R. Crumb: A Backward Glance

Installation view, R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, October 10–December 20, 2025. Photo by Angel Xotlanihua, Courtesy David Zwirner

By JOSH NILAND November 14, 2025

This fall at David Zwirner’s West Coast stronghold, a rather well-timed and reflexive exhibition, "R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia," has put the fruits of the cartoonist’s late-career resurgence on display to coincide with the publication of his first full-length comic effort in 25 years.

Equal parts “memoir, essay, polemic, neurosis, and conspiracy,” this new feat reveals an aging Crumb at his most vulnerable. What follows is a visceral narrative chronicling a slow disintegration brought about by a pandemic and the rapid advance of many other forces that have remade society so perniciously since its end. As the gallery says, the selection of more than 40 pieces “incisively mirror a broader culture of mistrust of authority.” Collectively, they come steeped in an astonished tone and acquired disposition, offering notes on the finer points of an unmistakable nervous breakdown: Thoughts are becoming harder to tame and irascible, everything once considered innocuous in life is sprouting into a disdainfully furtive form of self-analysis (his friends included), interpersonal communications have degraded, and now he’s coming apart at the seams.

Installation view, R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, October 10–December 20, 2025. Photo by Angel Xotlanihua, Courtesy David Zwirner

The return of the 82-year-old counterculture icon finds Los Angeles itself a city in the midst of a manic phase, lamenting rising authoritarianism and the decline of its creative economy after realizing the same ecological nightmares predicted by Mike Davis’s prescient crystalline text. Fear is its new public religion: the population anxious, unraveling, and afraid. 

Crumb celebrates the first local debut of such an epoch since the premiere of his remarkable Book of Genesis at The Hammer Museum sixteen years ago, examples of what the gallery says is a creative boon that followed his wife Aline’s death (so don’t expect a steamy love story—though elsewhere the publisher promises the finale of their raunchy Dirty Laundry collaboration). The bulk of them seem to relate his experience with a spiraling global stasis, the renovation of ‘Truth’, coronavirus, and growing digital divide. Here he is again as the anti-hero, couched in a post-collapse pretense; its gaunt, aberrant witness, The Crank Stripped Bare of His Humor, Even. Still caustic, but beholden to disturbing new social trends as the ink casts a spotlight on their wild imbroglio. It feels at home amidst a strain of increasingly dark-minded and malevolent contemporary media.

Page from R. Crumb, What is Paranoia?, 2025 © Robert Crumb, 2025. Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner

Like Sophocles gleaning clarity in old age sans the burden of a sex drive, Crumb, too, seems to reap artistic benefits from the loss of ribald, his own savage master. No more masturbation, the sins of rape and incest, the arch pervert proselytizing all our private sexual self-doubts, guilt, and shame. Gone too is a characteristic appeal to life’s demimondes, replaced instead by a series of deeply studied hot takes mixed with moments of pure flashback and elucidation. There’s a scroll on the ulterior functions of labeling “conspiracy theories” that unspools into a defense of a prominent Joe Rogan guest and repeats his support for others of the belief that Covid was an elaborate hoax. At this point, friendly assumptions about the author’s sanity begin to wane. Another page sees him admit to questioning it himself in a few unbridled moments, and the saga ends with our beloved protagonist putting his pen down, before launching into a diatribe against the amoral tendencies of “opportunistic” careerists inclined to unhealthy occupations.

This, of course, is to be read not only as a timely commentary on the artist's bottomed out deterioration but also that of the people and the culture which surrounds him. The confrontation with the annals of power, its theme, would garner easier sympathies if not for his aping claims made by RFK Jr. and the real fears he and other far-right enablers are embedding in them at the moment. 

R. Crumb, God Help Me, 2025 © Robert Crumb, 2025. Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner

That trepidation comes to bear in confessionals like God Help Me! (2025) and is made apparent by the rancor in his cynical Deep State Woman (2024). One wonders if he might be better served pointing to the flanges of acrid alt-right online culture or disillusioning some of its members from the belief systems of their high finance fasteners than prattling about vaccine mandates and social media. Nonetheless the same quality is still there, a few die-hards told me, if not in the comic panels then in the more personal work like his posthumous Aline drawings, a self-portrait drawn at gunpoint, Losin’ It, Every Moment Is Significant, and I Can’t Take Another Minute, all made this year.

Looking back this time, an episode that stands out, against all the haze and consternation, is his apparently consequential 1966 drug experiment one night in Cleveland, Ohio. Long since a foundational myth to true believers, The Very Worst LSD Trip I Ever Had (2023) now has added meaning as a parable for his lack of trust in people. (He recounted the fateful dose in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary, saying it revealed the “seedy side of America’s subconscious.") Half a century later, and it’s nice to see certain things unchanged, though the  blinders may be altered. Crumb is still at his best lamenting the mainstream in this contrapuntal low art format. It’s one of many qualities being retained through his breakdown. Despite a dramatic turn inward, the same hallucinatory insight still leaps from the page. 

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia continues at David Zwirner until January 10th.