Ric Heitzman: A Pee-wee's Playhouse Production Designer on Art, Animation, and Finding the Humor in Anything


text by Karly Quadros
portrait by Joshua White

“Guess who’s at the door, Pee-wee!”

Anyone who was a kid in the late-80s (or a lover of camp, kitsch, and tactile production design in any subsequent decade) knows the phrase well. Emanating from a jolly windowpane, it signaled the entrance of any number of zany characters: a rhinestone cowboy with an animated lasso, a bobbleheaded salesman, a 1950s beehive towering to the ceiling. Every Saturday morning at 10 a.m., the cast and characters of Pee-wee’s Playhouse pogo-sticked around a mid-century, candy-colored dream home, stuffed to the brim with puppets, papier mache, and wallpaper only the 80s could produce. Pee-wee Herman – the impish avatar of host and comedian Paul Reubens who is the center of a new two-part documentary, Pee-Wee As Himself, airing on May 23 – was the clear heart of the show, but it was the world of Pee-wee’s Playhouse that had kids wishing they could live inside their own surrealist bungalow.

Artist Ric Heitzman worked on Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a production designer, puppeteer, and voice actor for characters like Mr. Window, Cool Cat, and the Salesman. Even after the show ended in 1991, Heitzman’s art is packed with a boundless gestural joy and cast of characters straight from Sunday morning cartoons. Working across comics, cartoons, and commercial animation, Heitzman’s Escher-like paintings have a technicolor psychedelia to them, packed densely with explosions of color, hatching, and characters romping their way through their worlds.

Heitzman’s new show, Squiggly Dee, is on display until June 9 at Face Guts, a storefront gallery project from artist and former animator Tim Biskup, in collaboration with White Box LA. The two artists got together to discuss Pee-wee’s Playhouse, recurring dreams, and finding the humor in anything.

TIM BISKUP: What’s your favorite animal to draw?

RIC HEITZMAN: I draw a lot of insectoid characters. The first thing that came to my mind is Triceratops because that’s the animal I like the most, but I don’t draw it very often. I think about it a lot. Everything I draw is a mashup. I noticed I draw a lot of things that look like donkey-giraffe compilations. There’s a lot of insectoid things like centipedes and millipedes, things that look like human heads and insect bodies. That’s been in my head for a long time. It’s probably from playing with bugs as a kid. Kept everything in boxes with wax paper over them.

BISKUP: Of all the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters, which one was the most like you?

HEITZMAN: Mr. Window. Mr. Window is the most open. Mr. Window [dips into the character’s cadence] is also just my voice. ‘Hey, Peewee, guess who’s at the door!’ That’s basically all I said. ‘It’s the King of Cartoons!’ I liked the character of the window. I liked it because it was really happy. All those characters were happy, but that particular character was big and happy. Plus, I designed it.

BISKUP: Was there one that you didn’t like?

HEITZMAN: No. There was nothing on that show I didn’t like. Even the characters that other people didn’t like, I liked. To me, it was like a sandwich. If you take away something, you don’t know what else would be there anyway. We were recently together as a group, and George McGrath, the writer, said he never liked the salesman character because the exaggerated size of his head always bugged him. But it functioned in the narrative as this irritating thing. It bothered him – it was supposed to bother everybody. That’s the point. 

BISKUP: You’ve told me so many great stories about famous people that you’ve just randomly run into: your James Brown story, the Belushi and Akroyd story is incredible, the Dolly Parton story.

HEITZMAN: I was just in the right place at the right time. A lot of people came to [Pee-wee’s Playhouse]. I met a lot of people, not necessarily through Paul [Reubens], but through my associations with Paul when that show was on.

BISKUP: Can you tell me a random one that you haven’t told me yet? Have you met Liza Minelli?

HEITZMAN: No, I haven’t met Liza Minelli. I did go to a drag show when I first moved to LA and there was a really great Liza Minelli imitator.

BISKUP: Cher?

HEITZMAN: Oh yes, I’ve met Cher. She came to the Playhouse. She was on the Christmas show. That was amazing to meet her because she was really sweet.I don’t know how old she was, but she looked amazing. When people came on that show, either they were fascinated by it, because it was like being in Candyland, everybody walking around with their mouths open, or they were terrified.

She was one that was absolutely terrified. Paul introduced her to us before we did the shot. She admitted to us she was nervous because she always did stuff for adults and she didn’t know how to do this. Paul was like, “Don’t worry about it. Just play it the way you play it. Don’t worry about who it’s for.” It was just funny to see someone who does these giant stage shows and performs all over the world, and they come on set and they’re insecure about it. You wouldn’t think somebody that big would be that vulnerable.

BISKUP: The way that you’re talking about it gives me a great picture of what it was like to work there and the amount of vulnerability it created in people whether they were feeling joy or fear.

HEITZMAN: Most people felt joy. That’s the thing that I can say that I’m proudest of about that show. You were able to convey a pure sense of joy. You do that too. Your stuff has joy in it. To me, that’s the best thing in the world. It’s harder to be funny than it is to be serious.

BISKUP: It’s vulnerable.

HEITZMAN: Comedy has tragedy in it, but it still has to be funny. 

That show afforded us, at least afforded me, a view into this world that I never expected to have. I didn’t come out here to do that. I always just wanted to be an artist. In fact, when we first got an Emmy, I was like, “What is that?” I always heard that term, but I was like, “What is an Emmy really?” I remember when they said, “You won an Emmy,” I was like, “This is great, but could I get a show somewhere? Show my art?” 

That’s what I wanted. In other words, if you’re not going for this stuff, you look at it slightly differently. It was a window into a world that I never thought I’d ever have a window into. I was always like, [ silly voice] “Golly!”

BISKUP: [similar silly voice] “Look at all this cool stuff!”

HEITZMAN: Some of it was cool, but also the personalities! Like you said, I have stories. I literally have seen every kind of behavior on set that could ever happen: tantrums, people punching walls, people throwing themselves down in the middle of a scene crying. It’s a place where people feel comfortable just going to pieces. I’m not talking about people in front of the camera. I’m talking about the director, the costumer, the lighting person, somebody falling out of the rafters, the wardrobe catching on fire. You just go, this is Hollywood, man. This is wild. This is uncharted territory. Something can happen at any minute. I know workplaces can be like that. It’s emotional craziness but also technical craziness, and sometimes it’s both at the same time. People’s emotions are really raw in live action shooting. That’s the great thing about animation. You’re gonna see it through very slowly. 

BISKUP: It’s gonna develop over a long period of time, and you’re gonna be alone.

HEITZMAN: You’re never gonna be patient enough.

BISKUP: When you’re talking to somebody, do you see the cartoon version of them?

HEITZMAN: I see a humorous version of what’s going on very often. It’s exaggerated. I almost see a punchline before it’s coming. Someone can be telling a poignant story, and I don’t mean to make fun of them, but you get ahead of them and you think, is this gonna be a joke? But there’s no joke. But in your mind you imagine the joke.

BISKUP: Do you think about how you would draw them?

HEITZMAN: Now that I’m a seasoned artist, I could translate that at any time. I’m not as ambitious as I used to be because otherwise I get frustrated because some of this stuff passes in a moment. It’s really only at that moment, and it makes me happy. 

The characters get exaggerated, almost like Hee-Haw or some other TV show like Monty Python. It’s the kind of stuff I’ve always been drawn to. Everything just gets exaggerated in my head. I find it very humorous and it puts me in a good mood and happy. It’s a state of mind that I’m in most of the time.

BISKUP: I actively look for funny things that people say. I have a tendency to share my interpretation of what somebody said that was obviously not what they meant to say. I have a way of picking language apart and thinking of different ways to think about something that somebody said that makes it funnier. Does that ever make you feel crazy?

HEITZMAN: I think it's an inner world. I thought about that for a long time because even from an early age it makes you more isolated, developing another world or being able to look at your subconscious. I would say a lot of people are not in touch with their subconscious. Maybe I’m not using the right term.  

I have lots of examples of being somewhere – especially when I was dating women, and even with Lorainne, my wife – and I’ll be sitting somewhere with a really big smile on my face, and she says, “Why are you smiling like that?” And I’m honest. I’ll say, “If you could see what I’m seeing in my head right now, you’d be very happy too.” 

I have a really rich inner world. I could close my eyes right now and just start imaging stuff, and it’s always really entertaining to me, even when it’s dark, just because it’s cool looking [laughs]. You get caught up in your own imagination. That’s what an artist does.

BISKUP: I felt like I was crazy when I was younger, but now…

HEITZMAN: When did you start feeling like that, I wonder?

BISKUP: I was not doing well in school, and my mom was trying to figure out why and she took me to some doctors to get tested. They told her, “He’s really smart!” The translation I made in my head is, Okay, I’m really smart, but I’m not doing well in school, so I must be crazy. I just sat with that idea in my head for most of my life. I explained everything based on that.

HEITZMAN: But you weren’t scared of yourself, were you?

BISKUP: I think this is why I avoided drugs. The one time I smoked weed, it was really existentially terrifying. All the big fears that I didn’t even realize I had came out, and it was just like, Oh God, I cannot do this. I cannot let that stuff out of the bag. I always felt like there was this stockpile of craziness inside of me that I just had to keep a lid on.

HEITZMAN: When were you first conscious of this?

BISKUP: I had terrible nightmares when I was a kid, so I was scared to go to sleep.

HEITZMAN: Were they recurring nightmares?

BISKUP: I don’t think they were recurring until my thirties. Then I started having them, and they helped me get out of a career that I was troubled by and start actually making paintings. 

HEITZMAN: Have they gone away?

BISKUP: Yeah. When I was working in animation, I kept having these dreams that there was a portal inside my house, and on the other side of this portal, there was a whole universe of these characters and it was my responsibility to help these characters escape.

HEITZMAN: That’s a good responsibility. Unless they were characters of ill repute.

BISKUP: No, they were defenseless little guys. And my house was a machine that would help them get into my dimension. Eventually I stopped working in animation and started making paintings and selling them in galleries. And all of those dreams went away.  I had a friend who was having dinner at our house one night and she said, “Those were your paintings. Those were the characters from your paintings.” You got something like that?

HEITZMAN: Oh yeah. Going through the entertainment industry, it’s just a different approach to creativity because it’s creativity on demand, and that’s very different from creativity when you’re just sitting around daydreaming. When I was in the industry, most of what I was doing in my dreams was trying to figure out the jobs that were ahead of me. If I had a storyboard or something, all I could do in my dream was turn it over and over again.

But I had a recurring nightmare when I was really young that went away about the time I was a graduate student in college. A Tyrannosaurus was always coming at me, and I was always running into a room where my mother was. Her back was to me so I never saw her face, then I looked out the window, and it wasn’t the Tyrannosaurus but a tornado coming, and that’s when I woke up.

BISKUP: So the dinosaur wasn’t as scary as the tornado.

HEITZMAN: Yeah, because a tornado was something that would happen in my real life.

BISKUP: It makes me think of the storm drawing from your last show here. You told me some kind of emotional stuff that was wrapped up in that.

HEITZMAN: Most of my drawings address the humor that I feel most of the time. At least, I hope most of those drawings exude a certain humor that’s chaotic and spastic. But sometimes when I’m frustrated, usually about something in my life, some situation that I can’t really do anything about – I can’t spend the money, I can’t fix this, I don’t know the answer, damned if you do, damned if you don’t – I’m just trying to struggle through something. I don’t know what the answer’s going to be so I just try to put it into the drawing, and those drawings tend to be pretty dark, just because of the nature of indecision and lack of control.

There’s a bunch of these drawings that I wouldn’t show anybody. They’re just messed up.  Some of ‘em I painted over. It’s a side of you that you’re not proud of, so you’re not sure how people would interpret seeing them.

BISKUP: Do you think they show clearly that emotional intensity that you’re not comfortable with? Would I see that if I looked at it?

HEITZMAN: I don’t know. I just know how it resonates with me when I look at it. It’s okay. I captured that and put it in the bottle. But I don’t want it out of the bottle.

BISKUP: I have those too.

There’s pieces that I have that I’ve shown that may be dealing with really intense things that I don’t want to talk to people about necessarily, but nobody’s going to get that from looking at it because there’s an abstraction that kind of takes it away. But the energy that it transmits is still really powerful.

HEITZMAN: I tend to just put those things away and go on to something else. The one that you saw, it’s not that I like that one particular drawing and I didn’t like the other drawings. It’s just there’s something revealing, something when I see it that irritates me. It doesn’t make me go, “I want to show that to people.” There’s a lot of stuff in portfolios: it’s the evil portfolio.

BISKUP: Would you show me?

HEITZMAN: Maybe. I’ve shown very few people that just because it really is stuff I should get rid of. There’s also stuff that’s just not politically correct from a long time ago that I’m ashamed of. I’ve destroyed a lot of that. I don’t know why I haven’t destroyed the rest because it really needs to be.

BISKUP: It’s interesting because listening to that new Robert Crumb biography, he talks about flushing his work down the toilet for years. When he finally unleashed those things on the world, that’s when he really achieved fame and fortune.

HEITZMAN: I think that I’d be flogged. I think about that portfolio that I’m talking about, and the reason I haven’t thrown away some of that stuff is because I rendered it very well. It’s an evil thought, but I rendered it really well.

It’s funny because, especially when I had commercial artwork to do, the illustrated kind of design, I clenched a lot. I was really good at the beginning about starting with really loose drawings, but then when I had to formalize it I got really tight. I didn’t like where it went.

It affected my sleep. It affected a bunch of stuff about me. But people don’t know the difference. They say, “It looks great!” and you’re like, “God, it really kills me.” With commercial work, I felt it in my shoulders. My wife, she’s the most honest person. She’d just look over my shoulder and go, “Why did you tighten up?” She knows. After a little stretch, when I got out of [commercial work] and started doing animation, she’d say, “I’m so glad you don’t do that anymore because you don’t tighten up like you used to.” In animation, you don’t have time to tighten up. I was doing storyboards as fast as I could possibly draw them. I didn’t have time to think, This has got to be perfect.

BISKUP: I know some really good storyboard people who draw terribly, but their ideas are so good.

HEITZMAN: You know, I was freaking out when I first got into it. I never thought I was very good at it. When you turn it into a client for the very first time and you’re like, “Are they gonna understand this? Is this gonna make any sense?”

BISKUP: I talked to John Kricfalusi once about storyboarding. I was a background painter at the time. And you know what he said to me? He asked, “How old are you?” And I said, “I’m thirty.” He goes, “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be learning how to draw?”

HEITZMAN: [laughs] Wow. That’s supportive.

BISKUP: He loves to do that. He’s a challenger, man. Let me just say, I never did storyboards. That was me trying to get into storyboards, and that’s what he said. Thanks, John.

HEITZMAN: When I started doing storyboards, which was in Chicago, I realized fairly early on, you might be able to imagine the scenes, but you’re around a lot of people who can’t. In other words, they’re relying on you. 

Now, translating those drawings and being able to make it look like what they want it to look like? They don’t know what they want it to look like, but they know they don’t want it to look like R. Crumb or some funny animal comic. I had a really hard time drawing serious storyboards for serious things. They always looked rubbery. I couldn’t un-exaggerate. 

BISKUP: That is the inherent problem with animation: you’re working with people above you who are essentially going to tell you to make it less good.

HEITZMAN: You start out with a great idea, and you end up with one that’s just been cut to pieces. That’s the way most animation in America is. They say things like, “We have an artist-centric studio,” because they think that’s what they want to have. People love to rag on producers, and I can honestly say that there are producers to be ragged on, lots of ‘em. But I’ve also found producers who were really smart and who really believed in art and were just as good about managing people. But it’s few and far between. There are a lot of stupid people who ask you to do stupid things for stupid reasons.

It’s a hard business. But it’s mostly psychological. It’s not the art as much. It’s the psychology of trying to get all those people at the table to agree on something without too many opinions. Because they all want to have an opinion. 

HEITZMAN: Disney was the worst. I started out as a storyboard artist, and I worked myself all the way up to director. Then I was creative director, which is above the line. I didn’t know what that meant ‘til I was above the line. You’re just this über-head that looks over everything. “Oh, we can’t do it that way. This can’t be done that way.” If somebody’s really weak, you have to step in and say, “This person’s not doing their job.” I have to help them do whatever it is they’re doing or get rid of them.

BISKUP: How many years was that before you got there, above the line?

HEITZMAN: Oh that was a long time. That was way after Pee-wee. At least twenty years before I got to that. And I was just somebody that didn’t know that was a job.

In cartoons, it was not that developed. It was really small at Funny Garbage when I was doing cartoons for Cartoon Network. They wanted me to develop an entire division to make cartoons.

BISKUP: I was at Nickelodeon working at Oh Yeah! Cartoons at the same time. What a trip.

HEITZMAN: That was in ‘99.

BISKUP: I left the industry in 2001.

HEITZMAN: What forced me out of that industry was 9/11. Funny Garbage was very close to the Twin Towers. That was the Monday after I delivered the contract. I did twenty-five one-shot cartoons, three TV series, and a music video. I delivered that contract on Friday, so I was not in a hurry to get to work. I looked out the window of my building and the plane went right into the tower. It was the wildest thing to see. I knew something was wrong.

BISKUP: Whenever I think of leaving  animation, I always think of pulling back a bow string. Like my whole time working in animation was like tightening, tightening, and then all of a sudden I shot into a gallery. Is that what this feels like for you?

HEITZMAN: No, I went too long in that business. I burned myself completely out, and I couldn’t work for a while. I couldn’t really do anything. I took on too much. I couldn’t think funny.

Basically I couldn’t go anywhere unless I pitched something and it sold. I’d directed, I’d produced, I’d co-written things. People expected me to be delivering. Everybody said, “Okay, just bring us a product, and we’ll either do it or not.” I did that for a while, and I just got burned out.

BISKUP: How did you get back?

HEITZMAN: I taught for a while. I thought when I first started teaching that I would have a regular paycheck because I didn’t have one doing those jobs. They were always just up and down. I thought, This will give me some time to think out where I’m at. And it did. 

My whole trajectory with my work outside my art is that I’ll do as best I can until I get really tired of it, and then I’ll just walk away from it completely. This last walk away – which I hope is the last walk away, I hope to just be an artist the rest of my life, that’s what I want to do – I finally got to the point where I walked away from teaching. Even if I do it part-time, my head is going to be so distracted. I can’t make the art I want to make.

When I did that, I looked back and I was like, “God, I’ve had forty-five different careers where I’ve walked away from that career saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to do my art.’” You were smarter than me.

BISKUP: [laughs]

HEITZMAN: Right after Pee-wee, a lot of people that were close to me decided not to do this anymore. A lot of big artists I knew who were working partially in the industry like you were, they just decided to jettison the whole thing and be artists and make a go of it. I was a little insecure. I felt like I couldn’t.

I know you did what you did, and I have to say to this day, I really admire you for doing it. I admire all my friends who did it because I was insecure and I didn’t do it. And I feel like now I’m doing it.

BISKUP: When I did it, it was far more profitable than animation.

HEITZMAN: That’s the secret I didn’t know.

BISKUP: But only for about four years. And then there’s been fifteen years of barely making it. But having those four years in my head, I know I just gotta survive until there’s another wave. I’ve survived on that idea.

HEITZMAN: You’re good at looking ahead and strategizing. I’ve learned something from you in that world.

BISKUP: I think I really had to break away from the strategic part for a while. That’s what [storefront gallery space] Face Guts was about for me, just seeing how strategic I had been and that it was not working. I had reached a point where I was pushing so hard, and I think I was pretty annoying to most people. I realized that I had to get more loose and play around more and enjoy myself more. Being able to step away from strategy for a while made something energetic that I think was powerful and more true to who I am, so now I can be more strategic again.

HEITZMAN: You have the confidence because you know who you are. I’m a little behind you, but at the same time, I understand. I’m gaining on the confidence side.

BISKUP: I see this work and your last show as such a clear vision of who you are.

I haven’t asked you any of the questions I wrote down!

HEITZMAN: [laughs]

Crumb Hearts: Sonya Sombreuil in conversation with Dan Nadel

Sonya Sombrueil of Come Tees and writer Dan Nadel talk Robert Crumb, Eric Kroll, and watching the dirty old man go from artist to muse.

Image credit: Eric Kroll

text by Karly Quadros

For a certain kind of weirdo, R. Crumb is a god. The grandfather of underground comix, his work teems with a highly specific dirty-little-bugger-ness that hit just as 1960s San Francisco counterculture was getting into full swing. He defined a sickly funny visual language that inspired the likes of ‘90s alt comic anti-heroes like Daniel Clowes and Jamie Hewlett as well as painters like Louise Bonnet and Nicole Eisenman. In his cartoons, Crumb depicts himself as a combination of ornery, neurotic, and randy, chasing down (or fleeing in terror from) Catholic schoolgirls with chubby thighs and languorous hippie chicks with their asses hanging out of their bell bottoms. His fetishes are unmistakable; a Crumb girl exists in a category all her own. 

His other character creations share similar cult status. Mr. Natural, a guru with a Santa Claus beard and a priapic nose, was a great dispenser of ‘60s absurdist wisdom, while his relentlessly bootlegged Keep on Truckin’ cartoon fetches prices in the hundreds if you manage to find a vintage t-shirt carrying its image. Perhaps nothing captures Crumb’s signature cocktail of sleazy satire like his comic strip Fritz the Cat about an unrepentantly hedonistic hipster tabby cat. An X-rated film adaptation of the comic strip from cult animator Ralph Bakshi was released in 1972; Crumb was so worked up over creative differences with the filmmakers that he immediately killed off the beloved Fritz, dispatched by a scorned ex-girlfriend who stabbed him in the back of the head with an ice pick.

In recent years, the art world has grown to embrace Crumb’s work a little more. A 1994 documentary by Terry Zweigoff on Crumb brought his work to a larger audience, and he’s now represented by David Zwirner. Crumb’s notebooks, full of obscene jokes and intrusive thoughts, sell for around a million dollars each. On display is his adamant lack of self-censorship but also a technically dense, exuberantly gestural personal style.

Sonya Sombreuil, artist and founder of the LA streetwear brand Come Tees, has found a muse in R. Crumb, inspiring a limited collection of t-shirts, panties, and long sleeves emblazoned with Crumb’s artwork. The collection’s campaign is shot by legendary fetish photographer Eric Kroll who, in addition to his landmark “Sex Objects” series has also shot Robert Mapplethorpe, Grace Jones, Madonna, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. Sombreuil was joined by Dan Nadel whose biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, is out April 15. The two discussed Crumb, fetish, photography, and flesh.

KARLY QUADROS: When did you first encounter Robert Crumb’s work?

SONYA SOMBREUIL: My parents had a TV in their bedroom and underneath their TV there was a dubbed tape that just said CRUMB in big red block letters. As a little kid I was like, oh, that must be for kids. And my dad was like, “Nope, don’t watch that yet.” I grew up immersed in ‘60s, ‘70s counterculture ephemera. So I encountered it really early, and my dad would always get me Crumb for Christmas.

DAN NADEL:  I first found the work because I was at a comic book convention when I was like twelve or thirteen. The dealer asked what I was into and I said “Maus,” so he handed me American Splendor, which had this great Crumb cover and Crumb stories inside. Those were written by Harvey Pekar. They're these amazing tales of working class Cleveland and record collecting and just like quotidian life, and those drawings just totally knocked me out. A year later in a used bookstore, I found a copy of Head Comix. I was with my dad, and he bought it for me. I don't even think he looked inside. That rearranged my head.

It also felt completely normal for some reason. It was very familiar. I knew it was my own little world, but it was completely familiar to me.

SOMBREUIL: It’s funny that he has this corrupting influence.

NADEL: It’s educational, Sonya. How dare you? [laughs]

SOMBREUIL: For me it was! I guess I’m lucky.

NADEL: It’s true.  For a lot of us – I mean, for me – he was part of a gateway to all other art. A real inspiration in that way. It opens up a lot of other interesting doors.

SOMBREUIL: Before I got the subject matter, I knew it was for me.

NADEL: It’s weird when you find things there for you. I felt the same feeling when, like fifteen years later, I first ran across Christopher Forgues and Paper Rad and Fort Thunder. It was like, oh yeah, this was made just for me. It’s a curious thing.

QUADROS: There’s a recognition there. For me, Crumb is the ultimate avatar of the outsider, a helm that was then taken up by the likes of Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. In the 20th century, there was some edge to the people who embraced or satirized their neurotic preoccupations, but these days it seems like our whole world is ruled by repressed and intrusive thoughts run amok. Is there a danger in identifying too closely with being an outsider?

SOMBREUIL:  No. Crumb’s work, and why it's so important now, is the Charlie Brown phenomenon. Charlie Brown is the anomaly in his universe, but we're all Charlie Brown. And I feel the same way about Crumb's work. It's the recesses of your psyche. That was his content. He portrayed himself as this disgusting, irascible person, but he wasn't lauding those ideas. He was just revealing them. 

I think what's interesting about now is that there's a lot of people feeling offended. But actually, I think that the stigmas that are important to our society are ones that Crumb upheld in this work. And I think some of those stigmas have deteriorated in kind of a messed up way that I'm not sure we've seen the end of. People talk about the idea of decency or something – like obviously his work is indecent, but that's the point.

NADEL:  That's the point. It makes me think of Steve Albini, another avatar of edgelordiness. Before he died, he talked about how he regretted being so edgelordy, that he didn't quite realize that the stuff could be taken the wrong way. But at the same time, he remained this highly moral character with a really strong set of values. And what's so interesting about someone like Crumb is that, yeah, he gave vent to all this misogyny and racism. He also critiqued it, and it was also extremely clear where he stood.

It's still a blinking red warning sign at work. Even though it feels like it's too late for the warnings in some ways, his sense of awareness still feels very important even if we're completely swept up in it, like a tidal wave, swept up in the nastiness. But I think it's still really important. 

The thing about guys like Clowes and or someone like Julie Doucet or Robert, Aline [Kominsky-Crumb, Robert Crumb’s wife who is also a cartoonist], is that no matter where we are, that feeling of being outside is always accompanied by a really deep sense of self-reflection and, in many cases, deep self-loathing that is paired with a real meditative attempt to look inside and understand what it's all about. That, I think, is also a crucial difference between edgelord kinda work because they're really trying to understand. They're not just trying to fuck with you.

Image credit: Eric Kroll

SOMBREUIL: I’ve been talking about Crumb as a kind of wounded healer. He has these emotional and psychological wounds that he’s vociferous about, and in his own family, [you see] the effect that those wounds could have if they are accompanied by a different set of actions other than artmaking. But paradoxically, he’s healing the society that produces those kinds of wounds. When we shun that kind of work or say it’s a problem, you lose the potential impact of looking at yourself and looking at the world you live in.

NADEL: A s Robert would say, you have to deal with it. He always says “I’m both Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont.” He's the wise man and the fool. As he's gotten older, I think there is this instinct to heal. I think there always was this… wanting to understand and making work that would exercise these demons as much as show them. 

SOMBREUIL:  I heard this expression recently that someone said. They said this is a perverted attempt at healing. And a very literal attempt.

QUADROS: It makes me think a little bit about punk as a subculture. There’s this perverted sense of both reflecting and healing the ills of society. Crumb’s work especially was very integral to developing the aesthetics of punk and zine culture, underground comix.

NADEL: That was one of the fun things about writing this, realizing that influence didn't stop at hippiedom and it didn't stop in comics. One of the things that got me wanting to do it in the first place was knowing that the late Mike Kelley was a huge fan. Punk magazine was in part inspired by Crumb and then made fun of him, in this great judo move. Then people like Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw would take it up and put it through a conceptual blender. 

It just continues to have so many lives right up to the surprise that Sonya was so into it. The surprise that someone outside of my purview would be at all into it and so game was so much fun. It was such a great surprise because you never really know with him. I know that he's not forgotten because there's so much hubbub around the book, but you never know who's reading and who out there that's making art is into his work.

QUADROS: When you were making Come Tees, Sonya, were those some of the aesthetics you were drawing from when you were first beginning that label?

SOMBREUIL: Definitely. He is a looming figure in my personal cosmology.

I realize he’s that for a lot of artists. It’s like being into Jimi Hendrix when you’re into music. But it definitely feels very personal to me, like it’s possible to have a personal relationship with an icon. I tried being various forms of a Crumb girl for Halloween many years in a row. I tried putting cross hatching on my face. Come Tees, especially early Come Tees, had a lot of those qualities, cross hatched figures and speech bubbles, very conventional comic imagery.

NADEL: Did you ever make comics?

SOMBREUIL: I need an artist grant so that I can write my comic. Oh yeah, the least moneyed genre of all time.

NADEL: Maybe it would be worse if you were a poet, but otherwise… [laughs]

SOMBREUIL: In a way I’m a cultural dilettante. Compared to people who are into comic books, I don’t know almost anything. I know Art Spiegelman, the greats, but I’m into them profoundly. I really love the genre that is not fantasy. Did you say the word is prosaic?

NADEL: Nonfiction?

SOMBREUIL: Quotidian.

NADEL: You and me both.

QUADROS: Since you mentioned being a Crumb girl for Halloween, maybe you can talk a bit about the editorial and how you went about trying to capture the essence of the Crumb girl.

SOMBREUIL:  I have been obsessed with Eric Kroll for a few years. I had an amazing epiphany when I actually met him. I thought that I was obsessed with his archive that he posts all the time. But then I realized I was just obsessed with his constant posting, which is similar [to the editorial], totally mundane. No one in my generation could ever post like that. [laughs] It's amazing. He's so funny. I realized that I had misunderstood my interest in him. 

Many years ago, I reached out to him without knowing almost anything about him. I reached out to him to see if he would shoot for me, and he said, “I don't see how I fit into your world.” I was like, maybe we could meet up and talk about it. And he was like, meet me at this diner. But then I realized it was in Tucson. [laughs]

NADEL: Seriously? It was in Tucson?

SOMBREUIL: That’s where he lives! We all flew there.

NADEL: I always assumed he lived in LA.

SOMBREUIL: I did too. But no, he lives in Tucson.

NADEL: You flew there? Where?

SOMBREUIL: We stayed in a hotel. He offered to put us up, but there’s literally no standing room.  His house was incredible. I had no idea that he had shot the cover of the Zweigoff documentary. He was just like, “Oh yeah, they hated how much I charged them for my Crumb photo.” And I was like, “Oh what was your Crumb photo?” [laughs]

NADEL: That’s incredible.

SOMBREUIL: And then I just have intimate knowledge of what a Crumb girl is.

I had a couple friends who were down, who I knew were like in the archetype. It was an amazing thing because they're artists too. There was this really cool flip where Crumb and Kroll are actually our muses, these two artists who fetishize women.

Everyone knew what the assignment was. We all feel like we gained like a best friend. He just wanted to shoot things on his iPhone. He ended up making all these extravagant requests for different cameras, and I rounded up all of it and then he was like, “I hate these machines!” So he just shot everything with his phone.

NADEL: It’s such an interesting thing, that flip, because I showed Robert the Kroll photos. I explained because he’s still so… Crumb, that he couldn’t get his head around the idea that some young – meaning under the age of 50 – some young artists, particularly young female artists, would be even the slightest bit interested in him. Which, at a certain point, he should get over since young artists of all genders have been interested in him for about sixty years. But I showed him those pictures and he was like, “Oh my God, they really got it. They really understand what it is.”

And he’s self-aware enough to understand that what you got wasn’t just appealing to his kinks, but what you got was a particular way of thinking about the body and of embracing one’s body. I think he even used the term ‘body positivity.’ I was like, “Where did you learn that?” [laughs]

To make somebody like Kroll or Crumb your muses is such a great reversal because it flips the power. And it also lets them relax in a funny sort of way. It’s okay, now somebody else can make the art. There are other people in the game, and that’s good. It’s a good thing that it’s neither slavish imitation nor highfalutin, conceptual stuff. It’s just this other strain. For somebody like Crumb, who’s always been very generous about that, it’s refreshing and cool, especially in this mode, to see your treatment of the graphics. The things you picked were so left field and so interesting. 

It’s just great to have another set of eyes, another mind on this stuff that isn’t usually getting to play with it. Despite how much we love Kroll and Crumb, it’s remained within a fairly circumscribed set of people or a certain aesthetic for decades. It’s so cool to see it broken out of that mode. Nobody else would’ve chosen those images or nobody else would’ve designed things the way you designed them. They’re just completely making it fresh again.

SOMBREUIL:  I rewatched the documentary when you had first contacted me, and I was really moved by it because I felt first of all: the archetype of the outsider, that's still my inner monologue. I resonate with it so much. It's not an adolescent thing. It's eternal. And there's a lot of agony in that. 

It's funny, as a female viewer of his comics, because those comics had his idealized female form and it was like, “Hair? Unimportant. Face? Unimportant. Race? Unimportant. All that matters is they have big muscular thighs.” It felt like it gave me permission. Its soul breaks from the incredibly oppressive standards that are forced upon women. Both angles of it were healing for me. 

I thought a lot about the ways that Kroll and Crumb are the same and the way they're different. The women that they represent, the women in their worlds are almost always playing along on some level. When you think of Aline as a character, she's intelligent and she's bawdy and she is neurotic, and he portrays her so lovingly. It's an important feature in his work. 

NADEL:  I started on the journey of this book seven years ago. I was at an art opening actually. I was at a dinner and I was seated next to this woman named Sarah Lazin, and we got to talking. It turned out that she had moved to San Francisco in the late sixties and went to work for Rolling Stone magazine. She was part of this crew of female editorial workers who banded together in that time to to work together against these, you can imagine, ultimate macho rock assholes of the universe at that time. She's a badass. And she told me, “Crumb gave me permission to feel okay about my body.” And that kind of gave me a way in. Because I then interviewed a lot of women from that era, many of whom said the same thing, that his drawings were the first time that they felt okay about the way they looked.

There's a flip side to that, which can be a little bit like what my friend Naomi texted me the other day. She was joking, but it was partly real. She was like, “Did Crumb used to love bomb?’” There's a little bit of “I understand your body, no one else.”

But if you didn't know him, and you were Sarah, let's say, and it's the era of Twiggy and Peggy Lipton, I think that vision of women was really liberating. Obviously there was a lot about it that was also not so good. But nothing is. We all want things to be black or white, and it's all a big gray. 

SOMBREUIL: But I think the whole point is that women are treated sadistically, and that it’s sympathetic towards them. Like in the same comic I was walking about, he talks about the “sadistic women’s shoe industry.” And he says something like the tragic aspect is that these women have been the subject of ridicule their whole lives and have a negative self-image. It’s so compassionate.

And obviously there’s straight up obscenity, but that’s where humor is involved. Nothing is funny to everybody, and humor depends a little bit on taboos. There’s the funny, fucked up part of it, and then there’s the part of it that I think is incredibly sensitive.

NADEL: I agree. It’s interesting though because, of course, there’s another part of him. There’s a great interview from ‘68 or ‘69 where the interview goes, “You don’t really feel this way about women, do you?” It was about one of the Snatch comics. He says, “Sometimes I hate women.” There is that, that you have to contend with, but it’s part of the package. I guess what I’m saying is that some of it, you can’t even excuse. It’s just gnarly. But it’s part of the greater body of work.

Image credit: Eric Kroll

SOMBREUIL: You can’t defend it, and I don’t identify with all of it, but I think that the greater effect of it on a person, or at last on myself, was that it’s about objectification itself as a phenomenon. And a lot of it is about how women objectify men.

NADEL: It’s not something that has been written about much actually. It should be more. There’s much more nuance in all that work than he would lead you to believe. He’s often his own worst advocate in that sense.

SOMBREUIL: I think he has said that he doesn’t know where a lot of it comes from.

NADEL: That's right.

SOMBREUIL: It’s like this funny fairytale we have about drugs, that you take them once and you have ego death and then you’re just connected to the collective unconscious. That’s, to me, a funny way of talking about him, but it’s like he connected somewhere to something that’s very dark and twisted and resonant, and he has not taken full responsibility for it in a way that I relate to as an artist.

NADEL: That’s really interesting. There’s no explaining it. Bob Dylan said he didn’t know where the songs came from either. I think it’s the same with Robert. He connected into this larger consciousness, and he stayed with it for a very long time.

He’s still with it. He showed me a comic he’s working on. It’s all about paranoia, and it’s right on the money. It’s so specific to him, but he has this ability to be talking right at the reader, saying things that seem like they’re just the product of his own very particular imagination until you realize he’s talking about all of us, and that we all have this baseline paranoia, or a baseline set of visual cues or languages that we share. Somehow he both keyed into that and then iterated it so that it became his own. It’s highly unusual. You’re right, he doesn’t fully take responsibility for it, and maybe that’s good. Otherwise he’d be a whole other kind of artist. He can’t explain it. He refuses to.

SOMBREUIL: For someone who produced things that piss so many people off, for him to not accept full authorship of it is probably not the best PR.

NADEL: No. Terrible. [laughs]

SOMBREUIL:  But I think what he's saying is very truthful, which is that like he doesn't know where it comes from, and what he is responsible for is his technical ability to relay it. As corny as it is, it's like the artist as a mystic.

QUADROS: In some ways, it makes me think of the word ‘fetish’ and its origins as something religious or mystical, a ‘fetish object.’ It’s not just your kinks, but an object that gains higher meaning, a grander meaning than the sum of its parts. His obsession with it has imbued more inside of it. Not that he’s the first artist to make art about his fetishes, of course.

NADEL: But what he’s doing that’s different is that it’s in comics, so it’s not obscured. It’s so direct because it’s on paper and in a stack of things that you find in the basement or on a tape. The difference between it and, let’s say, Picasso or de Kooning or John Currin making art about their fetishes is that there’s no separation between you and the thing. You don’t have to go anywhere to experience it. The thing that you’re holding is the thing. It becomes a much more direct relationship.

SOMBREUIL: I never thought about that. Like the personability of privacy. It’s like a porno.

NADEL: Totally because you can lay in bed and read it. That was one of the great pleasures of comics in general growing up. It was my own thing. You watch a movie, somebody can walk in. You’re in an art museum or an art gallery, somebody’s going to be on their phone or whatever. But holding that thing… I think that’s one of the reasons why people feel that Crumb is theirs in a way that people don’t normally feel about other artists.

SOMBREUIL: His innovation is another flip, which is that the object of desire is often totally repugnant. You think about a John Currin, and it’s unrelenting. It’s quite sinister.

NADEL: I love those. Not all of them, but I love some of them a lot because they’re so thorough and twisted.

SOMBREUIL: Yeah, but to me the misogyny is much more evident there than in a Crumb comic where everything about it is obscene. Somehow that makes it a little bit easier to understand what he’s talking about. The nuance of it.

NADEL: Painting can be so nuanced, but it exists in a particular structure whereas comics have space to stretch out. And even though it’s maybe a more limited pictorial language with fewer tools – it’s just ink on paper – I think it does allow for a certain amount more nuance, especially in those areas.

[phone chimes]

SOMBREUIL: Would the ‘70s ever have happened if there was an iPhone? Definitely not.

NADEL: No, no. Too much technology in the way.

SOMBREUIL: Kroll was really engrossed in his phone. We were like, “Please use the camera, please.” And he was just like, “That’s not how this works.” But the more I look at the iPhone pics, the more I’m like, they’re incredible.

NADEL: What does he do all day? Does he have an archive?

SOMBREUIL:  He lives in the most incredible temple to erotica and photography in general. There's barely room to snake through all the different rooms. One room is just an island of files where you have to narrowly walk around. It's a relatively small house, but there's photos plastering the ceiling, the bathroom wall. Everything and anything you open up is just filled with photos. He OD'ed on beauty. He just loves photos and women. 

He loves women's clothes. I was thinking about him and Crumb because they both seem to really love dressing women. Crumb informed my personal style so much. I was like, “Yes, this is a flattering way for me to dress.”

When we were hanging out with Kroll, I was like, “Do you think you're just in women's clothes?” And he was like, “I've definitely thought about it.” He has like 10,000 bathing suits. We kept joking about it because he had only so much energy for shooting the photos – at a certain point he was like, “This is boring. I'm gonna take a nap,” – and then the next day he took us thrift shopping, and he had so much energy. He loved taking us shopping.

He’s incredible. Really good company and lovely and not a pervert. You feel comfortable around him. That’s part of his effect.  You feel like you could very easily take off your clothes, but it doesn't actually feel sexy at all. But I think immediately we were all really comfortable with him. But his house is incredible. It's a little bit of a tragedy because I'm not sure that it will ever be adequately archived. He’s a historian of erotica.

In the end, right before we left, he was like, “I have to show you some of the photos. This photographer's really important.” This guy would just go up to women in Washington Square Park and take photos of their hair. He had a hair fetish. I think it was like in the ‘60s. They're all black and white photos, just of someone's bun or someone’s hair as they’re moving by. I think people hated that and yelled at him. I don't think it was common to be photographed then. But they're important because they're anomalous. They're not in any other genre of erotica.

NADEL: I love the idea of those hair pictures. That’s so interesting.

SOMBREUIL: They’re really magical and really weird. They’re somehow about… shyness, like really profound inhibition. Because that’s as far as he could go: snapping a picture of a stranger’s hair.

NADEL: It makes me think of Christina Ramberg. She’s a Chicago painter in the ‘60s and ‘70s who specialized in refashioning women’s bodies but also really focused on hair. There’s also an Italian painter named Dominic Gnoli who did unbelievable paintings of hair. It’s a very particular thing to zoom in on, like with Crumb and shoes. If somebody’s deep into it enough, it’s a whole world basically. It opens up a whole universe of artmaking.

I was talking with Robert about a guy here in New York named J.B. Rund who we’ve all come in contact with in some way because he was an early champion of Eric Stanton. In the ‘70s, he was really responsible for bringing back a lot of the forgotten erotica before Taschen got involved.

It’s not as if there’s much writing about this stuff outside of these particularly obsessed people. And once they’re gone all the information in their heads is gone too. I think about that a lot. It’s not history that’s found its way even into cultural archives. It’s really sixty levels below the subculture. They’re gonna take the information about, like, what guy on 43rd Street sold what magazine to who. All that’s gonna go.

SOMBREUIL: I think there’s a laziness now about these kinds of histories because of the Internet.

Kroll is a national treasure. I think we all were wondering what we were in for, like this could be strange. He’s mercurial and cranky, but he’s also really lovely and sweet. He clearly really loves women.

There’s a lot of these kinds of histories that I wish were recorded. It was a really fun shoot because we got to go from taking photos to just sitting around for an hour while he’s going through boxes and boxes of photos, telling us the stories of everything. It’s interesting because being into erotica puts you super deeply in the margins. He showed us this book of his called the New York Years. It’s photos of Nam June Paik and all his artist friends. Like he wasn’t some obscure, random pornographer.

NADEL: He was around.

SOMBREUIL: I think it’s different now. I don’t think he would be sidelined as much. But that’s also what’s great about the whole precept of underground comics. It’s for the initiate. Even if it’s an enormous audience like with Crumb.

NADEL: It’s for the initiate, but it doesn’t take a password to get in. It’s accessible.

SOMBREUIL: I talk about this because my work is mostly on t-shirts, but you can’t get more democratic than a comic book.

NADEL: And a t-shirt.

SOMBREUIL: My t-shirts are not so democratic, unfortunately.

NADEL: You gotta make a living. That’s why you’re not making comics!