Absurd Comics

R. Crumb 

Cornelius Editions 

Collected for the first time in a collection, the stories in this 6th issue of the Kim collection all have in common the fact that they play on nonsense and the absurd. Partly silent — if we exclude the gimmicks, onomatopoeias and invented languages ​​— the short stories in this work give Crumb all the pleasure of playing with the dynamism of his drawing. The characters jump in all directions, the bodies deform endlessly, driven by a permanent delirious movement, or evolve in a completely surrealist setting. Like the famous “Keep on truckin’”, you have to keep moving forward at all costs, even when you are aware that you don’t know where you are going. Produced between 1966 and 1981, the stories in Absurd comics illustrate a particular vein of Robert Crumb. Dictated by drugs or by the simple desire to draw, these stories are intended to be without narrative, without logic and without the constraint of telling anything. The author engages here in an exercise in automatic writing, as Moebius did shortly after him - the latter summed up the experience thus: "One can very well imagine a story in the form of an elephant, a wheat field, or a sulfur match flame." By freeing himself from the narrative and leaving power to the unconscious, Crumb finds a new freedom that inspires him to graphically fabulous pages, among the most beautiful and most inappropriate that he has drawn during his career.