Robert Crumb grew up in an unhappy family (famously chronicled in the Terry Zwigoff documentary Crumb), surrounded by artistic brothers and sisters. His older brother, Charles Crumb, was an avid comic book fan, and pushed Robert to draw endless comic books from childhood into their teenage years. Together they created a comic called FOO; they attempted to sell it at their school and even door to door in their neighborhood, although Robert Crumb has said that they had little success. Eventually Charles gave up drawing, but Robert kept at it.

In the early 1960's Crumb moved to Cleveland, Ohio to live with a writer friend, Marty Pahls. There he designed greeting cards for the American Greetings corporation (some of them are still in circulation today) and met a group of young bohemians including Buzzy Linhart, Liz Johnston and others. Liz introduced him to his first wife, Dana Morgan Crumb. Crumb became a friend and protege of his idol, Mad Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman, contributing early Fritz the Cat strips and other work to Kurtzman's short-lived magazine Help! (the latter alongside other budding talents including Terry Gilliam and Gloria Steinem). Encouraged by the reaction to some drawings he had published in underground newspapers, including Philadelphia's Yarrowstalks, Crumb moved in 1967 to San Francisco, California, the center of the counterculture movement. Crumb published the first issue of his Zap Comix in early 1968. It would become an amazing success, establishing Crumb as the best-known artist of the underground comix movement.



Crumb employed detailed early 20th century cartoon styles in satirical stories that were sexually and politically outrageous, particularly in the context of comic books, which, thanks to the enforcement of the Comics Code, were generally wholesome children's fare. He soon attracted a number of other artists who were excited by the possibilities of publishing countercultural comic books. Crumb shared the pages of later issues of Zap with such artists as Spain Rodriguez, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Robert Williams, Harvey Kurtzman and Gilbert Shelton.

In the pages of Zap, the East Village Other, ''OZ'', Gothic Blimp Works, Motor City, Yellow Dog, and scores of other comix and counterculture publications, Crumb created characters that became counterculture icons; the best-known are "Mr. Natural" and "Fritz the Cat". Crumb's work was suddenly in great demand, and Crumb himself became an anti-establishment icon, a figure who genuinely resisted "selling out". His friend Janis Joplin hired him to draw the artwork for the cover of her band's album Cheap Thrills, but Crumb rejected an offer to illustrate an album cover for the Rolling Stones because he hated the band's music. Animation director Ralph Bakshi made a feature-length animated film of Fritz the Cat (the first animated film to garner an "X" rating), and the film was a box-office hit. Crumb was highly ambivalent during the film's pre-production and has claimed that his wife signed the rights to Fritz over to Bakshi when Crumb was away. Crumb disliked the finished film so much that he killed the fictional cat in his comics (an ostrich-woman stabbed the pompous movie-star Fritz in the head with an ice pick), and has since refused other lucrative offers to base films on his work, although at one point he and Zwigoff collaborated on a script based on Crumb's story Whiteman Meets Bigfoot, although it was never filmed.

The '70s were a difficult decade for Crumb, as he lost the legal rights to his ubiquitous Keep on Truckin cartoon and endured protracted legal battles with the Internal Revenue Service. His work became more bitter and satirical, and was outright misanthropic by the time he began Weirdo, the influential comics anthology that ran through the '80s. Crumb was the first editor, but even after he stepped down from that position he had a story in every issue and usually contributed the covers. The Crumb documentary became a surprise hit in 1994, introducing Crumb to a whole new generation. Since then he has become a somewhat regular contributor to The New Yorker and in recent years has also dabbled in fine art paintings and sculpture, creating a lifesize statue of one of his "Vulture Demoness" characters and another of his character Devil Girl in a contorted, sexualized, anatomically dubious pose that has her sitting on her own head.