ABSURD COMICS ONE-SHOT

Absurd Comics by Robert Crumb ( Cornélius Publishing )

Softcover
32 pages printed in black 
17 x 23.5 cm  
Assembled for the first time in an anthology, the stories in this 6th issue of the Kim collection all have nonsense and absurdity in common. Partly mute - if we exclude gimmicks, onomatopoeia and invented languages - the short stories in this book give Crumb the pleasure of playing with the dynamism of his drawing. Characters leap in all directions, bodies distort endlessly, driven by a delirious permanent motion, or evolve in a completely surrealist setting. Like the famous "Keep on truckin'", you have to keep going, whatever the cost, even when you know you don't know where you're going. Produced between 1966 and 1981, the stories in Absurd comics illustrate a particular vein of Robert Crumb's work. Dictated by drugs or the sheer desire to draw, these stories are intended to have no narrative, no logic and no compulsion to tell anything. Here, the author engages in an exercise in automatic writing, just as Moebius did shortly after him - the latter summing up the experience as follows: "You could very well imagine a story in the shape of an elephant, a field of wheat, or a sulphurous match f lamme." By freeing himself from narrative and leaving the power to the unconscious, Crumb found a new freedom that inspired some of the most graphically fabulous and unseemly pages he drew in his career.