Competing Masculinities in the Work of R. Crumb

Abstract

Using critical tools drawn from visual rhetoric, gender studies, and comics studies, chapter contributor Ian Blechschmidt examines how Robert Crumb’s comics during the underground comix boom constructed a normative ideal of masculine agency through their images, narratives, and gags. The chapter argues that the comics’ appeals to “authenticity” were shaped by broadly shared anxieties about disappearing opportunities for performing “manly,” individual agency. Unlike much previous scholarship on Crumb’s work, this chapter seeks to take a more critical approach to the way that Crumb’s work imagines the performance and stakes of authenticity by underscoring how that imagining is rooted in deep, very old, and in many ways very current understandings of what it means to perform masculinity in the United States. Though it does not attempt to “debunk” claims to Crumb’s subversiveness, this paper takes seriously Stuart Hall’s reminder that no text is wholly, inherently, or permanently subversive. And while Crumb’s underground comix may have spoken back against some aspects of mainstream American masculinity, one ought not forget the ways in which they thoroughly reinscribed others.