I dare say the lasting influence of Robert Crumb’s irreplaceable status as America’s ultimate outsider artist is that his own sense of self and place in society predates our social media obsessed and dependent world. He wrote about himself and his wife, displaying an almost stream of consciousness and compulsive need to share his life. And through the comic medium, you got the sense that each thought was pouring out of him, whether salacious or political, controversial or mundane: Crumb was able to make fun of himself while simultaneously questioning every single person or movement around him.
The joy and sadness of R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia, Crumb’s first show in LA since 2009 and created in the wake of the 2022 passing of his wife, Aline, is that through his own neurosis between conspiracy theories, politics, COVID and a recalling of his first LSD trip in 1966, you find yourself seeing perhaps the most vulnerable of Crumb's personality, the most human. As Kramers Ergot’s Sammy Harkham noted at the show’s press preview, Crumb seems, now in his 80s, to be aware of his own paranoias and, for lack of a better phrasing, his own meandering into “losing his mind.”
What I found most simply compelling about Tales of Paranoia, on view at David Zwirner through December 20, 2025, is the technical brilliance of the work, the penmanship, the art itself. Comic books are in themselves, art and narrative colliding, and through Crumb, there is always the existential self-exploration of life, love, religion and death in each frame. In an era where paranoia and our insatiable need to explain each of our worries and fears to an audience of glass screens, Crumb remains both ahead of his time and worried about where time is taking him. —Evan Pricco
R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia is on view at David Zwirner Los Angeles, 616 Western Avenue. Crumb's forthcoming publication, Tales of Paranoia, his new and first comic book in twenty-three years—will be published in November of 2025 by Fantagraphics.
