In this chapter, I only focus on the Sophie comics because Jesse, Crumb’s son from his first marriage, only makes brief appearances in his work, and his father does not seem to have played as significant a role in his education as in Sophie’s. In this chapter, I examine the way fatherhood tests Crumb’s portrayal of a specific type of masculinity (constructed partly as a reaction to second-wave feminism) and the extent to which his new vulnerability as “a doting fool” revises his understanding of gender roles. While in previous comics he had portrayed himself as a sexually frustrated man with violent fantasies, preying on women’s vulnerabilities and their susceptibility to fame, in his Sophie stories Crumb is a gentle, loving, and bumbling father, unprepared for the unexpected toll fatherhood is taking on his body, and pleased that his daughter’s willfulness indicates that she will not be dominated by any man. Crumb has an autobiographical persona that appears to be significantly transformed by fatherhood. The towering figure of the underground comics movement, often criticized for some of his sexist and racist cartoons where he claimed he was attempting to reveal “the id of America,” R.
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