Crumb Page #8

so tight, unthreatening and flat.

They wanted a dull lifestyle.

They wanted Perry Como.

They wanted this Ozzie and Harriet shell

we grew up in. The whole thing had...

this creepy, nightmarish,

grotesque quality.

This is the first issue of Zap Comix

that I did in late 1967.

It was the beginning of all this

underground comic nonsense.

It was all very LSD inspired.

A lot of these are things

I redrew from sketchbooks.

This Whiteman character.

A lot of this stuff...

I didn't realize when I was doing it

what it was about or connected to.

I realized afterwards,

this is really about my father.

This rigid...

gung-ho American kind of guy.

A typical World War II generation man.

When my father died in '82, my aunt

gave me stuff my father had sent her.

One of the things was this book

he wrote, Training People Effectively.

I'm not sure what he did for a living

in the last years of his life.

It had something to do with

employee motivation for a corporation.

Here's a photo.

I was reading about this syndrome in

Japan that Japanese businessmen have.

Something about some smiling disease...

where they have a fixed smile

on their face all the time.

I think my father had that.

The article said it was a sign

of deep depression.

He didn't smile when he was home.

The smile dropped

as soon as he came home.

He was a grim guy.

He fought in the war and everything.

He had a hard-ass attitude about life...

and thought my mother was mollycoddling

all of us, which she was.

All three of his sons ended up being

wimpy, nerdy weirdos.

It broke his heart, I think.

He wanted one of us to become a Marine.

My father was hotheaded.

He'd just blow his stack.

He'd lash out and hit you real hard.

When I was five years old, on

Christmas this whole thing happened...

where he blew his stack at me

and busted my collarbone.

- When you were five?

- Yeah.

Charles had a penchant

for getting in trouble.

He was diabolical as a kid.

And my father would beat him

unmercifully...

for these things he was doing,

crimes he was committing.

It just made him worse.

I had this subconscious desire

to be punished.

- Why?

- It had something to do with my father.

It had something to do with

being brought up by a sadistic bully.

There's some connection there

between the two of them...

although I'm not really sure what it is.

What was your mom like

when you were a kid?

She was an amphetamine addict. The

amphetamines would make her act crazy...

and do and say really crazy things.

It had an absolutely devastating effect,

I think, on all five of us kids.

Do you?

It had a devastating effect on me,

anyway.

How did your parents get along?

They got along well up until the time

I was 9 or 10 years old.

But after Beatie started taking

amphetamines to keep her weight down...

they had a terrible time.

They were screaming and yelling

at each other all the time...

morning, noon and night.

- She'd scratch at the old man's face.

- Till it looked like ground hamburger.

He would put makeup on

when he went to work...

in an attempt to cover up

the scratches on his face.

The old man came to me

and said...

lf you don't go out and get a job,

III make your life a hell on earth.

That's exactly what he started to do,

to make my life a hell on earth.

So to get him off my back, I took a job

as a telephone solicitor...

for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I stuck it out for a year...

because I was afraid of what

he would do to me if I didn't.

That's the last time you held a job,

though, right?

And it only lasted for a year.

That was back in '69.

The old man was always trying

to make productive citizens out of us.

When I was a teenager, he forced me

to use my drawing talent...

to draw pictures of houses, then ask

the people if they wanted to buy them.

- That was the old man's idea, wasn't it?

- Completely his idea. He made me do it.

It was a hateful job.

When I first got well-known,

he was proud of me.

He heard I was getting well-known

for my work, but he never saw it.

I don't think he would've approved.

He would've disapproved of it

on so-called moral grounds.

Somebody told me that someone at work

showed him one of my comics...

and that's when

he stopped talking to me.

He wouldn't speak to me after he saw

the stuff I was doing in the early '70s.

The story I had most trouble with

is this one.

I got two pages into it and thought...

This is too negative, too twisted,

too upsetting. Ive gotta stop this.

I quit working on it.

I threw the page in the garbage can.

At some point, Aline came

into my studio for something...

and I decided, I'll show her this

and see what she thinks about it.

So I pulled it out of the garbage can.

I said, What do you think about this?

I threw it away.

I didn't want to continue it.

It's too weird, too disturbing.

She read it and said,

You have to finish this.

You've got to see this through.

I said, She's a woman. She said I have

to do it, so I'll do it.

So Flakey Foont answers the door and

there's a girl's body standing there.

But what you see is Mr. Natural's head

and beard where her head should be.

That's how it starts.

Flakey Foont is confused by that.

And Mr. Natural comes galloping in...

riding the girl around the room.

Her body's very frisky,

and you don't see her head at all.

You just see Mr. Natural's beard

where her head should be.

Then she lands in a split.

And Mr. Natural starts talking about

what an amazing body this woman has.

But the head was always a problem...

'cause she had

such an obnoxious personality.

Flakey Foont is shocked and horrified

when he sees she doesn't have a head.

Mr. Natural explains, She was

obnoxious, so I got rid of the head.

You wanted her, lusted after her.

Now you can have her

because her head's missing.

Then he explains

how he took the head off...

and topped the neck with a cap.

Then Mr. Natural says he discovered...

that she had a second,

smaller brain in her butt...

and that is what's

making the body function.

Then he gives Foont directions on how

to feed her. You take the cap off...

and put this funnel down her neck.

Mr. Natural pulls out

this mannequin head and says...

lf you take her outside,

you've got to put this head on her...

so people aren't shocked and horrified

by a headless girl walking around.

Mr. Natural leaves and says, Don't say

I never did anything for you.

He gives the girl to Foont,

and Foont's getting excited.

He's got this wondrous body all

to himself to do with whatever he wants.

He says, I like it better with just

the cap. He knocks the fake head off.

He's leading her to the wall...

and she accidentally steps on

the fake head and smashes it.

He pushes her against the wall,

pulls her clothes off...

and he's admiring her firm butt.

This is the part where I get excited

when I'm working on it.

I enjoy drawing the female form.

I make a lot of fuss to make sure

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