The Book of Weirdo

The Book of Weirdo: A Retrospective of R. Crumb's Legendary Humor Comics Anthology by Jon B Cooke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The book is light on art, heavy on “my interactions with Crumb.”

There are good reasons for both. Crumb, who prior to this magazine had never edited anything more commercial than his brothers’ homemade comic books, put himself at the helm of Weirdo and declared that all contributing artists would retain complete and exclusive rights to their work. FWIW I am fully on board with this element of the Weirdo credo. Unfortunately, that means the book I would love to read — an anthology of Weirdo anthologies — would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, this lovely bound book of high-stock glossy paper offers us little more than (heh!) crumbs of what made Weirdo weird.

We get photos of the various contributors, some samples of the work, more than a few brand-spanking-new artistic tributes to the magazine and the people who made it. And lots and lots of stories about what it was like to work for and with Robert Crumb.

Crumb’s a legitimate draw — larger-than-life and twice as charming/galling. But anyone who has followed his grotesquely confessional work or watched Terry Zwigoff’s documentary is already intimately familiar with the direction these accounts take.

In the best of all possible worlds the magazine rack would be regularly larded with anthologies of Weirdo, the way MAD re-packaged and saturated the market with content from the 60s to the early 90s. In this world, Gaines was the savvier publisher, who paid his artists top-market value — and not a penny more. We make do with this, because we have to.

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