Mostly, these days, you find Crumb at his picturesque home in this rural town west of Sacramento. If I manage to turn out three issues of Hup a year, I’m completely happy.” “So, nothing’s happened with the script, but that doesn’t break my heart because I’d rather just do comics. All these wealthy industry types really seemed to take offense at that,” he says with a laugh. “I remember one night I was at this industry-type dinner party and in the course of the dinner table conversation I commented that to be a real, sincere artist in America is to be a loser in society. I wasn’t too good at selling it either-I kept saying the wrong things to these studio people. It’s a humorous, sex, burlesque story and it’s pretty weird. It’s based on a comic I did years ago about this wimpy guy who falls in love with a female sasquatch (huge, hairy creatures said to live in the mountains of North America), and gets abducted in the woods. “Me and a friend of mine, Terry Zwigoff, wrote this script and took it to Hollywood and pitched it to different studios,” he recalls, “and while the studio people seemed to find me an amusing character, the script was way too offbeat for the Hollywood machine. Considering that Crumb probably hasn’t sat through a mainstream Hollywood feature in years, it’s surprising that he applied himself to the task of writing a script that this defiant iconoclast didn’t get too far in Hollywood is less of a surprise. The virulent dislike of mass media that surfaces in nearly every strip he draws didn’t stop him from having a go-round with the film industry. Well, for one thing, he surfaced in Hollywood last year. Though Crumb experienced- endured is how he would describe it-a period of high-profile celebrityhood when he burst onto the scene, he has since removed himself from the media compost pile to the point that many who know of his work wonder: Whatever happened to R. In real life, however, the notoriously reclusive artist prefers to interact with his fellow man from a distance. Crumb, whose cartoons currently are published in the quarterly magazines Weirdo and Hup, is afflicted with a compulsion to confess, and in his work he invites the reader into his psyche.
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