Certain great artists are synonymous with their kinks. Egon Schiele had his thing for gaunt girls and their undergarments. Robert Mapplethorpe was partial to bulging muscles wrapped in leather. And then there is the legendary cartoonist R. Crumb'lover of solid legs, worshipper of meaty thighs, champion of the ample backside. To truly know his art is to know what turns him on. For the man who effectively invented underground comics in the 1960s, rubbing his readers' faces in his sexual proclivities was always the point. If Crumb, now 81, was helpless against his own desires'and there he was on the page, quivering and sweating behind his thick glasses as he beheld one of his zaftig goddesses'he suspected that, somehow, everyone else was also helpless against theirs. His comix, as he renamed them, epitomized the hippie turn of the decade because he dove to the depths not just of his own subconscious, but of something collectively screwy, bringing up all the American muck. He was the...
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