Robert Crumb and Dan Nadel with Naomi Fry — Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life

Over the course of 70 years, Robert Crumb almost single-handedly transformed comics from a pulp children’s pastime into high art for adults. Now with the help of Crumb himself — and his never-before-seen letters and archives — award-winning comics scholar and biographer Dan Nadel is ready to tell his story.

Subversive, literary, and profoundly inventive, Robert Crumb’s comics created a new American vernacular — capturing the 1960s counterculture, the shattering of our social and sexual taboos and the dissolution of the hippie dream, the history of popular music, and even the Book of Genesis in an utterly distinctive visual style. Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel, and countless other comics artists are indebted to his pathbreaking work. In a new biography written with Crumb’s cooperation, Dan Nadel tells his story — sharing how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame, struggles with mental illness, and came out on the other side.

In an unforgettable conversation moderated by New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry, hear Crumb and Nadel on the making of Crumb’s iconic oeuvre — including Zap Comix, Fritz the Cat, Weirdo, his final book-length comic of The Book of Genesis, and more. Find out how Crumb transformed the pressures of 1950s suburban America and his own dysfunctional family into a distinctive style that captures the essence of Crumb’s life, his unruly imagination, and the radical transformations of 20th century culture.