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INTERVIEWER
So how did you finally find publication?
CRUMB
Well, the hippie revolution happened. In 1964 I first got laid, I met my first wife, Dana, and all these protohippies in Cleveland. A lot of them were Jews from Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights. They started taking LSD and urged me to try it, so Dana got some LSD from a psychiatrist, it was still legal in ’65. We took it and that was totally a road-to-Damascus experience. It knocked you off your horse, taking LSD. I remember going to work that Monday, after taking LSD on Saturday, and it just seemed like a cardboard reality. It didn’t seem real to me anymore. Seemed completely fake, only a paper-moon kind of world. My coworkers, they were like, Crumb, what’s the matter with you, what happened to you? Because I was just staring at everything like I had never seen it before. And then it changed the whole direction of my artwork. Other people who had taken LSD understood right away what was going on, but the people who hadn’t, my coworkers, they didn’t get it.
INTERVIEWER
How did it change your artwork?
CRUMB
I had been working along in this modern adult cartoon trend, very influenced by the modern, expressionistic, arty quality of work by Jules Feiffer, Ronald Searle, Ralph Steadman. Then, on LSD, I got flung back into this cruder forties style, that suddenly became very powerful to me. It was a kind of grotesque interpretation of this forties thing, Popeye kind of stuff. I started drawing like that again. It was bizarre to people who had known my work before. Even Kurtzman said, What the hell are you doing? You’re regressing!
INTERVIEWER
How did you get to know Kurtzman?
CRUMB
I had gone to work for Help! magazine in the summer of 1964. I had sent him some cartoons. They had a section where they’d print cartoons by amateurs. Kurtzman liked my cartoons so much that he wrote back to me. I still have the letter he wrote to me in 1964 saying, Send us more of this stuff. I did.
INTERVIEWER
Were those drawings with text?
CRUMB
They were actually pantomimes, Fritz the Cat pantomime cartoons. Terry Gilliam was working there as Kurtzman’s assistant. He invited me to come to New York and help Gilliam out, so I spent a couple months in the summer of 1964, working with Terry Gilliam. Then I got married in September and went to Europe. When I got back to Cleveland in the spring of 1965 Terry Gilliam was leaving and Kurtzman invited me to come to New York and take his place as the assistant editor and I jumped at that. I admired Kurtzman so much, he was my hero, in his presence I was like a lovesick kid.
I arrived in New York in the summer of 1965, all set to go to work at Help! Dana and I had rented an apartment, and I reported to the office Monday morning. Kurtzman was standing in the hallway looking all shot down, and guys are taking the desks out of the office, I said, What’s going on? He said, The publisher decided to fold the magazine, it’s over. Then he said, Don’t worry, I’ll find you work. He felt guilty, because he had invited me and here I am, in New York. So he introduced me to this guy at Topps Bubble Gum Company in Brooklyn. I ended up working for them doing cards and promotions. A lot of good artists worked for Topps over the years. Art Spiegelman worked for them for a long time—he invented Garbage Pail Kids for Topps. They made a fortune off him.
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