Back in the ’60s, underground comix were very cool, and the coolest were done by R. Crumb. Remember Mr. Natural? Zap comix, violating taboos whenever possible? Wild stuff for wild times, representing the exuberance of counterculture youth rejecting the constraints of the Silent Majority’s rules through nasty, ugly, cutting satire. Remember?
If one was to teach a college level course about comics, wouldn’t R. Crumb be a big part of it? So thought University of Michigan prof Phoebe Gloeckner, who had used Crumb’s comix teaching the course for years. This time was different.
But in 2020, we were all “sheltering in place” because of the pandemic, and I was teaching on Zoom. The students Googled Robert Crumb before I could say much to contextualize his work. They immediately raised their voices in protest. Quoting from what they read, they insisted that Crumb was a “racist” and a “misogynist.” One student cried out that he had been accused of rape. Several insisted that showing any of his work was “hurtful.” They said I was “harming” the class.
I was taken aback. Comics are fundamentally a provocative medium, and Crumb is a provocative artist, but I didn’t think I had shown an especially offensive image. Crumb and his work have been the target of both high praise and bitter criticism for years, but before that moment, most of the students knew nothing about him — and seemed unwilling to question what they had read about him on the internet. Moreover, Crumb is a central figure in the history of comics. He can’t be written out of the books.
Crumb’s images and humor was “grotesque,” to be polite, and were meant to be, as that was the mechanism by which he ridicules social norms. But the message was completely lost on these students, who saw only that Crumb violated the rules brow-beaten into them about what could be permissibly expressed.
Not only did these students take it out on Crumb, whose work they couldn’t view without collapsing in paroxysms of trauma, but on Gloeckner for being the obvious racist and misogynist who forced their tender eyes and brains to view such horror.
After that class, the students began a private group chat called the R. Crumb Hate Corner, with a customized banner featuring Crumb’s face with “Punk bitch” written across it in red letters.
A couple of students who had access to the Hate Corner let Gloeckner know what was happening.
One of these students sent me screenshots from the Hate Corner throughout the semester. It soon became clear that the chat was not about Robert Crumb. It was about me. The “haters” were watching me carefully, waiting for me to slip up so they could add ammo to a document they were preparing, “Complaints Against Phoebe.” One day after class, two of my confidential informants shared their screen over Zoom and scrolled through the document, which described a plan to report me to the art-school administration. There was one statement that stood out to me, which I paraphrase here because I don’t have the document, something along the lines of: Let’s get this one right. We failed with the other professor — let’s do this one by the book. I inferred that they had attempted to bring charges against another teacher, without the desired outcome. Now they would try to get me, and make it stick.
And so the cabal worked to gather evidence of their professor’s harm to them to rid themselves and the University of this dangerous threat to their ideological orthodoxy. When Crumb learned about what her students were doing to Gloeckner, he expressed dismay.
Crumb, who read me emails from Gloeckner, was clearly bothered by what happened, not because the students didn’t like his work — lots of people don’t, and he himself has dismissed his art as “only lines on paper” — but because he felt they had failed to engage with it: Trauma and discomfort were the whole point. The rot of our society is undeniable, he says, so, rather than repress the horror, he wants to make it impossible to avoid.
Crumb’s not for everybody, as he well knows, but or college students to try to ruin a comics prof for teaching Crumb isn’t about fragility or trauma, but the inquisitors need to impose their social justice orthodoxy or else.
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