The problem with Tales of Paranoia is that it isn’t “batshit crazy”, it’s just boring. You can find the same sort of rant on Facebook, but here it’s in a nine panel grid layout.
It’s a slog, that first story: “What is Paranoia/The Narrative” is 11 pages of nine panels with a small Robert Crumb almosted crowded out the panels by his own word balloons as he explains the paranoid worldview to you, followed by his thoughts on Covid. Which are honestly no different from that of the average Covid skeptic: the disease may have been engineered, vaccins are dangerous and it’s all a conspiracy to make us more pliable. His vaccine scepticism is returned to in the one pager “A Difficult Conundrum” where he wrestles with whether he should take “a new vaccine” (he doesn’t mention which one) before deciding to not do so.
This is followed by the two page “Conspiracy Theories”, almost all text but two portraits of people Crumb mentions and Crumb himself. The heart of the book, considering its place, explaining and expanding on everything else in it, but it’s barely readable. I tried to, but skipped it the first time one or two paragraphs in because it’s so much nonsense. All the usual blather of covid as a “planned conspiracy”, some vague notions about the Deep State and Big Business profiting from the crisis, people like Joe Rogan and R. F. Kennedy namechecked. There’s nothing interesting about this. We’ve all heard it hundreds of times already, sometimes from our own family or friends.
The problem here is that Crumb never was politically aware, apart from having a native (naive) libertarian streak in him. What he sees as the signs of some grand conspiracy are clearly just the ordinary workings of capitalism. He’s not wrong to call out Pfizer and others from profiting massively from the pandemic, but he gets his causes all mixed up so ends up in rightwing paranoia.
That paranoia is on full display in the back half of Tales of Paranoia in “Deep State Woman”, a portrait of Margaret Hamburg, whom he leaves anonymous in the story but not enough not to find online. He traces Hamburg’s career as a physician and public health administrator, largely faithfully. Objectively what you have is a fairly ordinary career of a Beltway bureaucrat, but in Crumb’s mind this proves something.
The concluding story (barring a few more one pages on the inside aback and back cover) “I’m Afraid” continues on from “Deep State Woman” with Crumb revealing his greates terror is not that of Covid, but THEM as he devotes half a page to headshots of what I assume are people similar to Hamburg. He then goes into his impressions of who those people are and what they have in common, laments about the naivety of his “well-educated, progressive” friends to still believe in “science and the bio-medical system”, ending with a page long listing of organisations he’s afraid of.
None of this makes for interesting reading. There’s nothing interesting in what he’s saying and nothing interesting in how he says it, with page after page of just Crumb talking in tiny, cramped panels. what saves this comic are two things. The first is “Kiss of Death”, a posthumous “collaboration” with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, far more personal and interesting than the rest of Tales of Paranoia, the two of them talking about how publishing Aline’s books has sunk more than one publisher…
The other is “The very Worst LSD Trip I Ever Had”, in which Crumb looks back at an LSD trip gone wrong in 1966, when he and his then wife Dana got together with his friend Pete Cornell, took acid and then something happened Crumb has been blocking himself from remembering ever since. That actually read like a proper Crumb comic, not some rant from your 5G obsessed uncle on Twitter. In all though, this made me sad rather than outraged, to see the state Crumb has sunk to.
