![sophie crumb sophie crumb](https://art.famsf.org/sites/default/files/styles/artwork_view/public/artwork/crumb/0605200215470109.jpg)
Even though in his later work Crumb did revisit some of his experiences, and even published two affectionate full-page portraits of Jesse and his first wife Dana in The Sweeter Side of R. In the tangled threads of Crumb’s autobiographical narratives, Jesse also makes a brief appearance in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film Crumb ( 1994), where we see him drawing with his father and helping him pack before his move to France. He also appears even more briefly as a baby in the first installment of Crumb’s short story “My Troubles with Women,” where we only see him in one panel, as his mother is breastfeeding him and watching her husband leaving home “for a few weeks,” the father’s guilt materialized in the shape of a knife that protrudes from his chest, but still powerless to stop him from abandoning his wife and child in order to “pursue every opportunity to meet girls”. Jesse first appears in one of the earliest comics co-created by Crumb and Kominsky, from their first issue of Dirty Laundry Comics, titled “Aline’n’Bob’s Funtime Funnies,” where he is not a developed character as such, but merely functions as a narrative prop, possibly with the intention of creating a humorous effect: he walks in on Aline and Bob as they are having sex, and his main contribution to the plot is providing a cascade of angry expletives and unreasonable wishes before disappearing quite suddenly and never being mentioned again. In this chapter, I only focus on the Sophie comics because Jesse, Crumb’s son from his first marriage, only makes brief appearances in his work, and his father does not seem to have played as significant a role in his education as in Sophie’s.
![sophie crumb sophie crumb](http://fanpagepress.net/m/S/Sophie-Crumb-where-who-6.jpg)
In this chapter, I examine the way fatherhood tests Crumb’s portrayal of a specific type of masculinity (constructed partly as a reaction to second-wave feminism) and the extent to which his new vulnerability as “a doting fool” revises his understanding of gender roles. While in previous comics he had portrayed himself as a sexually frustrated man with violent fantasies, preying on women’s vulnerabilities and their susceptibility to fame, in his Sophie stories Crumb is a gentle, loving, and bumbling father, unprepared for the unexpected toll fatherhood is taking on his body, and pleased that his daughter’s willfulness indicates that she will not be dominated by any man. Crumb has an autobiographical persona that appears to be significantly transformed by fatherhood.
![sophie crumb sophie crumb](http://www.artloversnewyork.com/zine/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Sophie-Crumb-Sept-2014-NY.jpg)
Illuminating and intimate, this book is a dramatic yet subtle statement on the evolution of personality as seen through art.The towering figure of the underground comics movement, often criticized for some of his sexist and racist cartoons where he claimed he was attempting to reveal “the id of America,” R.
![sophie crumb sophie crumb](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/09/19/arts/19CRUMB1-GALLERIES/19CRUMB1-GALLERIES-jumbo-v2.jpg)
Revealing how an original artistic sensibility is both innate and nurtured, the book features six separate developmental stages, including Sophie's earliest drawings, the elaborate fantasy world of her childhood, her late adolescent rebellion, and her coming of age in the milieu of the Paris circus world and New York's "seventh circle of hell." The drawings from her early twenties-of tattoo artists, dangerous men-reflect a personal anguish that finally ends with her becoming a mother and creating a family of her own. Sifting through dozens of their daughter's remarkable sketchbooks, our generation's most celebrated graphic artists have, with their only child, Sophie, now selected more than three hundred paintings and drawings that depict her artistic and psychological maturation. Sophie Crumb's startlingly expressive drawings track her development as an artist from age two to twenty-eight.