Zap #1 and #0 are 100 percent Crumb, as are several Rip Off numbers, like Big Ass Comix ("Weird Sex Fantasies with the Behind in Mind"). Motor City Comix (featuring Lenore Goldberg, a kind of feminist Trashman) and the magnificent Despair. Having assimilated, it seems, the entire history of comics (with perhaps special emphasis on Barney Google, Orphan Annie, early Popeye, Dick Tracy, Pogo and the Katzenjammers), Crumb is by now a one-man band of cartooning….

Crumb's preoccupations and, therefore, his subject matter, have varied as wildly as [Bob] Dylan's over the several years of his published career. More than any of his predecessors, he's concerned with what Russian novelists liked to call "the eternal questions." Yet he also manages to stand apart from his own desperation. This duality emerges in the testy association of hung-up Flakey Foont and the spiritually arrogant, self-appointed guru Mr. Natural. Now, Mr. Natural may be...