In “The Many Faces of R. Crumb,” a comic from 1972, the eponymous underground cartoonist offers readers a crash course in his various personae. There’s Crumb the “long-suffering” artist, bearing the scars of stigmata as he hunches over his drawing table. There’s Crumb the “sentimental slob,” weeping into his booze while treacly music plays, and Crumb the “free spirit,” wandering down the highway with a suitcase and a bindle. There’s Crumb the businessman, the misanthropic crank, and the “monumental egoist.” But the version of Crumb entrenched in popular culture is Crumb the “sex-crazed fiend and pervert.” For more than a half-century, he has been a carnival barker of the straight male libido, hyping its excesses and directing our gaze to its more outré sideshows. His comics almost hyperventilate with perversion: incest, scatology, necrophilia, and fetishes. He has a weakness for legs and asses, which he renders as meaty trunks. He favors women who look “like they grew up on a farm digging irrigation trenches,” he once told an interviewer.
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