independent booksellers and college bookstores. "He speaks to so many kinds of readers, if you only focus on one audience, you're missing opportunities."ĭinaburg and MQP also looked for a way to pitch the book directly to U.S. "Crumb's work is fun and it's sophisticated," said Dinaburg. He flew to Chicago for book signings at the Rona Hoffman Gallery and at several bookstores and then came back to New York for a signing at Barnes & Noble. They grew up on Crumb." Next, in quick succession, McCartney followed her London Crumb party with a New York Crumb party, and Dinaburg arranged for Crumb to sit in conversation with art critic Robert Hughes for a packed house at the New York Public Library. "They sponsor the Armory Show," explained Dinaburg, "and the lawyers there are all latent bohemians. The venerable lefty British newspaper the Guardian followed with an extensive print interview with Crumb and his wife, Aline, also a formidable cartoonist, and also set up an elaborate Web site, G2 in Crumbland ( dedicated to the deviant splendor of classic Crumb images.įor the New York City launch, Dinaburg, who also consults for the Armory Show, an annual high-tone New York City art exhibition, grabbed her Rolodex again, organizing a signing at Clifford Chance, one of the largest law firms in the world. Fashion designer Stella McCartney, another Crumb fan, jumped at the chance to have Crumb design a cartoon for one of her T-shirts. Using her own art world contacts (and those of Crumb's New York City art dealer Paul Morris), Dinaburg tied the book's launch to the opening of Crumb exhibitions at Bonham's Gallery and Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. publication of the book, Dinaburg looked to present Crumb to a combination of comics fans, fine-arts patrons and the fashion crowd, using the U.K. MQP is printing another 20,000 copies for Britain and has printed 60,000 copies for North America.īeginning with the U.K. It's reached #1 on the bestseller list of the national U.K. The book has sold roughly 20,000 copies in since its release in Britain on March 14. The initial print run of 100,000 copies was aimed at a worldwide English language market. He's like Daumier or Hogarth he started in print, aiming at the everyday reader, and now he's in museums." "Crumb is one of the few cartoonists," said Dinaburg, "that can transcend the category. Dinaburg specializes in what she calls "cultural branding"-in this case, a plan to market Crumb to "multiple tiers" of arts audiences. MQP hired Mary Dinaburg of Dinaburg Arts, a New York City arts consultant, to oversee the book's marketing.
We wanted every student, everybody who bought a T-shirt, to be able to afford to buy a book." We wanted this to be a democratically conceived and distributed book. Weil emphasized that while she intended to market the book to readers interested in art as well as comics, "we didn't want it classified as an art book.
"We've been looking for titles that will raise the profile of MQP," said Weil, who set up a New York office for the company late last year. "We're going to throw a lot of resources at this book," said MQP publisher Zaro Weil. In a time when comics artists such as Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware are reaping mainstream success, both literary and commercial, who better to capture the reading public's fancy than America's favorite politically incorrect cartoonist? It even includes a CD featuring Crumb singing and playing the banjo.
R CRUMB T SHIRT FULL
The $25 book offers a retrospective on Crumb's life and work, including his response to American pop culture since the 1950s, and it's full of familiar as well as newly published material. Crumb Handbook, a 432-page, brick-like hardcover memoir packed with comics and written in collaboration with Crumb's longtime buddy Peter Poplaski. publisher, MQ Publications, is looking to break out Crumb to a larger readership while also increasing its own visibility in the U.S. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book (Little, Brown) in 1997 to the 17-volume (with more to come) Complete Crumb Comics from Fantagraphics-they've generally appealed to hardcore comics fans and his sales are steady but relatively modest. But while he's published a lot of books over the years-from The R.
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