The Complete Fritz the Cat

AUTHOR: Crumb, Robert

ARTIST: Robert Crumb (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Bélier Press

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1965-1972

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1978

Publication History

The publication history of Fritz the Cat is a complex one. The first published story appeared in Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! magazine in January, 1965. Further strips appeared in Help! and Cavalier magazine between 1965 and 1968, and individual panels and sketches can be found in Robert Crumb’s Sketchbook 1966-1967, which was published in Germany by Zweitausendeins in 1981. Further major stories were then published in Head Comix in 1968 and R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat: Three Big Stories in 1969.

After his disillusionment with the animated film version of the character, Crumb killed off the character in the final Fritz story in The People’s Comics in 1972. The majority of these stories were then reprinted in The Complete Fritz the Cat in 1978. Although this compilation was not conceived as a graphic novel when Crumb began working on the character in 1965, it nevertheless represents an episodic telling of the character’s development through the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The collection includes a series of single drawings from Crumb’s sketchbooks and other sources and the following strips: Cat Life (1959-1960) an unpublished pencil strip of Crumb’s cat Fred, who morphed into Fritz; “Fritz Comes on Strong” (from Help!, issue 22, January, 1965); “Fred, the Teen-Age Girl Pigeon” (from Help!, issue 34, May, 1965); “Fritz the Cat” (from R. Crumb’s Head Comix, 1968); “Fritz Bugs Out,” “Fritz Special Agent for the CIA,” and “Fritz the No-Good” (all from R. Crumb’s Fritz the Cat: Three Big Stories, 1969); “Fritz the Cat: Magician” (from Promethean Enterprises 3, 1971); “Fritz the Cat: Superstar” (from The People’s Comics, 1972); and a number of one-page strips, mainly from Cavalier in 1968.

Plot

There are fourteen stories in the anthology, varying from short, six-panel strips to a twenty-three-page story. The first appearance of Fritz is in “Fritz Comes on Strong,” a three-page strip with six borderless panels on each page. Against minimal or nonexistent backgrounds, Fritz and a female cat enter a room wearing winter clothing. Fritz gradually undresses the female, but when she is naked he confounds the reader’s expectations by crouching over her as he announces, “Now be patient, my sweet . . . them little fleas are hard t’get hold of!”

Fritz’s status in the stories varies hugely. In some he is a vagrant and in others, such as “Fred, the Teen-Age Girl Pigeon,” he is a superstar rock musician. Arriving at an airport, Fritz is mobbed by crowds, including the girl pigeon of the title. Accompanied by a disapproving literal (and figurative) fat cat manager figure, Fritz enters a limousine. The pigeon jumps on the car, but when the police try to remove her, Fritz invites her inside, where a flutter of tiny hearts above her head indicates her devotion to him. Arriving in his hotel room, Fritz is now leering, and she has become nervous and is sweating. The final two panels show Fritz yawning in bed with the pigeon’s clothing strewn over him, and then him burping (the only piece of dialogue in the whole story) with a contented smile on his face.

“Fritz Special Agent for the CIA” is different from most of the stories in the book. Although Fritz is still recognizable for his arrogance and his libido, the narrative is a fairly straightforward parody of the James Bond spy craze, and as such, reveals little about his character and makes few comments on contemporary society.

“Fritz the Cat” identifies Fritz as a college student who lives in “supercity.” It begins with Fritz and two friends in a park, moaning about being surrounded by phonies. Fritz and his friends argue about which of them has the most sensitive soul, but they are distracted by three girls (actually another cat and two doglike animals), whom they fail to impress with an energetic but incompetent musical performance. Fritz notices that the girls are impressed by a crow, and he dupes the crow into leaving to look for some nonexistent cheap drugs. He then impresses the girls with a bravura performance about his tormented soul. Persuading them that they can save each other’s souls, he lures them to an apartment where they all cavort naked in a bath. Despite protesting that he and the girls are “seekin’ after truth!” they are joined by the other occupants of the apartment in a pot-fueled orgy in the bathroom. Two policemen burst in, but Fritz shoots the toilet, and in the ensuing confusion he escapes. On the final page he obtains a top hat and suit from a drunken chicken, and by the next day, the park is full of imitators of Fritz’s “new look.”

The final Fritz story is “Fritz the Cat, Superstar.” Fritz is a film star, living in a mansion, where he treats a voluptuous crocodile, Abigail, with disdain. He explains to Mr. Bear, an expert who is helping him with his tax problems, that he likes his women, “tall ‘n’ proud . . . [I]t’s more fun to cut ‘em down ta size!!” His attempts to have sex with Abigail are interrupted by a phone call from his producers. He goes to a meeting with his producers, and they try to persuade him to read the script for the latest in what is clearly a series of poor films. Killing time before appearing on the Johnny Giraffe show, Fritz picks up a cute bunny and has rough sex with her. After dumping her, Fritz appears on the show, plugging his latest film and making condescending comments about the “counter culture.” Later, he bumps into an old girlfriend, Andrea Ostrich. Despite criticizing his attitude on the show, she begs him to have sex with her. However, once in her apartment he is distracted by watching his appearance on television and becomes aroused only when she hides her head under a chair. She refuses to move from that position so Fritz kicks her and leaves, muttering to himself, “Ha ha, foolish female.” She then kills him with an ice pick and stands over him exclaiming, “Ha yourself, smart ass!!” A small sign points to Fritz’s prone body with the attached phrase, “Violence in the media.”

Characters

•Fritz is the only regular character in the stories. Occasionally troubled by guilt and thoughts of bettering himself, Fritz is mainly driven by selfish desires, mostly for sexual satisfaction. He has little compunction about this and will say or do almost anything to achieve his ends. In short, he has the morals of an alley cat. His occupations vary hugely in the stories and include being merely a vagrant, then a rock musician, a college student, a college dropout, a revolutionary, a secret agent, and a Hollywood star.

•Winston is a female fox who is one of the few recurring characters in Fritz’s love life (other “old girlfriends,” such as Angela Ostrich, in fact appear only once). She is lucky in that she is not eaten, as Fred the pigeon girl was, but Fritz does treat her badly and falls out with her in the stories “Fritz Bugs Out” and “Fritz the Cat Doubts His Masculinity.” Fritz’s selfish treatment of both females and colleagues tends to mean that they appear for a short time and are then discarded.

•Charlene is another girlfriend (a cat) who is seduced by Fritz at the start of “Fritz Bugs Out.” She appears to have deep feelings for Fritz, but he regards her as “a good lay.” She makes a brief appearance later in the same story, and she is physically similar to characters (including Fritz’s wife) in “Fritz Comes on Strong,” “Fritz the Cat,” and “Fritz the No-Good,” but in these she is never identified by name and may not be the same character.

Artistic Style

Crumb was influenced by the “funny animal” comic books that he and his brother Charles read during their childhood, such as Little Lulu by John Stanley; Donald Duck by Carl Barks; and Pogo by Walt Kelly. His drawing style in early Fritz the Cat episodes is a combination of these styles and a loose free line seen in the work of classic American newspaper strip artists such as George Herriman, Milt Gross, and Rube Goldberg. The meandering spidery line of Crumb’s early work is partially due to the fact that he was drawing with a rapidograph pen, whereas the comic book artists he admired often used brushes, and the comic-strip artists mainly used dip pens.

The stories in the anthology clearly demonstrate the development of Crumb’s drawing style. The earlier strips are linear, with minimal cross-hatching, and are similar to the work Crumb did for the American Greetings card company in the early 1960’s. Gradually, the style changes, and by the final story, the drawings have heavier lines and, at times, dense and heavy cross-hatching. This gives the figures and settings a solid, almost plastic, depth, reflecting not only early American newspaper artists but also earlier graphic artists Crumb admired such as William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson. The effect is to create a sense of light falling across the figures that sets them in a solid, albeit surreal, world.

Crumb’s panel borders, always drawn by hand and with thin gutters, also show changes. In the earlier strips the lines are loose and quite thin. The panels may be distorted, but by the later stories, they are darker, much tighter, and more controlled. The strength of Crumb’s mature drawing style, for all its “cartoony” feel, is that it is, underneath, solid traditional draftsmanship. Crumb’s sketchbooks demonstrate his talent for observational drawings, but close examination of the later Fritz the Cat strips in particular reveals a sure handling and graphic sophistication that is unrivaled in underground or in many mainstream comics and graphic novels.

Themes

In Fritz the Cat, Crumb deals with sexual issues via his anthropomorphic characters; through them, he comments on the nature of both the counterculture and mainstream society. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the idea of sexual freedom could be seen as part of a wider political set of ideas that stemmed from disenchantment with the mores of mainstream society.

Crumb’s work occupies a strange and ambivalent position within the counterculture. While he entered into the general spirit of the underground and remains its most famous cartoonist, much of his work is actually highly critical of the counterculture. Fritz is a classic example of this, in that in order to satisfy his own (mainly sexual) desires, he will pay lip service to anything he sees as part of a trendy new set of ideas. Although he may be seen as “cool” by other characters, Crumb shows him to be, in fact, a shallow faker. He cannot be trusted or believed at any stage in his career, and if lies and duplicity will not suffice, he will resort to violence, as in his unprovoked attack in the one-page story “I Hates Ol’ Ladies.”

Crumb also plays with the nature of anthropomorphism. Fritz’s rampant sexual desires can be seen as entirely catlike, and for all his humanlike foibles, he can resort to feline behavior, as he does at the end of “Fred, the Teen-Age Girl Pigeon.”

“Fritz the Cat, Superstar,” seems to be somewhat autobiographical in that Fritz appears to reflect Crumb’s disillusionment with the entertainment industry and the idea of stardom. The film producers in the story are parodies of producer Steve Krantz and director Ralph Bakshi, and the titles of the series of films Fritz stars in show the desperation and redundancy of Hollywood—in the context of the story the Bakshi character is making Fritz the Cat, Ski Bum and is moving on to Fritz Goes to India.

Impact

Despite the comparatively short publication life, Fritz the Cat became one of the iconic figures of the underground, along with Crumb’s Mr. Natural and Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Two animated films helped to increase Fritz’s fame in mainstream society, but they perhaps also fixed his image more simplistically as a symbol of a new sexual freedom. Financial success was seen by some in the underground as part of a process of “selling out,” and the fame of Fritz was not welcomed by Crumb or others in the alternative media. In January, 1972, Michael O’Donoghue and Randall Enos produced a parody of Fritz in National Lampoon’s “Is Nothing Sacred?” issue. Their two-page strip is similar to Crumb’s own debunking of the character in the same year, and even includes Fritz plugging his latest film on a talk show, while being condescending about the counterculture.

Crumb’s work on Fritz also helped to fuel an ongoing debate about whether his depiction of sexual acts was part of this new freedom or an abuse of license bordering on pornography. Opinion has varied: Art critic Robert Hughes described Crumb as “an American Hogarth”; underground cartoonist Trina Robbins described his work as “heavily misogynistic.” A rape scene in “Fritz the No Good” is reminiscent of some of Crumb’s later work and these kinds of images still divide critics. Crumb has also been criticized for his portrayal of black characters as crows. In 1968, Viking Press censored his work and even rejected some Fritz the Cat stories, which were then published by Ballantine Books in 1969.

Crumb’s work on Fritz the Cat and his early Zap comics was also hugely influential on a wide range of cartoonists, both in terms of style and in demonstrating the range of issues that could effectively be dealt with in the medium of comic books. Artists as varied as Dan Clowes, Steve Bell, and Matt Groening have specifically acknowledged their debt to Crumb.

Films

Fritz the Cat. Directed by Ralph Bakshi. American International, 1972. The animated feature film, publicized as the first X-rated animation, played an unusually significant part in the history of the character. Crumb loathed the film and felt cheated by its producer, Krantz, although accounts of the way Crumb lost control of his character are contradictory. The film persuaded Crumb to kill off Fritz, which he duly did in 1972. The film begins with a sequence taken directly from Crumb’s Fritz story from Head Comix from 1965, in which after failing to impress three girls with his singing, Fritz fakes existential angst in order to have sex with them; later a sequence from “Fritz Bugs Out” is used. Much of the film, however, moved away from the original stories, and as soon as that happened, Crumb felt that the film lost its way and lost its grip on the nature of the character. Despite the fact that Crumb disowned the film and wanted his name removed from the titles, Bakshi and his animators did catch Crumb’s style effectively. The film still has many fans and has been featured on lists of the top one hundred animated films.

The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat. Directed by Robert Taylor. Cinemation Industries, 1974. Krantz produced this animation after the success of the first film. If Crumb was isolated in his disdain for the first film, he had the company of many critics and audiences in his dislike of this one.

Further Reading

Crumb, Robert. The Complete Crumb Comics (1986- ).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Sketchbook, 1966-’67 (1981).

Donahue, Don, and Susan Goodrick, eds. The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics (1981).

Shelton, Gilbert. The Adventures of Fat Freddy’s Cat (1977).

Bibliography

Beauchamp, Monte, ed. The Life and Times of R. Crumb: Comments from Contemporaries. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

Crumb, Robert, and Peter Poplaski. The R. Crumb Handbook. London: MQ Publications, 2005.

Feine, Donald. R., and Robert Crumb. Crumb Checklist of Work and Criticism, with a Biographical Supplement and a Full Set of Indexes. Cambridge, Mass.: Boatner Norton Press, 1981.

George, Milo, ed. R. Crumb. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics Books, 2004.

Poplaski, Peter, ed. The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.