Googly movie true believers
The image of Saartje continues to haunt modern Western society whenever someone decides to sexualize a black woman’s physique.Īgain there is the counter-argument: Crumb only wanted to expose the banal racism of Society here! He didn’t actually think such gross stereotypes were funny! :ĭisplayed as a European freak show attraction in early 1800s, the Hottentot Venus, whose real name was Saartje Baartman, helped to feed the white fascination with black female bodies and now remains an everlasting symbol of the dehumanization of African features. In particular, Angelfood seems to embody the “Hottentot Venus” stereotype. She is depicted as a brainless woman-child without personal agency, gang-raped by space-aliens, made to clean out a toilet with her tongue because she is too stupid to know better, and basically only existing as a sexual outlet for men. If everyone else is being drawn “ordinary” in those scenes, why not Blacks as well? From “Zap Comix” #0 (1967) The cover to “Black and White Comics” (1973)Īnd then you have a character like Angelfood McSpade…who specifically embodies the myth of the “over-sexed” woman of color. But it’s the fact that he almost always uses this artistic “short-hand” to depict people of color–even in mundane crowd scenes in which the “exposing racism” context is completely absent. Now I’m familiar with the argument that Crumb used those caricatures to expose and mock the inherent racism in pop-culture. I really really really wanted him to be one of my comic book “heroes”…and certainly didn’t want to seem like one of the humorless bitches he has depicted shutting up by shoving a big thick veiny cock into their pie-hole.įer starters, nearly EVERY depiction of an African-American–or a theoretical African–in his comics from this period contains a “Sambo” look. Oh dear reader, I valiantly fought this creeping conclusion through issue after issue of Crumb’s work. Natural’s out in the desert): a lot of these comics were extremely racist and violently misogynist. “Prime Crumb,” if you will.Īnd so after recently reading over 500 pages of his comics, I suddenly had a “revelation” moment (possibly similar to Mr. Ha-ha! That humorless bitch rilly *asked for it!*įinally, after all these years, I decided to just sit down and read a massive chunk of Crumb’s work–specifically, from 1967 to 1979. Well, that and the fact that Fantagraphics Press–a publishing imprint I highly respected–seemed to make a cottage industry in reprinting and deifying the man. Dick in Weirdo, his appearances in Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, and the 1994 Terry Zwigoff documentary Crumb. Though I would say, it was largely as a “second-hand” fan, having been mostly familiar with him through his story on Philip K. I have always considered myself a fan of Crumb’s work. So I’m going to talk about the time ( yesterday, to be precise) I realized a good portion of “underground” cartoonist Robert Crumb’s classic comix were **horrible**.