I first encountered Robert Crumb at my local Blockbuster, in the mid-Nineties, when Crumb became available for rental. I wasn’t more than ten at the time, so I didn’t understand that the movie was a documentary and Crumb a real person. I knew only that he was terrifically unpopular. Despite the fact that Crumb’s VHS slipcase proclaimed it one of the most amazing films ever, it was always in ample supply at Blockbuster. About a dozen copies of the cassette sat next to one another—a dozen Crumbs. Hunched and mustached, his hands clasped, his gaze magnified by his glasses, he grinned in a way that was lascivious but abashed. Opposite him, in the background, a woman lifted her skirt to expose a pair of sturdy thighs. But Crumb wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at me, a child, looking at her. The man was clearly a pervert.

As Dan Nadel’s new biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life (Scribner, $35), makes clear, I’m hardly the first person to reach this conclusion. Cops, judges, Christians, critics, feminists, and fans have all labeled Crumb a pervert, and Crumb has shruggingly conceded that they’re right. In his self-portraiture, lust afflicts him like a flu, leaving him sweaty and enervated. He depicts himself as a proto-incel who became an unlikely Chad, his tastes—parabolic calves, hip adductors with the constrictive strength of Burmese pythons—prefiguring the age of the Brazilian butt lift. Crumb likes his buxom, braless “big girls,” but he especially likes them wantonly abused, sometimes decapitated. As a child, he had an erotic fascination with Bugs Bunny; as an adolescent, he had no dates; as a man, he liked to jump on women’s backs. (“You don’t cop a feel. You cop a ride!” said one victim.) He once enlisted a wood-carver to make a sculpture of Devil Girl—one of his more lurid creations, with fangs—solid enough to bear his weight. Crumb’s friend Dian Hanson, herself a proud pornographer, has said that his preferred body type “accurately reproduces the point of view from childhood, looking up from the floor to Mommy.” Surely this is all proof of something. Genius? Satyriasis? Having learned more about the suffering and mental illness endemic to his family, I can only conclude that his persistence—his ability to live in the world at all—is the most perverted thing about him.

Sketchbook drawing, 1986 © Robert Crumb. Courtesy the artist

One of five kids, Crumb was born in 1943 to Chuck, an enlisted Marine, and Bea, a diner waitress. In the span of a few years, Chuck’s posts took the family from Pennsylvania to Iowa to California, with each new place less stimulating than the last. When the children acted out, Chuck spared not the rod. (He was also suspected of being closeted: in the early Sixties, a family friend claimed to have seen him cruising in a public restroom.) For her part, Bea had already had a baby with her stepbrother when she was fifteen; her parents covered it up by claiming the child as their own. She had a weakness for amphetamines, often chain-smoked in front of the television, and was twice committed to mental hospitals. Robert once found a suicide note she’d left in the family car. His older brother Charles went further than that; he tried to kill himself by guzzling furniture polish when he was in his late twenties. Charles got beat up a lot in high school and liked to smash bottles and slash tires; he never moved away from home and spent his last decades heavily medicated, before taking his own life in 1992. Sandra, one of two sisters, married a close friend of Robert’s named Marty; when she became pregnant, she supposedly told Marty, in Nadel’s words, that “she’d fucked everyone, including the pizza delivery boy, and wanted a divorce.” (Robert experienced his first orgasm while wrestling Sandra when they were teenagers.) Carol, the other sister, seems to have led a comparatively quiet life and keeps to herself. Finally there’s Maxon, the youngest brother, an epileptic who refused to treat his seizures. When he wasn’t assaulting women, he embraced asceticism. “Every six weeks since the late 1970s,” Nadel writes, “he has passed a twenty-nine-foot strip of cotton through his gastrointestinal system, in the mouth and out the anus, a cleansing that takes about a week to complete.”

As a boy, Robert watched airplanes get hauled to the scrapyard, fascinated, Nadel notes, by “the idea of surplus American mass production bound for oblivion.” But he found his main refuge in comic books, especially those with a jaundiced view of postwar life: Pogo, Little Lulu, even Donald Duck, whom Carl Barks imbued with an unmistakable cynicism. World-weariness was easy to come by in the comics of the late Forties, when, Nadel observes, “the medium became a place to cram all the PTSD, atomic anxiety, and existential fear that could fit between two covers.” The Crumb boys mainlined that PTSD while they could, but comics changed after the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham instigated a moral panic with his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent (it could be the title of a Crumb comic).

Wertham was a complex figure. In 1946, he was a founder of the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem, which brought Freud and psychoanalysis to the community, and studied the effects of poverty and racism on the mind—a radical connection to make at the time. He knew that kids’ problems had far deeper roots than drawings of men in capes, but he blamed the capes anyway. Seduction of the Innocent, though larded with shoddy evidence, cemented the spurious connection between children’s media consumption and juvenile delinquency, and resulted in publishers’ adopting a code that precluded “lust, sadism, masochism . . . lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations . . . [and] profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity”: all the stuff that Crumb put back in.

Yes: Crumb’s work is egotistical, misogynist, racist—or, more generously, a feculent parody. He stews in mass culture and retreats into the haunted sound of old 78s, “a lost world of smokestack factories,” he once wrote, and “clanging trolley cars.” But his comix are best understood as a bottom-up effort to return a neutered art form—one that afforded him untrammeled fantasy as a kid—to a place of illegitimacy and anarchy, shame and desire, surplus and oblivion. “Filling the newsstand in his mind,” Nadel writes, with “rubbery grotesques” and carnivalesque freaks committing sins of the flesh, he regurgitated the styles of contemporary advertising, schlocky superhero stories, and hot-under-the-collar squares like his dad. Nostalgia for prewar America met the nostalgie de la boue of one who touches himself before the Venus of Willendorf. Nadel’s book floats Crumb on the rapids of his times: the Human Be-In, Tipper Gore sniffing around for satanists, COVID-vaccine paranoia. (“Why are they so trusting?” he asks about “the intelligentsia” in a comic about the vaccine. “I don’t get it!”) Crumb gives us the reprobate who drew “Life Among the Constipated” and “The Family That Lays Together Stays Together,” as well as the domestic who enjoyed a long, fulfilling marriage to Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his wife and frequent collaborator, who died in 2022.

The biography ends with Crumb alone, grieving Aline, recalling a vision of hell that he once had on LSD and trying to draw it. What would Wertham make of that? In a letter that ran in Playboy in 1970, he said of underground comics that “their very crudity and utter vulgarity will by themselves prove self-defeating in the long run.” Wrong. You may want to dismiss Crumb as a morsel of some strange loaf, fallen to the ground to be swept away. But today he is shown by David Zwirner, among the bluest of the blue-chip galleries, and his pieces command six figures. The perverts won.

The moral panic over comic books casts its shadow in Hannah Zeavin’s Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, $34.95), which examines the heavy hand that social scientists have taken in the nursery. (She includes a photo of Wertham—his Coke-bottle glasses reminiscent of Crumb’s—reading a magazine called Shock Illustrated with a look of stern disapproval.) Zeavin is well aware that the expert class, whomever it comprises, has consistently found comics, movies, and TV to be “sites of contamination” that corrupt the youth. But the medium most often blamed, she writes, is the mother herself.

Beam Me Up, by Madeline Donahue. Courtesy the artist and Nina Johnson, Miami

Over the past century, the “psy-ences,” as Zeavin dubs them, have promulgated a theory of the mother as “the substance through which children acquired their health, morals, affects, ideologies, and psychological well-being,” likening her to an atmosphere, a climate, an envelope. The mother was pure (she alone could be trusted with the solemn duty of childcare), but she was also fallible, the porous place where the badness seeped in, exposing her children to both her own deficiencies and those of the culture at large. If children were impressionable, then mothers did all the impressing. “Psychologists thus had to negotiate this cognitive dissonance,” Zeavin writes, “by making a whole new set of diagnoses of both mother and child that recorded the distance between an ideal of American mothering and its actualities.” D. W. Winnicott, the psychoanalyst who bound mothers and babies into an inextricable “mother-baby” dyad, remains widely admired for his concept of the “good enough mother,” which, per Zeavin, “seems to lower the bar from perfection and is thus often misread as proto-feminist.” But even Winnicott placed impossible burdens on mothering, believing, as Zeavin puts it, that “mothers must be deeply attuned, cannot be trained or taught to be so, and cannot merely go through the gestures of care (he cautions against boredom during diaper changes).”

If the mother relied on devices, media, or a nanny to provide care, her children were widely believed to be in danger of sliding into degeneracy. But mothers can’t always be around. As nannies and nurses became more expensive, and the sacredness of the nuclear family more enshrined, American families turned to the Zenith Radio Nurse and the TV Eye, early baby monitors. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in 1932 had made people suspicious of hired help—an extension, Zeavin argues, of long-standing fears that children could be corrupted by drinking the breast milk of enslaved wet nurses. Bring on the machines: the Sears “Wee-Alert” bed-wetting alarm (ca. 1950), the Nanny Cam (1992). In 1944, B. F. Skinner, the behaviorist of Skinner box fame, invented the Air Crib—another box, this one a climate-controlled, sterile, all-in-one crib–playpen–“baby tender.” It looked like an aquarium, promised to reduce childcare labor to one and a half hours a day (beyond that, your baby could simply live in the box), and was variously “received as either miracle or abomination,” Zeavin writes, because “it marked parenting as labor, rather than as unmediated love.”

Along with Skinner, we hear from Dr. Spock, telling mothers to trust their instincts; from Dr. Leo Kanner, shunning “refrigerator mothers,” whose chilly affectlessness, he believed, caused autism in their children; and from “celebrity pediatrician” Dr. Harvey Karp, who, with his wife, Nina Montée Karp, invented the SNOO, a $1,700 “smart” bassinet that helps infants sleep through the night. Karp is an emblem of what Zeavin refers to as “neo-scientific parenting,” with its apps, logs, and “micro-markers of development.” I share her tacit suspicion of these, and of the SNOO’s gasp-inducing retail price—but in its marketing, she identifies an insidious push to get working moms “rested enough toproduce, reproduce, and produce again.” (Maybe. Or maybe exhausted parents crave rest for its own sake.)

Theories of “hot and cool mothering,” Zeavin notes, rhyme with Marshall McLuhan’s concept of hot and cool media. Looking at parenting counsel as a kind of media theory offers her a way to understand the nuclear family’s place in society, how it becomes a laboratory for combining technology and care. Zeavin’s is a scholarly book, and it reads like one: a phrase like “natal alienation is the subtending compact of American life” could issue only from the academy. This wouldn’t bother me were it not for the fact that many parents who have no patience for “subtending compacts” would benefit enormously from the history in Mother Media, which could have been made more approachable without being watered down. What Zeavin has traced is the set of unspoken assumptions behind “every concerned glance, chiding ‘tsk,’ or sigh directed at a mother shushing her child while handing over an iPad.”

Vauhini Vara would never have chided anyone for using an iPad, or an iPhone, or AirPods, AirTags, MacBooks. She adopted these products eagerly and, as a tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal, helped bring their infantilizing proprietary names into common parlance. The essays in Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, $30) track the tech industry’s saturation of her life from the Nineties to the present, and her complicity in making that saturation appear desirable, or at least not undesirable. Searches includes artifacts from her Google history (“What percentage of parents give death instructions”; “How to become a charlie chaplin style clown”), her Amazon reviews (Fruit of the Loom cushioned crew socks “seem solid”), and her interests as determined by Twitter’s algorithm (journalists, juice). The passage of time is measured in devices and debuts: “the summer the iPhone went on sale”; “the month I started using Twitter.”

“Have Another Look,” by David Avazzadeh. Courtesy the artist

This would be annoying were it not set against the storm of an actual life: it’s alarming and somehow moving to recall scandals like Cambridge Analytica’s electioneering and the Foxconn suicides as they percolate through Vara’s grieving her sister’s death, her finding love, and her prosaic workdays in her “beloved beige cubicle.” Her efforts to decouple from technocapitalism are largely failures, of course—most of her Amazon reviews include phrases like “I try not to buy from Amazon.” The trying is the thing; she tried as we all used to try, and now the trying seems quaint. The tech incursions we hoped to avoid fifteen years ago were more trivial, less dystopic than the ones we want to stave off now. These days, the venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, on a quest to vanquish death, regularly posts “nighttime erection data”—his own and his teenage son’s. By contrast, Searches is about living in the moment when the moment is 8:15 pm on Thanksgiving 2007, and Facebook is telling you that Mark Zuckerberg just bought a ticket to American Gangster on Fandango.com.

At the heart of the book is “Ghosts,” an essay about the death of Vara’s sister, co-written with GPT-3, a precursor to ChatGPT. When it was published a few years ago in The Believer, the essay prompted much hand-wringing about AI and creativity, separating the collaborationists from the resistance. In the essay, the AI fabricates a memory in which Vara’s sister takes her hand, “the hand I write with, the hand I am writing this with.” Vara believed that the machine generated a scene more alive to her grief than she was—the disembodied GPT-3 offered “as nuanced and profound a reference to embodiment as I’d ever read.” She feeds the manuscript of Searches to ChatGPT, and it offers the expected feedback: chipper, literal-minded, repetitive praise (“a powerful statement of empowerment”). Compared with the more sensitive GPT-3, it talks like an anxious waiter, saying stuff like “Certainly!” and “Feel free to . . . ” At one point, a friend of Vara’s seeks AI-generated images of women for a business school presentation. They’re all flawed: “I’ll ask for a CEO giving a board presentation,” the friend says, “and she looks like she’s a stripper.” Maybe the ghost in the machine was trained on R. Crumb.