
But they were enough to inspire an article in The Michigan Daily demonizing her: There were a few-but not serious ones nor ones that stemmed from racism or transphobia. Crumb Hate Corner”, which was really a Gloeckner hate corner, and then observed her daily and carefully, looking for further missteps.
#R crumb comics movie#
Gloeckner apologized, and her attempt to make amends by telling the students to watch the movie “Crumb” ( 95% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes), “failed miserably”. But I suspect the students didn’t know abut the Cultural Revolution, much less the red book the woman’s holding. Yes, if you’re determined to be offended, you can see this satire as racist (after all, there are Chinese people there), and “sexualizing Asian women” (no, it satirized Chinese culture during the Cultural Revolution). When the Young Lust cover came into view, one student raised the alarm: “Why are you showing us even more racist images?” The cover, the student said, “sexualized Asian women.” Kinney satirizes the representations of cheering Mao supporters omnipresent in Cultural Revolution propaganda. The story, dedicated to Zhou Yang, an early supporter of Mao’s who was later imprisoned, is a humorous critique of the Communist government’s oppressive methods of controlling behavior. This particular cover is a teaser for Jay Kinney’s Red Guard Romance, a love story set in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. The Young Lust series satirized romance comics of the 1940s-60s. One of them was the cover of Young Lust #5 (1977), featuring a Red Guard couple in a suggestive embrace. The students watched as multiple images flashed by, images I planned to share later in the semester. Natural, clearly a satire on the “enlightenment” that we all were seeking in the Sixties:īelow is another cover that got Glockener in trouble when she showed it:Īs I searched for particular comics covers, I forgot that I was sharing my screen. But don’t forget his greatest creation, the faux-guru Mr. That’s for sure! And if you’ve read Crumb (I have a collection of his comics) or seen the highly acclaimed movie about him and his dysfunctional family (“ Crumb“, 1985, described by Gene Siskel as “the best movie of the year”), you’ll know that a lot of Crumb’s art involved working out his own psychological hangups, which happened to be a lot of readers’ psychological hangups, too. Moreover, Crumb is a central figure in the history of comics.

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. Comics are fundamentally a provocative medium, and Crumb is a provocative artist, but I didn’t think I had shown an especially offensive image. Several insisted that showing any of his work was “hurtful.” They said I was “harming” the class. 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. They immediately raised their voices in protest. The students Googled Robert Crumb before I could say much to contextualize his work. Her comments are indented:īut in 2020, we were all “sheltering in place” because of the pandemic, and I was teaching on Zoom. The article is long, and I won’t describe it in detail, but I’ll show a few images that incited student protest and got Glockner in trouble. An art exhibit she was invited to give at a local institute was canceled because of this controversy, as was a TEDx talk she was invited to give.

Nevertheless, Glockener was repeatedly criticized by students, who complained to the administration, and was investigated by two offices involve with diversity and equity. And of course his work didn’t result in a whole generation of hippies that hated women.

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Crumb, who, yes, sexualized women and dealt with fraught topics, was nevertheless wildly popular, especially because he was heterodox. There’s nothing, it seems, that you can teach about such “alternative” comics/graphic art that isn’t offensive, particularly when you remember this stuff began in the Sixties as a reaction to anodyne comics. Crumb) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. I usually think of the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) as a “woke-ish” site, but there’s nothing pro-woke about artist Phoebe Goeckner’s description of how horribly she was treated when teaching “graphic art novels” and alternative comic-book art (e.g., R.
