Why did the NYT send a reporter to some obscure part of France to interview R. Crumb?

And why did this article published on September 15th only become apparent to me days later — when I'm always keeping an eye out for articles about R. Crumb? And why am I reading through paragraphs and paragraphs of the article — "R. Crumb Means Some Offense Even from his refuge in France, the comics artist still makes America’s pulse race" — without finding anything new or barely anything that I don't know from the 1995 documentary "Crumb"?

There's something odd here!

Here's the answer. It's way down at the end of the article. He's got a new comic, “The Crumb Family Covid Exposé” — that's reason to cover him — but it's not what people carrying the official message want us to read — even though they trekked to France find out about:

Crumb caught Covid-19 last fall but, well before that, he’d developed extreme conspiracy theories about the pandemic. He calls himself “resolutely anti-vax.” In conversation...

Maybe if we go to France and talk to him, he'll clarify himself back into the community of good-thinkers....

... he is fixated on his distrust of the medical community....

Oh, no!!! 

... though in his work, he doesn’t present this worldview as correct, or even necessarily valid.

Come on. Tease this out. He's a character in his comics, but that's not really him, right? He's making fun of that guy, the him that's not him, and he really must — in some important way worth going to France for — trust the experts who tell us to get vaccinated.

He seems to be dissecting a contrarian impulse in himself the same way he used to look at his twisted sexual fantasies.

Yeah. That's it! His distorted thoughts about the vaccine happened in a mind that generated intense and weird sexual fantasies!

His wife, a cancer survivor, is vaccinated and, at one point in the comic, believing the shot has made her arm magnetic, he tries to see if a spoon will stick to her. “Is this a crazy person?” he asks of himself, drawing himself very much like a crazy person.

So his doubts about the vaccine were portrayed — by the artist himself — as crazy. 

He’s still willing, in other words, to make himself ugly and unlikable in his work.

Ugly and unlikable? Do we hate anti-vaxxers? 

There’s a question that recurs in a lot of Crumb’s art, which I found myself wondering about as he dismissed the Covid vaccines to me as merely a way to enrich Big Pharma.

Wait a minute now. You're revealing the conversation that you went all the way to France to have but not telling us much about his ideas. You want to use him, but you don't want his actual opinions to break through. I would like to have a conversation with him about what he thinks about what the NYT did with the access he gave. 

It’s some variation of “What’s wrong with this guy?” In one comic, called “Anal Antics” (1971), the byline is “R. ‘What-Does-It-All-Mean?’ Crumb,” and the plot features Snoid living inside a woman’s posterior. In the first panel, there’s a subtitle: “More sick humor which serves no purpose.”

So questioning the vaccine is — you're supposed to see — on a level with living inside a woman's ass. Idle nonsense (except to the extent the drawings are detailed and fascinating). 

“I guess the question,” I say to him, “is ‘what is the purpose?’”

Nice of the Times — M.H. Miller— to offer the great artist an opportunity to step away from his heresy.

“That’s a question that I often imagine being asked of me by the tribunal that I’m in front of,” he says, “up there on their dais high above me. And I just have to stand there like this.” He shrugs exaggeratedly. 

God is my judge.