On the Fritz

Every moment in history (or in an individual life) is an inflection point. One always can point to a single choice made by someone(s) somewhere that would have made a world of difference had it been made the other way. Yet, some eras really are more stable than others – a more momentous choice than usual would have to flip in order to make a real difference. It is why our attention is more readily drawn to unstable eras when things are unusually in flux; there are so many more obvious “if only” moments when the touch of a finger could tip the outcome. The 1960s are one such era – and not just for nostalgic Boomers narcissistically reminiscing about their youths, though it’s hard to deny I am one of those. 1968 was a world apart from 1963 in popular culture, social mores, and public affairs. Those five years really were revolutionary, but easily could have gone very differently for better or for worse. The revolution was broader than five years, of course. “The 1960s” as we think of them had all of their roots in the 1950s and reached their fullest expression in the 1970s, but the most glaring surface transformation was smack in the middle of the ‘60s proper.
 
Comic book author/artist Robert Crumb probably didn’t affect the big picture of the decade very much even though in a sense he painted it. In other words the social trends of the ‘60s would have been little changed without him, but the visual representation of them would be different and probably poorer. Then (as now) I was rarely in step with the times and never ahead of them, so my first awareness of Robert Crumb was as the artist who drew the cover of Cheap Thrills, a must-have 1968 album by Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin. Fortunately, my sister was a couple years older than I and infinitely hipper, so she then supplied me with underground comics by Crumb. I enjoyed them but was not enough of a fan to seek out more and collect them.

 
One of Crumb’s recurring characters was Fritz the Cat, who first appeared in 1959. The cat’s backstory was not always the same. Sometimes he was a pretentious liberal arts student. Sometimes he was an international spy. Sometimes he was a famous rock star. But always Fritz was an obnoxious self-involved egotist in (despite the feline form) all too human fashion. His real interests are sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Side characters deliberately, ironically, and unabashedly exaggerate stereotypes of the day, whether racial, social, or political. Why are the characters all animals? Crumb just felt freer using them: “I can put more nonsense, more satire and fantasy into the animals.” Nonetheless, as he mentions in a comic, they are “not unlike people in their manners and morals.” Considering the era, Crumb’s vision of humanity is ultimately a dark one: surface idealism and altruism have crass selfish underpinnings in nearly all his characters.
 
In 1972 legendary animator Ralph Bakshi produced the movie Fritz the Cat, which mashes up storylines from a few comics but mostly relies on “Fritz Bugs Out.” Fritz in the film version is a college student who is far less intellectual than he thinks, and whose ideological rhetoric encourages a riot that turns him into a fugitive. Oh, yes: the cartoon is X-rated. The movie was a box office success, but Robert Crumb hated it. He hated it so much that he killed off Fritz in the comics in 1972 in order to discourage a sequel. (It didn’t work: the sequel The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat was produced anyway.)
 
None of this had crossed my mind in a very long time until a couple weeks ago when I stumbled across an online reference to Cool World (I no longer remember where), another Bakshi animation from 1992. Though it had nothing to do with Crumb, the reference brought him to mind anyway and prompted me to look him up on Amazon. The collection The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat caught my eye and a few days later it arrived at the door. It contains tales from Fritz’ first 1959 appearance to his untimely 1972 death. Someone reading Crumb for the first time is likely to ask the same question as a first time viewer of the movie: Is this an homage to its era or a venomous send-up of it? The answer is yes. It is both.

 
Is there any relevance in the Fritz comics to the 2020s? Perhaps, at least if we consider what a similarly representative comic about our own time would look like. If the comic is honest the answer to the same question surely again would be yes. And in half a century folks will ponder what would have happened if this person or that in 2022 simply had made another choice.

 

Caleb Janssens’ vlog on Fritz