R. Crumb at the Frye

Took Carina & Grandma Helen to the Frye to see the R.Crumb exhibit. Crumb did seminal counter-culture comics, or graphic novels as they are called now. From Mister Natural to Shuman the Human to some pretty sick and twisted stuff in Zap! comics he was a productive and interesting, perhaps genre defining artist of the 60s and 70s. Powerful stuff, he was more talented than I had realized. The selected work also said interesting things about him - his taste in women, the blues musicians, his insights into drugs, pop culture, and sex, his fearlessness in pursuing topics that reveal parts of him that most of us would never willingly expose. He did a haunting bit about seeing a girl on the bus in New York who was so beautiful it was almost magical. Of course he couldn't say a word to her, probably hardly made eye contact, and yet decades later he could still recall it and draw beautiful cartoons about it - sad, human, heart rending. Very real, it resonated and stuck with me. The cynicism and jaded sensibilities also can be over the top, but they only had a bit of his more hard-core stuff. Grandma Helen said "I just didn't look at the rude stuff."