--- name: "Robert Crumb" canonical: "https://film.one/person/robert-crumb" roles: ["Actor"] born: "30 August 1943" reviewed_on_fi1m: 2 average_fi1m_score: 86 updated: "2026-09-17T04:58:48.208296+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Robert Crumb Actor. Born 30 August 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. ## Details - **Work:** Actor - **Born:** 30 August 1943, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA - **Active:** 1995–2001 - **Also known as:** R. Crumb - **Fi1m score by decade:** 1990s 87 (1), 2000s 84 (1) - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q435278, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0190054/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/73033 ## Streaming the US now - **The Roku Channel:** [*Crumb*](https://film.one/film/crumb.md) (87) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Robert Crumb > Robert Crumb is not an actor and has never pretended to be. In Terry Zwigoff's *Crumb* (1995) he does on screen what he does on the page: sits still, tells the truth about himself, and declines to make it any easier to look at. He sits on his mother's sofa in Philadelphia and draws while other people talk about him. That is most of what Robert Crumb does in Terry Zwigoff's *Crumb* (1995), and it turns out to be plenty. He is not an actor. He is the subject of one of the best films about an artist we know, and he is good in it for the reason most people would be bad: he has no interest in being liked, and he never once checks the camera to see how he is doing. The work came early. His elder brother Charles ran the family comic book as a boy and made Robert draw for it, and the habit never left. After school in 1961 he coloured greetings cards for American Greetings in Cleveland, moved to San Francisco in 1967 and put out *Zap Comix* the following year, which helped start the underground comix trade. Fritz the Cat and Mr Natural are his, and so are the Keep on Truckin' men who ended up on a million T-shirts, and by the time Zwigoff's camera finds him he has come to hate the sixties and most of what has been said about him since. He drew Harvey Pekar's stories for *American Splendor* from 1976, made the confessional *Dirty Laundry Comics* with Aline Kominsky-Crumb from 1974, and in the early 1990s took the family to the south of France. Zwigoff spends surprisingly few of his 121 minutes on the cartoons and a great many on where they came from. When the comics do appear, Livingston and Alberti pan across the pages panel by panel at the film's pace, so you read the strip and cannot skip the bits you would rather not see. We wanted to look away during those pans, at the women drawn as bodies and the racial caricatures, and we were not allowed to, and we came out unsure whether that was the film's point or Crumb's. Robert Hughes argues for the drawings and puts them next to Brueghel. Deirdre English and Trina Robbins argue against, and they are given room. Crumb's reply never changes: he draws what is in his head and hopes it is not only in his. What holds the screen is the drawing itself, the heavy cross-hatching that looks borrowed from cartoons made before he was born, and the man's refusal to make it or himself more agreeable. Maryse Alberti keeps the curtains drawn and the lamps on and lights nobody to look better than they do; David Boeddinghaus plays the 1920s piano Crumb prefers to anything made since. Crumb says he cannot stand the world he lives in, and everything in the frame agrees with him. The best witness to him is Kominsky-Crumb, a cartoonist herself, who knows exactly what he is and has stayed. "Everything that is strong in me has gone into my art work," he has said. The film is what he had left over, and it is still more than most people would let anyone see. Do not wait for a second one. ## Biography Robert Crumb is an American cartoonist, illustrator and musician. He was born on 30 August 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Crumb is a founder of the underground comix movement and is best known for works including the "Keep on Truckin'" strip and characters such as Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural. He appeared as himself in the 1995 documentary film *Crumb*, directed by Terry Zwigoff. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1991. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (2) - *Ghost World* (2001), Fi1m 84, Thanks — [page](https://film.one/film/ghost-world.md) - *Crumb* (1995), Fi1m 87, as Self — [page](https://film.one/film/crumb.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/robert-crumb