The wonderfully talented Françoise Mouly, art editor at the New Yorker and one of the forces behind the legendary Raw, tells Sarah Boxer of the Los Angeles Review of Books about introducing R. Crumb to the New Yorker during the 1990s:

“Sarah Boxer:

It’s amazing that you ever got R. Crumb in The New Yorker. How did that go down?

Françoise Mouly:

When I started back in 1992, I asked him for an image for the cover. And it was of some interest to him, because as a kid growing up with his brother, what they’re looking at is Mad magazine, but also The New Yorker covers, because it was narrative storytelling. There’s a picture of his brother Charles in their room, and on the walls are New Yorker covers from the ’30s and ’40s.

That medium of the New Yorker cover is a challenge. It’s like writing a kind of sonnet, with only so many meters, or like a haiku, because you can’t use too many words.

Sarah Boxer:

You didn’t always love Crumb’s work. In the Masters of American Comics catalog, you wrote: “I came to R. Crumb’s work with the full force of all my prejudices. I found his work unabashed in its vulgarity and was put off by the glorification of his own nerdiness, his occasionally repulsive depictions of women, blacks, and Jews, and his endless graphic representations of kinky smelly, sweaty sex.”

Françoise Mouly:

I had to get over my prejudices against the offensive part to find the incredibly sensitive, humanistic side of the man. When you read the complete R. Crumb stories, you realize he’s such a good observer of the people around him. It makes sense that he became an emblem of the ’60s, not so much for Mr. Natural, but because he is such a sensitive and communicative observer.

He’s not a hippie in any way. He may have been smoking dope and taking acid, but Crumb was always somewhat mocking of the ‘peace-man’ hippie, the long-haired, bearded hippie. He himself was straitlaced, more of a beatnik, you know, wearing a hat, his beard trimmed. Of course, he’s misogynistic and misanthropic, but he’s also a real humanist. I don’t believe they are incompatible.”