Well, our movie on this episode is the much-acclaimed 1994 documentary Crum, directed by Terry Zweigoff.

It's subject is the legendary American underground cartoonist Robert Crum, who signs his work simply R. Crum.

And a little context for those who don't know him, as Crum notes early in this film, he's probably best

known to the layman for three things. Creating the character of Fritz the Cat, who was adapted into

a notorious film, coining the phrase keep on truckin and its associated imagery, as well as for

designing the iconic album cover of Janice Joplin's

cheap thrills. And because of these things, he's commonly associated with the 60s and its

counterculture, but that's not exactly representative of his work. In fact, in his interviews in

this film, he seems quite down on a lot of the culture surrounding the counterculture.

He's a big fan of like Dixieland Jazz and Old Blues, for instance, not very into the rock scene.

Much of his work is crude and provocative and sometimes downright pornographic.

A lot of it is confessional and autobiographical. He often lays his sexual fantasies on a slab for the

world to see, no matter how ugly they may be. And a lot of his work could also be described as being

social satire of a truly fearless kind. Going to some of the ugliest spots in the collective American unconscious.

He's not hard up for defenders. The art critic Robert Hughes is in this documentary,

and he calls Crum the broigle of the second half of the 20th century, while also noting that there

was no broigle of the first half of the 20th century.

He also compares him to Goya.

But Crum has also, of course, been subject of controversy for the 50 years, 60 years now, probably

that he's been active from people who regard his work as racist, sexist, self-indulgent, and merely pornographic. This documentary positions Krum as someone

for whom art was a form of therapy. He came from a seemingly ordinary on the outside post-war

family in New Jersey that was nevertheless deeply dysfunctional. Crum and his siblings were

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