Confessions of Robert Crumb is a 1987 documentary picking over the life of America's greatest living cartoonist. It opens with Crumb and his wife sitting on the doorstep of their idyllic little-house-on-the-prairie style home, skilfully fingerpicking a jaunty bluegrass tune on banjo and guitar. When the music comes to an end, Crumb turns to camera.
"Hello." He says, expressionless. "My name is Robert Crumb and this is my wife Aline. We are underground cartoonists."
"On the surface our life appears to be really quaint and charming," Aline says.
"Yes. Doesn't it," Crumb says. "But underneath it's a steaming cauldron of sexual perversion, drugs and twisted neurosis." He picks up his banjo and begins to play again.
This mix of salacious pay off and deadpan self-mockery is quintessential Crumb. The Godfather of American underground comics has been staining paper with the contents of his wry, sordid mind for more than half a century. And whilst it's true that he's created a canon from pen and ink that pulsates with sexual perversion, drugs and twisted neurosis, to describe it merely as such undersells Crumb's rare gift for satire, his merciless self-examination and his remarkable work rate. In terms of quantity alone there is no one else who has been as consistent—he scripted, drew and self-released his first comic in 1958, aged 15, and hasn't stopped working since.