Father of underground comics goes uptown

By Ron Todt, Associated Press

Published: October 29, 2008

PHILADELPHIA (AP) _ As a lonely teenager, Robert Crumb vowed to use his artistic talent to become famous to take revenge on those who had rejected him.

But it was a tour through the drug-laced San Francisco of the 1960s that brought him fame as the father of underground comics. His satiric, surreal and sometimes sexually explicit images helped illustrate the emerging counterculture and chronicled what he has called the "seamy side of America's subconscious."

Compared to Brueghel and Goya and denounced as a pornographic misogynist, Crumb finds his work popping up these days in fine art museums throughout the world. Now the 65-year-old artist is having a homecoming of sorts in Philadelphia in "R. Crumb's Underground," a career-spanning exhibition of more than 100 works, on view at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art through Dec. 7.

"It was just a matter of the art world actually catching up to him," said Todd Hignite, editor of Comic Art Magazine, who curated the show for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco last year. "He's been so influential not only to practically every cartoonist following in his wake, but a lot of gallery artists are really influenced by him as well."

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