Bread For Crumb

Yonks ago, I posted a round of correspondence between Woody Gelman and Robert Crumb just after the debut of Zap Comix in late 1967 or early 1968.  Woody, in fact, received 25 copies of the first printing of this infamous and influential underground comic. To put this in perspective, a near mint copy of this comic is worth about twenty grand today. But I digress.

Crumb and Gelman look like they had a fairly close relationship, no doubt as a result of Crumb's employment by Topps in 1965. I have no idea how long they corresponded and in fact, I think a good deal of Crumb's early letters post 1964 have been lost or are unavailable to the masses. His existing letters from 1958-1977, which are very light post-1964, have been collected in book form in case you are interested.

Well, I stumbled across the letter Crumb sent back to Woody after receiving his check for the 25 issues of Zap (plus a bit extra as a gift upon the birth of Crumb's son, Jesse). The letter was even accompanied by an "almost" illustrated envelope, which is still a doozy:

 That's the address of Card Collectors Company. Woody actually lived one town over, in Malverne.

The letter has some tasty content:

 

Let's navigate this sucker, which I found over at www.icollector.com.

Woody filed these, hence the circled "Crumb" in his distinctive red crayon.  Len Brown, Bob (actually Bhob I think) Stewart, Art Spiegelman and Woody all got to see it circulated at the Topps offices in Brooklyn from the looks of things.

Crumb has misspelled Victor Mocsoso's last name, even though he was a Zap contributor. Moscoso is one of the most famous psychedelic artists in the world.

The crazy guy from Kansas has to be S. Clay Wilson, who was about to move from Lawrence to San Francisco to be with the Zap team.

I'm not sure the "Stoned" newspaper ever took off, although it may have semi-manifested in some later collaborations, most prolifically "Weirdo!", which was considered an artistic bust when it debuted in 1981 and which Crumb abandoned after a year or so, although it soldiered on for a while.

Mike McInerney was someone in New York Woody put Crumb on to in the hope of assisting with distribution on the East Coast; Crumb had inquired in his first letter to Woody regarding assistance in this area and McInerney, who was also vital in 1960's Science Fiction fandom, ended up moving to San Francisco in 1969. It seems Woody started that wheel turning!

Don Donahue's Apex Novelties was the underground publishing concern that printed Zap. It is legendary in a number of ways.

"Click" commenced publishing in 1938 and was "The National Picture Monthly". This link will lead you to a reprint but with some detail of the contents of a typical issue.

The Viking Book was R. Crumb's Head Comix.

Jesse Crumb died in a car accident at the age of 49 unfortunately.

Lil was Woody's wife.

Crumb divorced his wife Dana in 1978, the same year Woody would pass away.

I've said it before and I'll say it again-Woody was the man!

Love, Woody

A pretty neat bit of correspondence was auctioned off a couple of years ago by Nate D. Sanders Auctions to which I was alerted by BFF o'the Archive Jeff Shepherd.  It's a two-parter, with Robert Crumb, a former Topps artist (in 1965) writing to his former boss, Woody Gelman, in the spring of 1968.  Check out the content of this letter:

Crumb is discussing, of course, the quite infamous first issue of Zap Comics! Woody, being Woody, was likely ordering 25 copies of one of the most famous underground comix ever published to distribute to his friends and colleagues. Currently that's something on the order of a half million dollars worth of pulp that Woody got for a mere $3.75!  There is some good information in this letter concerning the first issue's first run, which would be in excess of 3,500 copies a figure toward the upper end of estimates for this historical artifact. It would appear 4,000 to 5,000 first edition copies would have been run I think. It also appears Woody had received copies previously.

You also get wind of Crumb's firstborn, Jesse; the search for a New York distributor; and a query as to whether Bhob Stewart (the longtime reviewer at Publishers Weekly and generally a comics historian) had seen the first issue.

The fact that Woody's response is also extant is quite remarkable, although I suspect it was a carbon. Woody also had a file going on Crumb in his archives:

I love the Nostalgia Press letterhead! I also get the distinct impression Crumb and his (first) wife had visited Woody recently at his home in Malverne, Long Island, NY. Woody's handwriting is atrocious, worse than mine even, and I can't make everything out (there is some sort of "familiar" abbreviation to boot ) but Woody definitely showed Zap #1 to a very young Art Spiegelman, which is kind of mind blowing! Let's not overlook that $20 gift to young Jesse Crumb either-these guys were clearly friends.

Woody was a prime mover in subversive comic art and the extent of his involvement and appreciation in the movement seems to grow every time another bit of information is uncovered. And this all needs to be put into historical perspective as Woody was writing back to Crumb two weeks after Martin Luther King was murdered. It was a chaotic time in America.

Crumb-bling

It has been an auction season of mixed success for your intrepid webmaster. I've won some nice, old Topps companion pieces, made some purchases (some of which will be featured here in future posts) and lost out on some really killer items.  My most recent whiff concerns some Robert Crumb sales material produced for Topps in 1965, during his first foray to New York where Woody Gelman reeled him in for a short time after a hoped for job at Harvey Kurtzman's Help! magazine fell through.

During his nine months in New York City Crumb produced Monster Greeting Cards for Topps and did a couple of other projects.  One of these was an 18 page sales brochure designed for Topps jobbers and their retailers, a piece I did not manage to snag.  The brochure is rare (possibly his rarest extant publication) and also chased after by Crumb collectors, who are legion:

Much like his work on Monster Greeting Cards, Crumb's style was not fully developed in 1965. According to the man himself, he didn't start drawing in the style for which he is known now until after he started experimenting with LSD in late 1965 into mid 1966. I am curious if his LSD adventures were shared with anyone at Topps!

Two pages of interior artwork have been auctioned by Heritage fairly recently.  Here is page 5:

Page 13 is a doozy:

I love the old pasteups; everything was done manually back then.

I'm of the opinion that original Crumb artwork is moving into that magical realm of high end art collectors, if it's not there already.  He's going to be looked back upon as one of the 20th Century's major illustrators and artists.

Pretty Crumby

It's not necessarily unknown in the hobby but the fact that Robert Crumb did some artwork for Topps in the mid 1960's is certainly a something a little more well kept than you would think.  Crumb did the majority of the artwork for the 1965 Monster Greeting Cards set, a series of fifty standard sized cards as Woody Gelman started hiring artists, some presumably starving, that were a bit offbeat.  Crumb had not yet started his underground comix work when he moved to New York City in 1965 to work at Help! magazine, a humorous and groundbreaking rag founded by Harvey Kurtzman.

Long story short the magazine folded and issued its last gasp in September of 1965. Whether or not Crumb did his Topps artwork before or after Help! went under is not something I have put too much time into figuring out but he clearly needed the extra income either way.  Crumb illustrated the majority of the cards but some featured photography so not all of the possible 100 sides are his. In the recently concluded Fall 2013 REA auction two original Crumb artworks were auctioned.

While there are two separate artworks, somewhere along the way they ended up attached to each other but no matter:

The art is on boards and is, unfortunately, not signed.  Various notes and markings also are present but make no mistake, this is pretty amazing stuff.  Here's an actual, albeit well-loved card I snagged a scan of off eBay that matches the art on the left:

The back is somewhat in the vein of material appearing in Help!, so that is interesting as well. 

Crumb also self-produced at least two sets of music related trading cards, Heroes of the Blues and Early Jazz Greats.  Here's some artwork from the former, on a serigraph:

There are 36 cards in the set and they are a little larger and squarer than standard cards are. There are some other Crumb sets out there like this but I think only the blues and jazz sets are still in print. They have both been available for over 30 years and can be purchased to this day off the R. Crumb website.

Woody Gelman was hip to the jive as Jay Lynch once said; he was certainly hip to up-and-coming artistic talent!