For more than 40 years, legendary American artist Robert Crumb has documented his nightly dreams in a meticulously kept private journal. This material has stood as a guarded secret in a career defined by an impish compulsion to publically self-disclose. All of the artist's well-documented preoccupations are present and accounted for--rampant egomania, insatiable lust, profound self-disgust, the sad beauty of old America, the moral bankruptcy of new America and the fool's errand quest for spiritual enlightenment--but here they are entirely untamed, springing forth from forces beyond even his control. Published for the first time, the complete Dream Diaries offer readers a deep, dark look under the hood of one of America's most aggressively dynamic comedic voices.
Contributions by José Alaniz, Ian Blechschmidt, Paul Fisher Davies, Zanne Domoney-Lyttle, David Huxley, Lynn Marie Kutch, Julian Lawrence, Liliana Milkova, Stiliana Milkova, Kim A. Munson, Jason S. Polley, Paul Sheehan, Clarence Burton Sheffield Jr., and Daniel Worden From his work on underground comix like Zap and Weirdo, to his cultural prominence, R. Crumb is one of the most renowned comics artists in the medium’s history. His work, beginning in the 1960s, ranges provocatively and controversially over major moments, tensions, and ideas in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from the counterculture and the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement, to racial politics and sexual liberation. While Crumb’s early work refined the parodic, over-the-top, and sexually explicit styles we associate with underground comix, he also pioneered the comics memoir, through his own autobiographical and confessional comics, as well as in his collaborations. More recently, Crumb has turned to long-form, book-length works, such as his acclaimed Book of Genesis and Kafka. Over the long arc of his career, Crumb has shaped the conventions of underground and alternative comics, autobiographical comics, and the “graphic novel.” And, through his involvement in music, animation, and documentary film projects, Crumb is a widely recognized persona, an artist who has defined the vocation of the cartoonist in a widely influential way. The Comics of R. Crumb: Underground in the Art Museum is a groundbreaking collection on the work of a pioneer of underground comix and a fixture of comics culture. Ranging from art history and literary studies, to environmental studies and religious history, the essays included in this volume cast Crumb's work as formally sophisticated and complex in its representations of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and history, while also charting Crumb’s role in underground comix and the ways in which his work has circulated in the art museum.
R. Crumb’s obsessions—from sex to the Bible, music, politics, and the vicissitudes and obscenities of daily life—are chronicled in this comprehensive book of work by the illustrious American comic artist. Instrumental in the formation of the underground comics scene in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s, Crumb has ruptured and expanded the boundaries of the graphic arts, redefining comics and cartoons as countercultural art forms. Presenting a slice of Crumb’s unique universe, this book features a wide array of printed matter culled from the artist’s five-decade career—tear sheets of drawings and comics taken directly from the publications where the works first appeared, comic book covers, broadsides from the 1960s and 1970s, and tabloids from Haight-Ashbury, Oakland, the Lower East Side, and other counterculture enclaves, as well as exhibition ephemera. Complementing this volume are historical works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have inspired Crumb and pages from his rarely seen sketchbooks from the 1970s and 1980s that reveal his exemplary skill as a draftsman. Documenting the critically acclaimed exhibition Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb at David Zwirner, New York, in 2019, curated by Robert Storr, this publication offers an opportunity to immerse oneself in Crumb’s singular mind. In the accompanying text, Storr explores the challenging nature of some of Crumb’s work and the importance of artists who take on the status quo.
"One of the most promising of the younger graphic novelists." —Charles McGrath, The New York Times Magazine Considered by many to be the most influential female cartoonist ever, Julie Doucet created an iconic body of work in the ten short years she solely devoted herself to her trailblazing comic-book series Dirty Plotte. Her comics are densely inked and detailed with a pulsating neurosis from a decidedly female point of view that set the comic-book world on its head when the series debuted. Doucet returns to comics after a five-year hiatus with a reworked edition of her dream journal My Most Secret Desire, complete with never-before-published material. My Most Secret Desire is considered to be Doucet 's most innovative work, exploring the longings, pressures, and exploits of the feminine subconscious. Nightmarish tales of pregnancy, menstruation, sex changes, and boyfriends haunt Doucet's nocturnal psyche with a feverish and surreal pitch.
The early work of the pioneering feminist cartoonist plus her acclaimed new story “Dream House" Aline Kominsky-Crumb immediately made her mark in the Bay Area’s underground comix scene with unabashedly raw, dirty, unfiltered comics chronicling the thoughts and desires of a woman coming of age in the 1960s. Kominsky-Crumb didn’t worry about self-flattery. In fact, her darkest secrets and deepest insecurities were all the more fodder for groundbreaking stories. Her exaggerated comix alter ego, Bunch, is self-destructive and grotesque but crackles with the self-deprecating humor and honesty of a cartoonist confident in the story she wants to tell. Collecting comics from the 1970s through today, Love That Bunch is shockingly prescient while still being an authentic story of its era. Kominsky-Crumb was ahead of her time in juxtaposing the contradictory nature of female sexuality with a proud, complicated feminism. Most important, she does so without apology. One of the most famous and idiosyncratic cartoonists of our time, Kominsky-Crumb traces her steps from a Beatles-loving fangirl, an East Village groupie, an adult grappling with her childhood, and a 1980s housewife and mother, to a new thirty-page story, “Dream House,” that looks back on her childhood forty years later. Love That Bunch will be Kominsky-Crumb’s only solo-authored book in print. Originally published as a book in 1990, this new expanded edition follows her to the present, including an afterword penned by the noted comics scholar Hillary Chute.
No one asks for the childhood they get, and no child ever deserved to go to Chartwell Manor. For Glenn Head, his two years spent at the now-defunct Mendham, NJ, boarding school ― run by a serial sexual and emotional abuser of young boys in the early 1970s ― left emotional scars in ways that he continues to process. This graphic memoir ― a book almost 50 years in the making ― tells the story of that experience, and then delves with even greater detail into the reverberations of that experience in adulthood, including addiction and other self-destructive behavior. Head tells his story with unsparing honesty, depicting himself as a deeply flawed human struggling to make sense of the childhood he was given.
First released in 2002, this provocative, critically acclaimed novel is now a major motion picture starring Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig, and Alexander Skarsgård. “I don't remember being born. I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness.” So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. After losing her virginity to her mother's boyfriend, Minnie pursues a string of sexual encounters (with both boys and girls) while experimenting with drugs and developing her talents as an artist. Unsupervised and unguided by her aloof and narcissistic mother, Minnie plunges into a defenseless, yet fearless adolescence. While set in the libertine atmosphere of 1970s San Francisco, Minnie's journey to understand herself and her world is universal: this is the story of a young woman troubled by the discontinuity between what she thinks and feels and what she observes in those around her. Acclaimed cartoonist and author Phoebe Gloeckner serves up a deft blend of visual and verbal narrative in her complex presentation of a pivotal year in a girl's life, recounted in diary pages and illustrations, with full narrative sequences in comics form. The Diary of a Teenage Girl offers a searing comment on adult society as seen though the eyes of a young woman on the verge of joining it. This edition has been updated by the author with an introduction reflecting on the book's critical reception and value as diary or novel, historical document or work of art. Also included in this revised edition are supplementary photographs and illustrations from the author's childhood, including some of her own diary entries. "Phoebe Gloeckner... is creating some of the edgiest work about young women's lives in any medium."—The New York Times "One of the most brutally honest, shocking, tender and beautiful portrayals of growing up female in America."—Salon "It's the most honest depiction of sexuality in a long, long time; as a meditation on adolescence, it picks up a literary ball that's been only fitfully carried after Salinger."—Nerve.com
One of America’s most celebrated cartoonists, Robert Crumb helped define cartoon and punk subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s with comic strips like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Keep on Truckin’. The open sexuality of his work, paired with frequent self-deprecation and a free, almost stream-of-consciousness style, have made Crumb into a global voice and a renowned contemporary artist. Originally published by Kitchen Sink Press in 1996, Art & Beauty Magazine, Number 1 is at once a satirical take on aesthetics and a continued exploration of Crumb’s subversion of sexuality and mainstream values. Drawings of women in positions ranging from lascivious to modest or mid-sport are accompanied by quotations, many of which are from artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Harvey Kurtzman. Mining his own obsessions and fantasies, Crumb reimagines the history of art, challenging notions of beauty, along with society’s mores and expectations of propriety around the female form. The second volume of Art & Beauty, published in 2003, expanded on the first, adding all new drawings (also of women) and quotations, likewise taken from the history of art and aesthetics. The effect of both volumes is undeniably destabilizing. The images appeal to a purely erotic sensibility, which in turn is undercut by the inclusion of highfalutin and frequently philosophical prose. The images drag philosophy back down to earth, while the writing challenges the pure eroticism of Crumb’s drawings. The eagerly awaited Art & Beauty, Number 3 is released for the first time as part of Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb. It is published on the occasion of Crumb's exhibition at David Zwirner, London, which debuts the new work he created for the magazine’s third issue. Presenting all three volumes in one book, Art & Beauty Magazine is arranged chronologically and guides the reader through the twenty-year history of Crumb’s magazine, from the earliest images in the 1990s to the most recent drawings completed in 2016. Paul Morris, longtime gallerist and supporter of Crumb’s practice, writes an introduction that contextualizes this body of work and the artist’s career as a whole. This beautiful edition, with a cover specially designed by Crumb for its release, makes the initial two issues available for the first time in over ten years, and presents the new and previously unpublished material from the third. For seasoned supporters and novices alike, Art & Beauty Magazine: Drawings by R. Crumb is a wonderful window into Crumb’s world of bodies and ideas, art and beauty. A limited edition of 400 signed copies is published as well.
Amy Mathers Award Winner MYRCA Award Nominee R. Ross Arnett Award Nominee American Library Association YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers Red Maple Award Nominee Red Maple Honour Book Barnes & Noble’s Top 25 Most Anticipated Own Voices Novels Chapters-Indigo Most Anticipated Teen Books Junior Library Guild Selection CCBC Best Pick for Kids & Teens CCBC Red Leaf Literature OLA White Pine Teen Committee Summer Reading List A Guyanese girl must find the balance between her parents' "old world" expectations and traditions while pursuing her dream of being a great trumpeter in this contemporary, coming-of-age story. Nira Ghani has always dreamed of becoming a musician. Her Guyanese parents, however, have big plans for her to become a scientist or doctor. Nira's grandmother and her best friend, Emily, are the only people who seem to truly understand her desire to establish an identity outside of the one imposed on Nira by her parents. When auditions for jazz band are announced, Nira realizes it's now or never to convince her parents that she deserves a chance to pursue her passion. As if fighting with her parents weren't bad enough, Nira finds herself navigating a new friendship dynamic when her crush, Noah, and notorious mean-girl, McKenzie "Mac," take a sudden interest in her and Emily, inserting themselves into the fold. So, too, does Nira's much cooler (and very competitive) cousin Farah. Is she trying to wiggle her way into the new group to get closer to Noah? Is McKenzie trying to steal Emily's attention away from her? As Farah and Noah grow closer and Emily begins to pull away, Nira's trusted trumpet "George" remains her constant, offering her an escape from family and school drama. But it isn't until Nira takes a step back that she realizes she's not the only one struggling to find her place in the world. As painful truths about her family are revealed, Nira learns to accept people for who they are and to open herself in ways she never thought possible. A relatable and timely contemporary, coming-of age story, In the Key of Nira Ghani explores the social and cultural struggles of a teen in an immigrant household.
