Robert Crumb's first iconic character -- and still possibly his most -- was Fritz the Cat: the horny, high, hipster feline whose wild adventures and sexual escapades captivated countercultural audiences from the mid-'60s until 1972, when Ralph Bakshi turned the strips into an X-rated animated film that Crumb hated so much, he famously killed off the character and never returned to him.
The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat contains all the Fritz stories from the earliest sketchbook-drawn tales ("Hey, Ol' Cat!" and "Fritz Comes On Strong") to the wild adventure stories ("Special Agent for the C.I.A.") to the classic "peak" Fritz stories ("Fritz the No-Good") all the way to the despairing "Fritz the Cat, Superstar" with its infamous icepick ending. Plus an introduction by Crumb, sketchbook pages, and more in a new paperback edition.
Über den Autor R. Crumb
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Born in Philadelphia, Robert Crumb is one of America's most celebrated artists. Thrust reluctantly into fame as a defining voice of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture with comic strips like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, and Keep on Truckin', then again in the 1990s with the acclaimed documentary Crumb and more recently the 2025 biography Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life, he continues to push himself and his chosen medium from his home in the south of France.In addition to being one of the seven, original Zap Comix contributors, Robert Williams's influence on alternative art is immeasurable. From his endeavors to broaden the possibilities for young artists to gain exposure sprang the well-known art chronicle, Juxtapoz magazine. He is the subject of a recent documentary, Mr. Bitchin'. He lives in Chatsworth, CA with his wife Suzanne.Gilbert Shelton (b. 1940, Dallas, Texas), a founding father of the underground comix movement, is the creator of the iconic comix characters The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart-Hog. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2012. He has been known to sing and play piano for the Blum Brothers, a Paris-based rhythm and blues group. He lives in Paris, France, with his wife and an ever-changing number of cats.Paul Mavrides (b. 1952), an enigmatic cartoonist, painter, and graphic artist, began collaborating with Gilbert Shelton on The Freak Brothers in 1978. He is a founding member of the Church of the SubGenius. In 1997, after a six-year legal battle, he won a landmark decision for artists' rights in California that established a legal equivalency between written-word authors and cartoonists.Manuel Rodriguez (1940-2012), better known as Spain, was one of the great American underground and socially conscious cartoonists.Victor Moscoso is one of the defining stylists of the psychedelic culture of the 1960s, and one of the original Zap Comix artists (with R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson and Rick Griffin). He lives with his wife Gail in San Francisco, California.Richard Alden Griffin (1944-1991) was an American artist and one of the leading designers of psychedelic posters in the 1960s. He was a key figure in the underground comix movement as a founding member of the Zap Comix collective.Steve Clay Wilson (1941-2021) was an American underground cartoonist and central figure in the underground comix movement. Wilson attracted attention from readers with aggressively violent and sexually explicit panoramas of lowlife individuals, often depicting the wild escapades of pirates and bikers.
