The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book

Kitchen Sink/Little, Brown, 250 p., $40

Crumb is starting to get that same “venerable elder wacko” treatment that Zappa got in the year before he died. Could this mean the end is near for dear old R.? After all, look how it went for the last celebrity who went to France to escape the paparazzi. I don’t mean to be morbid, but unless Crumb is cooking something else up over there at the moment (and he may be), the Coffee Table Art Book might be our last best hope for an autobio from the guy.

Sure, all of his stuff is autobiographical, but now it’s here in order, from an immature 8-year-old comics collector to an immature 50-year-old cartoonist. And it’s amplified by many unpublished sketchbook pages, samples from the greeting-card days, many single-panel self-portraits, such as “The Little Guy Who Lives Inside My Brain,” and the best of the long-form rambling cartoonsthe ones where he tries to figure out whether it’s him or the universe that’s more fucked up. In addition, Crumb has handwritten a chapter-by-chapter memoir of his life and times, not exhaustive, of course, but enough for him to wrest the control of his story away from filmmaker Terry Zwigoff. As Crumb retells the story of hightailing it to California and dropping acid for the first time, you can see the effect of the drug page by page in his style from 1965 to 1967. As for his obsession for women with huge legs, well, that pretty much runs from one end to the other. Along with cubist oil paintings and beautiful landscapes are a couple of Crumb’s most notoriously offensive cartoons, 1968’s “Nigger Hearts” and 1992’s “A Bitchin’ Bod,” as if he wanted to be sure nobody got away with a toned-down abridgment of his twisted oeuvre. Okay, we got it, Bob, you’re twisted, you’re pathetic, you’re a self-indulgent pervert who did too much acid way back when and still doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.

So when does the next issue come out?

–Vance Lehmkuhl