Robert Crumb is caught in traffic, allowing us time to snoop out the best place for a photoshoot in the upmarket London gallery where more than 50 of his pictures are on display. It all looks so well mannered, this orderly line of black-and-white illustrations, and then you peer into the pictures and the familiar rude energy comes roistering out.
We decide that we will place him between an erotic rear view of the tennis player Serena Williams and a homely portrait of his wife of almost 40 years, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, in bed with her laptop. Aline is the chunky brunette who features in so much of Robert's work - not least in the three issues of Art & Beauty magazine that are the subject of this exhibition.
It is Robert, not Aline, who I have come to interview, and whose pictures are on sale at a starting price of $30,000 (£20,800), but their art is so intertwined that it's hard to understand either in isolation. One collaboration, unprecedented in the history of comics or indeed any art, had husband and wife each drawing themselves in the throes of sex with each other.
As we wait for the great man to arrive, Lucas Zwirner, the 25-year-old editor of the gallery's publishing outlet, gives a learned explanation of the appeal of Crumb's work to a new generation. "What's exciting about the work is his openness to his own desire and erotics," he enthuses. "There's something irreconcilable at the heart of the work that doesn't resolve towards a single vision of beauty, and which is at odds with much contemporary art. It's about seduction and repulsion. You are drawn into the work and you are judging yourself as you look at it."