But, seriously, give “Binky Brown” a chance, at least a read. It’s one of the most weirdly fascinating things the comic book form has ever produced: poignant, obsessive, beautifully worked-over, graphically exciting, varied, unpredictable, wrenching, embarrassing, and, from my POV, touching.

The one Crumb piece I’ve seen that I really like is that single pager that shows the same location across a period of time (forest, road, gas station, highway, city, etc).

I’ve not read Binky Brown, and I’m not sure I will. I don’t much expect it to be to my tastes. Not when there’s so much else I am excited to buy and read and reread.

OK. Is this a determination based on Crumbian "style," which has remained recognizable if not stable over decades? (You can see more brushwork and more heft in later Crumb than in his breakout late-60s comix, but we'd all recognize that it's still the same artist, yes? He has grown but he continues to be Crumb.)

Is it a question of ethos, triggered by the recognizability of the style but also carrying ethical/ideological implications, e.g., Crumb's often vicious indulgence of racist and sexist stereotypes?

Does dislike of his style (is it really consistently ugly?) extend to masterful work he has done for others, e.g., Pekar's "Hypothetical Quandary"?

Or is your determination based more on Crumb's subject matter? If so, that would strike me as quite a generalization, since "Meatball," "Patton," "Nausea," "It's Really Too Bad," "White Man Meets Bigfoot," Crumb's Kafka, and Genesis don't have a lot of subject matter in common.

I don't consider myself a professional defender of Crumb, but I'm really curious about the sources of our attraction/antipathy toward particular artists.

Is it partly that the typically dense Crumb style creates a clotted or cluttered look? That would seem at odds with the poetic minimalism of some of your own comics.

Me, I like some Crumb, I like a lot of Deitch, I like Justin's Green work a lot ("Binky" is the best single UG comic book IMO), and I like, sometimes, the salutary ugliness and self-recrimination in Aline Kominsky-Crumb's stuff. I don't generally like the macho posturing of some of the others, though I'm wowed by some of their formalist experiments.

Well, I don’t see it that way. I don’t get the emotion or the ingenuity. And I haven’t seen anyone make a good case for either.

It’s partially the emphasis on the “no restraints I can’t draw anything so why not” attitude, though with Crumb its also the nostalgia and the ugly drawing style and the women issue and…

I’m probably not a big fan of most comics that would be seen as heavily influenced by him either.

Sorry, Suat, but this is patronizing.

There is another interpretive possibility that has not been broached here, namely, that Crumb took to the project with a determination neither to rationalize nor to ridicule its seeming contradictions, inconsistencies, and atavistic power. That he did not "believe" in the text in any literal sense but did not intend to satirize or expose it in any sense; rather, he sought to give the work the same poker-faced air of detachment, yet subtle emotional investment, that he has brought to a number of other adaptation projects. I would call this imaginative entry into a certain interpretation of the source text (one can see the same in, e.g., Crumb's "Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick").

I don't see this as condescending or childish. And to take Crumb at his word that this is merely "straight illustration," Derik, is to ignore the fact that it is manifestly a comic book being offered to a non-comics audience. That doesn't mean that Crumb is applying no ingenuity to the breakdown of pages and the parsing out of the action. That also doesn't mean that there is no investment of emotion in the images (check out Abraham leading Isaac to potential sacrifice, for example).

Derik, I think you and I have a rather sharp disagreement about the nature, influence, and overall artistic vitality of underground comix; I get the impression from this and previous posts that you have a particular antipathy to Crumb and his fellow travelers. I'm no great lover of Crumb's latter-day confessional persona, and in fact I "hated" (i.e., felt confused and simultaneously repulsed and attracted by) his work when I first saw it, but I think he has done some very great comics. What's your take on the deification of Crumb?

I don’t think it’s ever been released in the US. I got an import to review, and it’s an import still on US Amazon. It great for how it riffs on Shandy, skewering it with its own inventions. The Crumb book sounds like it dies on its own refusal to get anywhere near invention and adaptation.