Weirdo - RIP

Yours truly never knew anything about Weirdo, an underground comix magazine created by the esteemed R. Crumb. The layouts remind me of Upper & Lower Case, a magazine for the ages for graphic designers, which is, IMHO, high praise indeed.

A prodigious purveyor of perverted art and the doyen of underground comix, Robert Dennis Crumb (“R. Crumb” in his signatures) has been illustrating the unhinged imagery lodged in his unconscious for six decades and counting. To his ongoing bewilderment, the controversial and formerly destitute artist’s drawings and cartoons now fetch top dollar at esteemed gallery exhibitions, such as David Zwirner’s recent Drawing for Print: Mind Fucks, Kultur Klashes, Pulp Fiction & Pulp Fact by the Illustrious R. Crumb.

Before he was famous, though, Crumb endured all sorts of problems. Though he’d made a splash in 1968 with his Zap Comix series, which helped define the underground comix aesthetic, his early thirties were plagued by disastrous relationships, lawsuits, financial struggles, heavy LSD use, and copyright infringements (including an X-rated film made about his Fritz the Cat character without his permission). But things started looking up as Crumb approached his 40th birthday — thanks, in part, to Weirdo, an independent magazine he launched in 1981 following a flash of insight during a meditation session.

Running from 1981 to 1990, lasting 27 issues and three editors, Weirdo lived up to its title. It shone a spotlight on the bizarre, the perverted, the grotesque, and the marginalized; comics by schizophrenics, convicts, and homeless people all made their way into its pages. Each issue sported an original Crumb cover and included stories by veteran and newcomer comic artists, oddball ephemera (such as ads for the spoofy Church of SubGenius), and works by forgotten artists (Gene Deitch, Stanislav Szukalski). Weirdo was an important series in comix history, and contained some of Crumb’s best, most refined work. And yet the mainstream art and comic world largely neglected Weirdo during its decade-long run, even as Crumb gained notoriety.

Prodigious talent without a doubt.