Word: crumb
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Forget the social comment you might have been expecting. The consciousness of R. Crumb, Fritz's original creator, is that of a disaffected urbanite who reads the Daily News with chortling masochism and controls his paranoia by making Obscene statements. His message (and that of the film made from his comic books): the world isn't really so screwed up, since everyone's just in it for a taste of ass and acid, so why are we all anxious...
...doubt feel better. Which is why Fritz belongs to the suffering and the ignorant, to the sweethearted guys who get it in the neck, to 12 year-old idealists of all ages who need a rest from disillusionment--who need the total disillusionment which Crumb and his animator push...
...Fritz of Crumb's first sagas went to a bigcity education factory, and soon got sick of his existence. He bugged out, searching for Truth and Beauty in these United States. Between fucks, Fritz--good fellow that he was--got suckered and succored by every imaginable self-interest group (while milking them for everything he could get). Crumb never closed the cat's case, though he did fantasize a finally played-out Fritz, shtupping yet another bitch, swigging one last Ripple with a porker named Heinz--and slowly dying of his own terrific life-style...
Cartoonist Ralph Bakshi softens up the story. He makes Fritz into a harmless NYU romantic, circa 1967. (The date is a needless hedge, and a more potent campus might have made Fritz dangerous.) This doesn't work for much of Fritz: under Crumb lies agony, under Bakshi gas. The screen Fritz enacts the essential Crumb pose of a phony out for pleasure under moralistic guises. He sees through all the other phonies and beats them at their game by living out his fantasies in fact. But this Fritz is enveloped with his animator's love (he's even cuter facially...
...nuts and fakes," he said of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum-and was duly ignored by it. For most of his working life, critics dismissed him as a pedantic illustrator. Born in 1898, Escher was 52 before his tightly executed woodcuts, lithographs and engravings began to attract even a crumb of attention. A retiring, ironic man with the bony nose and goat beard of an El Greco prelate, Escher took no part in art debates, lived quietly in a village outside Amsterdam, and made few claims for his work. It was improvisation, he insisted: his prints contained nothing that they...