Comix Revolution is not at all a used bookstore, but it deviates enough from the conventional chain bookstore model to be just as interesting.
The store, 606 Davis St., obviously is geared primarily toward comic book fans, but a quick browsing of the stock will demonstrate that comic-book artists long ago transcended the world of superheroes and science fiction. Robert Crumb, during a nearly 40-year career, consistantly has been among the most effective and innovative of those artists.
Along with the expected selection of Marvel comics and the like, Comix Revolution sells a mostly left-leaning cross section of current magazines, fiction, graphic novels and various novelties, printed or otherwise. The shop carries several Crumb collections, including “R. Crumb’s America,” a collection of strips from 1967 to 1993 in which Crumb, known mostly as R. Crumb, spewed out his horrified reactions to the present and possible future of the United States.
Crumb commonly has been called an “underground” or “anti-establishment” cartoonist since he first emerged in the late 1960s. He hates consumerism and mainstream pop culture, but he’s also the ultimate misanthrope and the ultimate skeptic — this is a man who always wears a shabby suit with a bowtie, and who once declined an offer to draw an album cover for the Rolling Stones. Crumb’s work harshly satirizes American life, arguing that hippies and leftist radicals are just as misguided and hopeless as his conservative, sexually repressed all-American good citizen “Whiteman.” All of this madness and bile is fitted into a pretty old-fashioned panel format, yet Crumb’s images are crude and strangely powerful. Crumb can make his characters grotesquely realistic or ridiculously cartoonish as the situation demands.
The first strip in the collection, “Modern America,” bears a warning in tiny letters at the top of the page: “This is not a happy comic strip.” Crumb presents an America cluttered up by greed, development, industry, confusion, political ills and general despair. After showing us “America the cruel bully,” “American the glutton,” “America the greedy” and “America the ugly,” Crumb introduces us to a short, balding blue-collar man who, indignant with the powers that be, storms out of his living room in search of something better, but doesn’t get any farther than the local run-down strip club.
“Lenor Goldberg and her Girl Commanders,” who embody the sexual fantasy Crumb’s work is notorious for, fight modern ills by crashing a meeting of the country’s intellectual elite and escaping into their sex lives. Other characters, like Onion Head, Patricia Pig and The Goose and the Gander, mill around the country, grow more and more bewildered and can’t seem to figure out what to do about it.
— Scott Gordon
