Odds & Ends
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Drawing
Odds & Ends Details
Amazon.com Review Fans of underground comics god R. Crumb know that he started his career in greeting cards, but few have seen examples of his earliest work. Forty years of his commercial and otherwise unpublished output is collected in Odds & Ends, a lovely companion piece to his better-known work in Zap Comics, Weirdo, and the rest. Including advertisements and announcements done for friends and family, magazine illustrations, and some surprisingly sensitive portraits, the book is essential for those who want to see how the man's work evolved in private, parallel to his published work. Odds & Ends shows Crumb at his silly, geeky best. --Rob Lightner Read more From Publishers Weekly Called "the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century" by no less a skeptic than establishment art critic Robert Hughes, cartoonist R. Crumb has produced some of the smuttiest yet piercingly affecting and quintessentially American art since the 1960s. Fans of Mr. Natural, the Monkey Wrench Gang, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and Crumb's agonized self-portraits won't want to miss Odds & Ends, a new, chronologically organized collection of unpublished doodles, Valentine cards drawn during his employment at American Greetings, covers for underground newspapers, advertisements for porn theaters and bike shops, and record album covers. Crumb selected the myriad b&w and color drawings here, all displaying his dark and hilarious vulgarity. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal This is a collection of Crumb's less celebrated but by no means inferior works, including some previously unseen by the public. Beginning in 1960, the book treats us to a chronological look at unpublished sketches, greeting cards, magazine covers, and many other, more marginal selections from Crumb's oeuvre. There are brief blurbs about every selection, explaining whether they have appeared previously and, if so, where a useful feature, considering the somewhat peripheral nature of these pieces. Like all of Crumb's work, this is a bizarre collection (including the short-lived "Devil Girl Choco-Bars" and Crumb's take on the Bill Clinton scandal of a few years ago) that will offend some but delight others. A fascinating glimpse at a previously unknown side of one of the most prolific artists of his time, this is proof that he rarely sacrificed quality, no matter how trivial or commercial the purpose. Vincent Au, New York Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Booklist Although its compilers have striven admirably, the ongoing project, published by Fantagraphics, that aims to be the complete works of underground comics artist Crumb somehow has missed quite a bit of the prolific cartoonist's output during the past four decades. But Crumb completists need not despair, thanks to this handsome roundup of hundreds of little-seen drawings for greeting cards, advertisements, books, and magazines; a handful of short comics stories; and--the rarest items here--drawings made for friends and relatives, such as portraits, birthday cards, and wedding invitations. The predominance of individual drawings rather than comics stories emphasizes Crumb's sometimes underrated prowess with a pen, and his meticulous yet expressive style is enhanced by the book's handsome design and high-quality reproduction. Taken individually, the works in this miscellany may not have the impact of Crumb's best comics stories, but taken as a body of work, they show that even Crumb's crumbs can amount to a feast. Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more Review 'Crumb is the Brueghel of the last half of the twentieth century.' -- Robert Hughes'It wouldn't surprise me a hell of a lot if we all look back in ten years to say, yes, Robert Crumb was the Henry Ford of a new art form.' -- Hunter S. Thompson, 1969 Read more About the Author Robert Crumb lives in France, where he spends his time drawing and playing the banjo for his band Les Primitifs du Futur. Read more
Reviews
Given Crumb's countercultural weirdness and his penchant for big-bummed women, the title Odds & Ends given this collection is perfect--and surely must originate with Crumb himself!Odds & Ends focuses largely (but not exclusively) on Crumb the "commercial" artist. Arranged more or less chronologicaly, the book reproduces cards he drew when working, in the early days, for American Greeting Cards; buttons for various causes; illustrations for grassroots community newspapers like "Winds of Change"; baby shower, wedding, and anniversary announcements; letter heads, business card illustrations, and book covers; political cartoons defending environmentalism and mocking Maggie Thatcher (she's depicted as a hen laying rotten eggs) and religious intolerance (a gorilla, thumping his chest and hooting, who wears a T-shirt with a Moral Majority logo); "high-end" sketch portraits (e.g., Woody Guthrie, Alan Dershowitz, George Jones) and a cover for the New Yorker; and wonderfully self-deprecating self-portraits, including one featuring Crumb holding forth to a sound-asleep interviewer.The book's creme de la Crumb is the set of color and line illustrations Crumb drew for the 10th anniversary edition (1987) of Edward Abbey's The Monkey-Wrench Gang (a calendar featuring the drawings was also produced. I'd read about the illustrations in other places, but never had a chance to see them until running across Odds & Ends. They're absolutely wonderful, uncannily capturing Abbey's mad (but also refreshingly sane) gang of eco-heroes.Crumb is perfectly recognizable in the illustrations collected here, and yet there's a freshness to the pieces that's captivating. Most of his fans, I suspect, will never have seen the majority of this work--at least I certainly hadn't. It's good stuff, well worth looking at and thinking about.
