The 1960s and 70s were an era packed with revolutionary media; rock music was hitting its indulgent adolescence, cinema was breaking away from the studio system, and theater was undergoing a formal deconstruction. All of these things were fueled by political upheaval, sexual liberation, and plenty of drugs.
Comics were no different: even the superheroes of the Marvel Age were revolutionary in their inventiveness (and, eventually, a little druggy in their abstractness). But comics were by no means limited to the Big Two, even then. Underground comix were a thriving genre, and R. Crumb would become its poster boy. And when talking Crumb, you gotta talk Fritz the Cat.
Arguably one of the most famous works by undeniably the most famous of underground cartoonists, Fritz the Cat dresses down social commentary, shoveling perverse mania into a funny animal book (the most disposable of mediums). Where some of Crumb’s major work might skew to the personal or autobiographical, Fritz was the extreme edge of social parody of the youth subculture.
Fritz the Cat is often upsetting. That’s at least part of the point. Sexually promiscuous (sometimes incestuous), socially immoral, and pedantically pretentious, Fritz could be both abysmally low-brow and pay some lip-service to high-brow concerns. In “Fritz Bugs Out”, the first large strip in The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat, Fritz has a good deal of Jack Kerouac to him: he’s an ass with high-minded, poetic aspirations, caught up in the certainty that the only way to know the world is to wander it aimlessly. A failed student with vague revolutionary ideals, Fritz spends the strip finding ways to indulge rather than act. It’s a reactive strip in that Fritz, seemingly the victim of circumstance, hilariously sets himself to fail over and over again. As with a lot of his comics, R. Crumb was very likely parodizing himself alongside the college burnouts, aspiring hippies, and stunted social revolutionaries that are most clearly Fritz’s primary targets.
But like one of R Crumb’s influences, Carl Barks’s Donald Duck, Fritz is a bit of an everyman. His role, job, and aspects can change based on the story in which he finds himself. In “Fritz the Cat, Special Agent for the C.I.A.”, Fritz becomes a distinctly different sort of parody, spouting anti-Communist rhetoric, going up against a distinctly racist Chinese army (portrayed for laughs as rats).
After dissatisfaction over the 1972 animated feature by the legendary animator Ralph Bakshi, R Crumb killed Fritz off, somewhat anticlimactically, in “Fritz the Cat ‘Superstar’”; by then, the character had become a parody of himself.
The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat is a slim volume, but it perfectly bottles the mania inherent to the character, charting his beginnings as a somewhat earnest attempt at animal cartooning to his eventual destruction at the hands of his creator. It’s a wild ride, and certainly one of import, but it’s occasionally hard to look at through the modern lens. The whole revolutionary experiment of the era failed, its once open-minded youths aged into congenially, problematically conservative septuagenarians. There’s a certain naivete to the whole endeavor, to believe that the status quo could be undermined by a cat so proudly fondling women.
