
For the new story, "Don't Tempt Fate," Crumb has abandoned the rich blacks that characterized this part of his career in favor of a crosshatching technique that captures every ripple of flesh and clothing. A classic example appears in the latest "Complete Crumb." "Footsy," rendered in a dramatic chiaroscuro, tells of his teenage encounters with the feet of various "lusty creatures" at school. The supporting stories have a much sharper bite, including a return to his painfully confessional autobiographical style. The teen-age Crumb says hello to a pair of "stunningly beautiful 1950s American highschool girls" in "Mystic Funnies" #3 But "The Hipman," sad to say, seems a bit out of touch. The new volume of "Complete Crumb," which covers his work from the mid-1980s, includes strips with Mode O'Day, an archetype of that era's material-obsessed superficiality.
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Fritz the Cat, happy-go-lucky and free lovin' until getting offed by his crazy ostrich girlfriend, became iconic of the sixties and seventies.

Since this is a Crumb comic, a big-legged, big-chested Amazon soon puts him out of sorts, getting him in trouble with an even more diminutive, backwards-baseball-capped, trash-talking "gangsta'" named "Fishlips." Every era has received a similar razzing at the hands of Mr. Sporting a mullet and a T-shirt that says "Empire Builder" on it, Hipman drives around in his one-man European car, worrying about how hip he is. "Mystic Funnies" starts out with the story of "The Hipman," another of Crumb's acid portrayals of a modern, frustrated, vulgar American. $3.95) contains all new material in each of Crumb's classic styles.

Even better, "Mystic Funnies" number three (Fantagraphics Books 32pp.
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$18.95) continues a series of annual books that seeks to include every scrap of Crumb's work in chronological order. "The Complete Crumb Comics" volume 16 (Fantagraphics Books 128pp.

But this month fans will get a double dose of Crumb material both old and new. Residing in France since the 1990s, Crumb's output has slowed. When Terry Zwigoff's documentary, "Crumb," came out in 1994, he became the world's best-known comicbook artist. Through the following decades Crumb continued to stretch the form's limits with his mix of biting satire and naked autobiography. No other artist so dominates any medium as does Crumb, whose black and white, psychedelic-inspired books from the mid-sixties, with titles like "Zap" and "Big Ass," reinvented the art form into "comix." Then he got better. Follow three years, Robert Crumb has finally returned to comix.
