Robert Crumb, the American master cartoonist, has been successfully
exhibited in Britain, where some critics have compared his work
to that of Cruickshank or Hogarth. Certainly there is a Rabelaisian
impact to the cartoons. Crumb now lives mainly in France, a refugee
from an American culture which he believes is gradually disintegrating.
In The R. Crumb Handbook (MQ Publications, March 2005), his new
book prepared with Peter Poplaski, Crumb produces a landscape vignette
where the pure green land is gradually destroyed by the remorseless
process of development. Overhead wires and lines spring up, tramlines
and throughways sprout and after 12 episodes, a simple homespun
vernacular building finally disappears, together with any remaining
greenery. It could be said that this sequence is equally to be found
now in southern England.