Happy 69th birthday today to Robert Crumb, one of the founding figures of the underground comic movement, who took the conventions of comic books and turned it on its proverbial ears, absolutely slaughtering sacred cows with unabashed, uncensored and downright filthy and brutally honest approaches, and holding mirrors up to real life and all its pretensions and fascinations.

Crumb, whose knack for illustration trailblazed an absolute revolution in said movement, was full of cynicism, wit, style, subversive radicalism, and a “fuck you if you don’t like it or agree with it, but never fuck with my right to draw it and say it” attitude. His entire career has been fixed in the underground movement, he never tried to jump that ship, he never tried or wanted to draw for a mainstream publication, and even in the very, very few times he did, it was still like lighting a match in the hallowed halls of those institutions, Robert Crumb’s illustrative and eclectic mind and sharp ear for dialogue still every bit mired in his style and in full force.