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Your Vigor for Life Appalls Me: Robert Crumb Letters, 1958-1977. Ilse Thompson, ed. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1998.
Although Robert Crumb is arguably the most important American comic book artist, there is not a single article on his work in an academic journal. While the academy, traditionally hesitant to study comic books, has shown increasing interest in the genre throughout the last decade, scholars of popular culture still face a number of challenges in giving the form and its artists sustained critical attention. Aspects of the object itself and its reception seem to inhibit scholarly commentary: it is most often an inexpensively printed, troublesome to preserve book whose fetishizing by collectors makes a sizable library holding difficult and expensive to assemble. Equally a barrier is that for comic book artists there exists very little of the apparatus which both signals and helps to create canonicity; for important authors we generally have a set of complete works, biographies, and collected letters. Robert Crumb, however, is the one of the few comic book artists for whom most of this material exists. Fantagraphics Books is in the midst of issuing Crumb's complete works, and thirteen volumes...