Anti-semites like Congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) would love it if they were told the author was a German politician called Anton Drexler. (Drexler had a co-author, hint-hint.) But a reasonably well-read Antifa member might deduce the co-author's name, and realize he was being compelled by the course syllabus to confront his own deeply-rooted fascism. His reaction would be typically fascistic. He would insist that students have the right to be confirmed in their ignorance and prejudice, rather than being challenged, and that any professor who dared to pose such a challenge must be fired, which is pure Hitlerite fascism in and of itself. My hypothetical students would be pleased by der Führer's theory of education, as well. (Students in National Socialist Germany weren't required to learn much of anything. Their "education" consisted mostly of un-learning Western Civilization. That and grenade tossing.)
However, a teacher goes beyond his moral rights if he requires his students to believe anything they are taught. It is not only immoral, it's stupid. Even mathematics is not indisputably true. Whitehead and Russell labored for a decade and more trying to prove the axioms of arithmetic, only to get shot down in flames by Kurt Gödel. Remember those yard signs that appeared in or around 2020, the ones that listed some fundamental beliefs required of "good" people, such as love is love, and science is real? I don't see them anymore, which is understandable. Nobody is likely to erect a sign on his own front lawn effectively stating IDIOTS LIVE HERE. As soon as the Resident of the United States began to fuck up, those signs got trashed. Science is real, but so is religion. But real is not the same as true. Every scientific proposition you've ever heard of is at least partly bullshit. Even the most truthy proposition ever in the history of human thought, the Standard Model, is untrue because it cannot account for most of the Universe. Teachers who demand belief are fools, or worse.
I do not see evidence that the professor, Phoebe Gloeckner, demanded belief from her students -- R. Crumb was a genius. Believe it or flunk! If she did, she overstepped the bounds of rationality. Granted, rationality is a rare commodity in American "higher education", but everyone deserves the benefit of doubt.
Crumb is hysterically funny still, 50 years later.
I admit that I started to read the Manson thing, but stopped when he said George Floyd was murdered. If he's that ignorant or dishonest, I have trouble continuing.
But I probably would have agreed with it. I'm an archaeology PhD and have nothing to do with my old or any other Anthropology department as they've turned into nothing more than political activist organizations. I worked with some UCLA people in Egypt in 2012 and it was. . . .bad. They had an Obama Won party. I did not participate.
"Avoid professors who's views you won't agree with."
I never knew or cared what my professors' views were. I cared if they were knowledgeable (by reputation) and competent communicators.
Why else attend class?
Those whiny-ass Millennials can take their micro-aggressions and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine.
"Celine was not a Nazi. That's what the commies labeled him. He was a French patriot, who was anticommunist and was against WW II."
I think it was Celine's virulent anti-semitism that got him branded a Nazi, (and not just by the Communists, though I agree he was not a Nazi). Celine was a brilliant writer, and I have all his novels on my bookshelf, except for CASSE PIPE (CANNON FODDER), an uncompleted novel, published posthumously, that is not currently available in an English edition. (There was a limited edition small press edition of it in English that is out of print.) I still have to read the final trilogy.
Anyone that Doesn't think, that The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are Classically funny,
OBVIOUSLY hasn't been smoking enough grass
“implying that our discomfort towards misogyny and racism is something to be fixed.”
Having had a lot of student evals, and waded through a massive amount of post-secondary education, this quote really highlights a key underlying problem. Most people don't actually know how to read or the purpose of reading at an academic level or for academic purposes. It actually takes being guided to learn how to do this, or to stumble along until one learns it.
The key problem is that people usually read either to be entertained or to be convinced. However, good academic reading can navigate learning without having either of these. When I was in college and in later in seminary I was reading a lot of material that I didn't agree with, and it made me mad. Then I realized, which is blindingly obvious after the fact, that I didn't have to agree with it, and it was my choice to disagree with it, and oftentimes professors assigned books that they didn't agree with.
Students assume that somehow being exposed to that material was somehow trying to fix or convince them to change something they believed in, because that's what people tend to do, whether in school, religions, sports, or almost anything else.
The benefits of mass information and communication on the internet has been almost completely undermined by this tendency so people gather in philosophically narrow enclaves and try to cancel those they disagree with.
Good reading, good academic reading, means being able to disagree with material and say exactly why, while understanding the motives, perspectives, context of the writer.
Honestly, this trait is probably a big reason why I keep reading Althouse after all these years (since near the beginning of the blog) because our hostess does this so well.
The students had alleged that when they told Gloeckner content presented in class was racist or misogynistic, Gloeckner would answer with “but is it though?” They alleged this answer is “constantly invalidating the experience of marginalized groups.”
Well, when you say things that are false, you SHOULD be "invalidated".
Anything else is racism
It's probably not too much to say that Critical Theory is the basis of the Academy. The problem is not and never has been critique/criticism/critical theory, but its employment by the shallow and ignorant to exploit situations where it isn't needed and can be actually counterproductive.
One of the greatest influences on me, a history prof, used to ask, "Who is your best friend?
His answer, "Your harshest critic."
Another, one of my grad school profs, used to complain that students in the South were too polite to tear into one another's work critically in seminars; OTOH I recall Gary Gallagher ruefully reporting that for some reason his graduate history students always thought that he had selected the 20 or so worst possible books on the important topics and issues for them to read and evaluate . . .
Is Crumb's work rude and crude? Umm, yes, self-evidently so. One assumes R. Crumb intended to get in people's faces.
It's just that the right to do just that was all but unquestioned in the 1960s; now, not so much. Today it's more "I'm offended" so make it go away. Because it's never enough that you don't have to read it, not when the very thought that someone, somewhere might be reading it. And, who knows, laughing?
Not that Crumb comics are at all hard to find: several hardcover books of them have been published, and many public libraries have copies of these.
For now. Before some self-appointed vigilante (or self-appointed ALA-member "guardian" librarian?) removes them and/or "loses" them.
They would have had a collective stroke if she had shown them the works of S. Clay Wilson.
Never read comic books as a child or ever but I know the names R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman. Was browsing at the Fantagraphics website (F. who publish the Hernandez brothers' comics) and noticed this from March of this year. Althouse was writing about Maus not too long ago-- someone was trying to or did ban Maus, as I recall....
Jim Rugg states, “I am sorry for my latest Red Room cover. I have drawn several variant covers for the Red Room series and I had fun parodying famous and iconic comics and graphic novel covers, but I realize (now) that the morally charged subject matter of Maus made it an inappropriate subject for the necessarily over-the-top Red Room treatment and I apologize for my misjudgment. I did not consider how this would affect people. I never meant to hurt anyone. I’m sorry I hurt you. I was ignorant and insensitive. I take responsibility. I offer no excuses. I was wrong. And I am sorry, Mr. Spiegelman and everyone this has hurt.”
Fantagraphics supports the artist’s decision to pull this cover and we regret that we did not bring this issue up during the editorial process. We wish to offer our own apology for its offense and we are sorry for our part in this. Going forward, we will be more cognizant of our comics covers.
I never meant to hurt anyone, sure, sure. Famous last words. I'd happily see what cover this Rugg fellow is on about but since I'd never heard of him, either, eh. There is another page about this ('Rugg parodies Maus: it doesn't go well') by someone else I don't know, here.
"Your harshest critic"
Too right. In my role advising startup founders, I always tell them that the most important feedback they can get is from customers who have big criticisms of their product. Why? Because they are ENGAGED. They care enough to spend their own valuable time to, in effect, improve your product, because they need it improved.
Of all the underground comic artists the only one that has had significant success in the straight publishing industry is Bill Griffith with Zippy the Pinhead. Gilbert Shelton might have been able to with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, but back in the '70s and '80s that slot in the dailies likely would have gone to Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury. Crumb's work, though, has endured even if he never achieved commercial success in the larger market. On the other hand, who doesn't recognize Mr. Natural? Crumb has had his influence on the general culture. For what it's worth, he was criticized as racist and sexist back when he was contributing to Zap in the late '60s and early '70s. "Them sho' was fresh spacemens!"
Crumb has always admitted he was weird. He draws women with fat asses because he likes fat asses and he's sexually aroused by microcephalics.
Post a Comment