Robert Crumb did not simply draw comics. He drew the underground: its nervous humour, its dirty truths, its absurd bodies, its music, its appetites, its contradictions. His pages helped give counterculture a face before counterculture became a market category.

Cannabis appears in that world not as decoration, but as atmosphere — part of the printed language of refusal, looseness, satire and outsider life.

For LIBERA HERBA, Crumb belongs here not because he made cannabis “beautiful”, but because he helped preserve the visual climate in which the plant travelled: cheap paper, black ink, underground print, stubborn humour and the refusal to behave.

Some people carried the plant into courtrooms, ballots and protests.

Others drew the room where it was already being passed around.

Robert Crumb
1943–

American cartoonist, illustrator, writer and musician. A central figure of the underground comix movement, associated with Zap Comix, Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Weirdo and a dense pen-and-ink style that became inseparable from the visual memory of counterculture. His work satirised American culture while drawing deeply from older folk, blues and printed traditions.

Robert Crumb – drawing the underground

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