![]() The power elite has learned just to ignore such demonstrations, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of people show up for them. ![]() It doesn’t seem that mass protests and demonstrations have much effect anymore. With someone like Trump, what’s the challenge, compared to the fifties and the sixties, when people were more conformist and there were not as many liberties as now? What will happen now, with Trump as president? I don’t have the answer for that. I didn’t want to go directly to that subject but what I want to know from you has to do with cartooning. People around the world were wondering if it was going to be a similar situation as Donald Trump in the United States. France could still end up with Le Pen or somebody like her. That could still change by the next election if “business as usual” means a continuing decline in the well–being of the working classes, and an increasing trend toward the U.S.A. But the people voted in Macron ‘cause most of them still don’t want Marine Le Pen in charge. My favorite candidate was Mélenchon, the Communist candidate. Who knows? But he’s certainly better than Marine Le Pen who would push a basically racist, anti-Muslim agenda if she got elected. He’ll probably pretty much do the bidding of big business and the banks. They called him the Hillary Clinton of France. It’s hard to know exactly what Macron stands for - probably business as usual. I’m relieved that Macron won over Marine Le Pen. That’s how this interview begins, where Crumb, from his unorthodox point of view addresses the political stage, including the Mexican one, counterculture, music, and, of course, comics. ![]() Our talk begins, inevitably, with that subject, since the Crumbs -Robert and his wife, the also cartoonist Aline Kominsky–Crumb- have lived there since the beginning of the 90’s in a small French villa -“Crumbland”, as Aline calls it- where they both practice meditation and continue drawing. The election result gave the Western world a chance to breathe. It’s been only four days since France voted Emmanuel Macron when I pick up the phone receiver in order to call Crumb. Living in France since 1992, he agreed to an exclusive interview, the first he concedes to a Mexican journalist, in which he discusses France’s and the United States’ political panorama, and his work as godfather of underground comics. His clashing, obsessive line has documented the drug–ridden trip of the hippie era, the beauty of women and the tales from the Book of Genesis, without forgetting the heroes of blues, jazz, and ragtime, to whom he has profusely portrayed. With an obscene, misogynistic, and sexist fame that precedes him, as well as a praising of him as a modern–day Hieronymus Bosch, he undoubtedly is one of the greatest American graphic artists of the 20 th Century. Born in 1943, Robert Crumb is the creator of Zap!, the archetypical magazine of American underground comics -aka “comix”- from the 60’s.
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