Weirdo (comics)  

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Weirdo

Weirdo was a magazine sized comics anthology created by Robert Crumb, published from 1981 to 1993 by Last Gasp. Weirdo served as an insistently "low art" counterpoint to its contemporary rival RAW, Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's highbrow alternative comics anthology. Early issues of Weirdo reflect Crumb's interests at the time – outsider art, fumetti, Church of the SubGenius-type anti-propaganda and assorted "weirdness". It also introduced artists such as Peter Bagge and Dennis (Stickboy) Worden.

Crumb later handed over the editing reins to Bagge, and then to Crumb's wife, cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. The last issue, #28, titled Verre D'eau, was published in 1993.

Weirdo, No. 13

The second "Klassic Komic" was "Psychopathia Sexualis" from Weirdo, No. 13, published in the summer of 1985 (a note to the reader dates the story March 1985). [20] "Psychopathia Sexualis" summarizes 16 cases from the 238 recounted in Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing's notorious psychoanalytic medical study (Crumb tells the reader that the excerpts are culled from the 12th German edition of Krafft-Ebing's book, published in 1906). Baron Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840 - 1902) was born in Mannheim, Germany, and was a professor of psychiatry at Strasbourg from the age of 32. His magnum opus was published in 1886. Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey succeeded Krafft-Ebing as catalogers of sexual aberrations, but Krafft-Ebing was the pioneer. His findings were so shocking that the frank portions of his cases were printed in Latin. Though he was associated with Freud, Krafft-Ebing seems to have believed that sexual aberrations were organic, or associated with syphilis rather than unresolved childhood fixations or failures to mature.
In Crumb's story, a cartoon Krafft-Ebing addresses the reader, noting, "Few people are conscious of the deep influence exerted by sexual life upon the sentiment, thought and action of man in his social relations to others." The cases follow: case number two (senile dementia in an 80-year-old man with homosexual leanings), case number nine (absence of sexual feeling in a young man), case number 11 (hypersexuality in a married man), case number 31 (onanism and vampirism), case number 35 (defilement of women by soiling them in public), case number 48 (sadism in women, i. e., a wife who must suck the blood from a cut on her husband's arm for sexual satisfaction), case number 59 (a married man who likes to be walked on by prostitutes), case number 75 (a married man with a fetish for nails in the soles of women's shoes), case number 97 (self-cannibalism), case number 98 (hair fetish), case number 110 (ladies' handkerchief fetish), case number 114 (shoe fetish), case number 152 (androgyny), case number 165 (lesbianism), case number 220 (male sadism), and case number 231 (compulsive bestiality). On the cover of Weirdo No. 13, Crumb alludes to other cases that he doesn't illustrate, numbers 78, 88 (an eye fetish), 142, 160, 170, 180, and 229. It's a parade of characters that in sheer volume is unlike anything previously shown in Crumb. Also on the cover, Crumb calls Psychopathia Sexualis the "dirtiest book ever written" (illustrated by "America's dirtiest cartoonist!!").
It's a catalog of mostly male sexual perversions. The women here are, for the most part frigid wives, prostitutes paid to don shoes and walk on a client, or victims of the men's bizarre predilections. The one exception is case number 165: "Congenital Sexual Inversion in Women (Viraginity)," which is a 38-year-old woman who wore male attire and pursued women. After her death, an autopsy revealed "dura adherent to vault of cranium. No atrophied brain. Convolutions broad, not numerous, regularly arranged."D. K. Holm




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