To the Editor:
With a chill, I read how University of Michigan students attempted to punish Phoebe Gloeckner for assigning R. Crumb, a canonical artist in American counterculture, in her course on comics (“My Cartoonish Cancellation,” The Chronicle Review, November 10). First time tragedy, second time farce. Half a century ago, the editors of the underground magazine Oz were jailed, forcibly shorn of their hair, and subjected to the longest obscenity trial in England’s history for appropriating and publishing a strip by the same artist. Raids followed throughout London, with Scotland Yard’s Department of Obscene Publications impounding, as the Times reported in one instance, “several hundred copies of a 20p book called Nasty Tales” containing “the work of R. C. Crum [sic] of the Los Angeles Free Press.”
The new political charge against Crumb (“racism,” “misogyny”) resembles the old ethical one from 1971 (“corrupting the morals of children and young persons”). Both complaints miss Crumb’s fairly obvious satire on the white male ego. And both, by wishing to delete Crumb from the history of graphic cultural critique, suggest that artists must interrogate abhorrent human imp
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