Where the Action Is: Crumb, Semiotics, L'Ecriture Feminine, and Taste

My discovery of R. Crumb’s work signaled a paradigm shift to the perceptions I held between what comics can and cannot do. I devoted a lot of my youth into unearthing Crumb’s comics, which was by no means an easy feat for a 12-year old living in the pre-internet suburbs of Ottawa, Canada. This elusive quality to underground comix continues in academia. Broadly speaking, academics are unfamiliar with the comics medium, and it can be said that the works of cartoonist Robert Crumb, along with the underground comix movement he helped to pioneer, are even less well known known to scholars. Crumb says he enjoys complete artistic freedom, however he ascribes challenges to a state repression. In this chapter, I employ a mixed research method of comics, semiotics, and theories of l’écriture féminine to investigate some of the ways that R. Crumb can be studied by academics.