The Book of Weirdo: A Retrospective of R. Crumb's Legendary Humor Comics Anthology

This book exceeded all expectations! It’s such a thoroughly researched and entertaining book, it’s worth every penny. Definitely one of the best books I’ve ever read dedicated to the comic book, with page after page full of interviews and beautiful artwork, it’s a fun, overwhelming experience. Very cool

There's a lot in this big, heavy book.

This is a great book for those familiar with Comix, underground artists, humor and the actual Weirdo magazine. Also great for someone wanting to learn more about this genre. Well done book. A ton of history and anecdotes here.

I loved everything about this book. It was interesting to learn what motivated Crumb to create Weirdo in the first place, then hand the reigns over to Bagge and then to Aline. The contributor testimonials were fun to read as well. Great companion book to "Crumb: Weirdo Years".

Weirdo was hard for me to come by back in the '80's, because I live in the boondocks, and there was no internet. Thanks to Jon Cooke for compiling this essential chronicle of an outstanding venue for alternative comics of the era. Quite simply: a labor of love, beautifully realized.

This is essential reading for any fan (or anyone curious about) underground comix. Well researched, heavily illustrated, dense with information. A must have.

Here's what I learned from the review by W Prajer in Canada, which cannot be upvoted here in the US. I was looking for an anthology of Weirdo, and this book is clearly NOT it: "The book is light on art, heavy on “my interactions with Crumb.” "There are good reasons for both. Crumb, who prior to this magazine had never edited anything more commercial than his brothers’ homemade comic books, put himself at the helm of Weirdo and declared that all contributing artists would retain complete and exclusive rights to their work. FWIW I am on board with this element of the Weirdo credo. Unfortunately, that means the book I would love to read—an anthology of Weirdo—would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, this lovely bound book of high-stock glossy paper offers us little more than (heh!) crumbs of what made Weirdo weird."

Perhaps this review isn't fair and it's on me for not carefully reading the description of the book before buying. I thoroughly enjoyed Existential Comics. I just assumed this would be more of the same. It's not. The majority of this books are interviews. Not sure why it needed to be in coffee table book form. Rather than read about how seminal this comic book was, it would have been much more enjoyable to read some of the actual comics and find this out for myself.

Brilliant illustrations, in-depth articles, input from pretty much every creator that appeared in Weirdo. Honest and balanced. It made me dig out my old issues once again. Excellent buy.

God Bless Robert!

I love the Last Gasp/ Kitchen Sink comics and Crumb is one of my favourite comic artists of all time so to read the history of the Mad Magazine for adults was great. Fully illustrated and great information!

A beautiful book, but it is not the anthology of Weirdo some purchasers may expect. It's an oral history, text heavy. For me, this could've been distilled into a fraction of the page count in a Comics Journal article, say. Or even as an introduction to a complete or selected reprint of Weirdo. This book is a supplementary item for readers who have already read the Weirdo magazine. Newcomers and those with a less committed interest may find less of interest.

The book is light on art, heavy on “my interactions with Crumb.” There are good reasons for both. Crumb, who prior to this magazine had never edited anything more commercial than his brothers’ homemade comic books, put himself at the helm of Weirdo and declared that all contributing artists would retain complete and exclusive rights to their work. FWIW I am on board with this element of the Weirdo credo. Unfortunately, that means the book I would love to read—an anthology of Weirdo—would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, this lovely bound book of high-stock glossy paper offers us little more than (heh!) crumbs of what made Weirdo weird. We get photos of the various contributors, some samples of the work, more than a few brand-spanking-new artistic tributes to the magazine and the people who made it. And lots and lots of stories about what it was like to work for and with Robert Crumb. Crumb’s a legitimate draw—larger-than-life and twice as charming/hideous. But anyone who has followed his grotesquely confessional work or watched Terry Zwigoff’s documentary is already intimately familiar with the direction these accounts take. In the best of all possible worlds the magazine rack would be regularly larded with anthologies of Weirdo, the way MAD re-sold its content from the 60s to the early 90s. In this world, Gaines was the savvier publisher. We make do with this, because we have to.