Students at the University of Richmond are mad as hell about Robert Crumb’s comics, and they’re not going to take it any more. Student Timothy Patterson is horrified:

“[The] book features a number of appalling depictions, such as the raping of a little girl, forced oral sex with a woman chained to a desk, and a picture of Crumb sitting on top of a pile of drugged, raped women dressed as a king,” Patterson said.

This year, Bertram Ashe, an associate professor of English and American studies, assigned “My Troubles with Women” and a documentary on Crumb titled “Crumb” to his American Misfit: Geek Literature and Culture class.

Patterson’s response questioned Ashe’s academic freedom to assign this material to his class.

Ashe responds cleverly:

“I’m offended by a middle-aged man having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from putting Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ on my syllabus,” he said.

Which is a good point. If Crumb were a prose stylist, would any of this be happening? The funny thing is that Patterson’s whining is sure to only help the sales of Crumb’s splendid new adaptation of the Book of Genesis; any publicity is good publicity. Reading other letters to the editor about U of R’s Crumb exhibit and lecture highlight how conservative some college students are, and I find all this talk about “the bounds of freedom” to be alarming.

19 replies on “Newsflash: Robert Crumb Is Controversial”

  1. You think that’s bad, apparently the Windows 7 marketing team didn’t realize that Family Guy was controversial.

    Probably because they forgot to include a device driver for that.

  4. People who are easily offended probably shouldn’t go to college and should avoid college campuses in general (except for BYU and similar ultra-lame schools).

  6. It’s probably some College Republican douchebags writing the letters. It’s like their full time job, before they graduate to become the future Tim Eymans or Sarah Palins of the world.

  7. I have that book “My Troubles With Women” (it’s a great collection BTW, consider it as a stocking stuffer for the misanthrope in your life), and there is NO “raping of a little girl” in that book. That’s either a blatant misrepresentation or just a flat out lie.

  8. The professors response was brilliant. I think this was a healthy exchange of ideas, after all, you don’t want those who are advocating censorship to do so from the sidelines until it’s too late to stop them.

  10. Can’t wait for Timothy to express his horror and outrage when he has to read Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” for his English Lit. class. Why, Swift proposes eating children! SHOCK! HORROR! OUTRAGE! OFFENSE!

    Crumb is amazing: he’s a stupendous draftsmen and has no fear when it comes to using his art to expose those perverse demons everyone has but prefer to suppress. Expose? Shit, he revels in them.

  11. “Certainly Crumb’s work has played an influential role in world of comics, but being historic doesn’t make it honorable…”

    Who said anything about honor? I wouldn’t consider the massacre of an entire continent’s inhabitants noble, but it is without a doubt historically significant in any high school U.S. History class.

    And clearly this guy’s view of comic books stops at the front door of DC and Marvel, since Watchmen was anything but “a medium through which society is elevated and the good of the human spirit is proclaimed”. You know they made a movie about this one, right? Go watch it.

  13. Nabokov didn’t rape a 13 year old.
    Polanski didn’t write Lolita.

    Ashe’s response is only clever to a credulous PC hack.

  14. @13: Hey Boyo, tain’t “PC” to defend Crumb. It’s the so called PC crowd, right wing and left wing, that are up in arms over this. But I agree, Ashe’s response was weak, but, hey, he’s a college prof so his head is up his ass anyway.

  16. @13: Nabokov’s protagonist DOES have sex with a 13yr old girl. You kinda missed the point and made yourself look like an idiot.

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