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"Ridin' The Dog" is...about a conversation I had with a great jazz musician on a Greyhound bus going east out of Chicago. I'd been very interested in his music for years before we met, by sheer coincidence, on the bus." – Harvey Pekar
The Visual Studies Workshop of New York later identified the unnamed figure on the bus as Sun Ra, and the subject of their conversation, "Lamar Washington," is based on Albert Ayler.
Harvey Pekar, often called "the poet laureate of Cleveland," described his work as "autobiography written as it's happening." His first collaboration with Crumb was in 1972; Pekar's self-published American Splendor series, first released in 1976, featured stories illustrated by Crumb, Dumm, Budgett, and Brian Bram – and the 15-issue series (from 1976 to 1991), adapted into a film starring Paul Giamatti in 2003, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Some of his first work, though, was as a freelance jazz critic, publishing first in The Jazz Review in 1959. This story brings together all of his influences at the moment his career in graphic fiction was taking off. In some of his last work, he was featured on the Cleveland episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. He died in 2010.
Robert Crumb is a legend of the underground comix movement. He invented Fritz the Cat, and the images from his Keep on Truckin' strip. Scatological, pornographic, psychedlic and and exuberantly, defiantly perverse, his illustrations mine his subconscious (and conscious) fixations. As the underground declined in the '70s, he contributed to the Arcade anthology and illustrated Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Much of his work appeared in a magazine he founded, Weirdo (1981-1993). In 1991, the sale of six Crumb sketchbooks financed his and wife's move to southeastern France. In 1994, Terry Zwigoff directed Crumb, a documentary film on Robert Crumb's life – called by at least one critic "the greatest documentary ever made." It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. In 2008, Crumb was given a retrospective at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2009, he rewrote the Book of Genesis as a graphic novel. In 2017, Crumb's original cover art for the 1969 Fritz the Cat collection sold for $717,000, the highest price to that point for any piece of American cartoon art.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+1986.71.8 |
