The comic nerds have won.

There was a time when comic book readers were those ill-dressed, unsocialized nerds who crouched in corners reading all the time, who spent hours hunting down back issues in dusty stores, and who perfected the knack of quickly sealing their prized editions into plastic sacks. These crazed creatures were viewed as nuts because the object of their obsession was considered extraneous and low grade, and because anybody in America who takes anything seriously, who concentrates on something to scholarly extremes, is viewed as a weirdo.

But the last 10 years have seen a revolution in taste, and the dedication and proselytizing of the nerds have had an effect on the perception of comic art. With the advent of influential "graphic novels" such as The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen , and the prizewinning work of Art Spiegelman in Maus, the comic is finally taken seriously as an art form. The comic book artist is finally considered a superstar—but at a time when the bottom is starting to fall out of the comic book collecting market that those nerds and heartless comic book hustlers forged with their bizarre bartering techniques.

Those who believe that comics have at least the potential to be a major art form have always had special esteem for R. Crumb. One of the founders of the underground comic movement in the late '60s with titles such as Zap, Big Ass Comics, and (Plunge into the Depths of) Despair Comics, Robert Crumb has evolved into perhaps the country's most honest and self-revelatory artist. Now 57 years old (though he doesn't look it), and still industrious, Crumb has issued a series of independent comic books, magazines, and cartoon strips over the past 30 years that constitute an unblinking scrutiny of America's cultural landscape, as well as an animal howl of frustration at the situation of a sensitive human being in a culture that demands cessation of desire while simultaneously encouraging desire for profit in a sex-drenched media blitz.

In the documentary Crumb, which is the height of respectability that Crumb fans, at least, have yet seen for their idol and his art, filmmaker Terry Zwigoff has paid homage to the curious angst and universally recognizable drawing style of R. Crumb.

Just over two hours long, Crumb is a profile of the artist in extremis. Though seemingly meandering, the film actually has a fascinating and coherent narrative line. Zwigoff introduces us to Crumb in his sanctum sanctorum, the small studio behind his house in Winters, California, listening to old blues 78s. He follows Crumb to his Mom's house in Philadelphia, where the viewer also meets his fascinating — and equally brilliant — older brother Charles. Zwigoff catches Crumb on Market Street in San Francisco, one of the places where Crumb likes to sketch. He shows Crumb talking to his brother Maxon, who lives in a San Francisco SRO, then being interviewed by a reporter, and enjoying a photo shoot for Leg Show magazine. Finally, Zwigoff shows the artist packing up his possessions for a move to France ("slightly less evil than the United States") with his wife Aline Kominsky and daughter Sophie. The notoriously misanthropic Crumb laughs a lot, though it might be nervous laughter, especially when his sex life is under analysis right in front of him. Interspersed among these moments are interviews with friends, lovers, colleagues and admirers of Crumb who comment on everything from his position in 20th Century art to his penis size.

But Zwigoff and his editor, Victor Livingston, have cunningly arranged the footage that came out of a six-year shoot into a logical, orderly journey into the mind of an artist. As Zwigoff bird-dogs Crumb, he —and the viewer— learns increasingly fascinating things about the man, his art, his family, and his sexuality. It's a Crumb fanatic's dream.

But Crumb also offers a clue as to what makes for a great documentary. As in other recent premiere examples of the art form, films such as The Thin Blue Line, Brother's Keeper, and Hoop Dreams, the director really knows his subject. Zwigoff has been a friend of Crumb's for 20-plus years (he plays in Crumb's blues band The Cheap Suit Serenaders), and brings to the film his profound and detailed knowledge of his subject. Generally, documentary directors go into a project because they want to learn about it. They do minimal research, or have their assistants accumulate some research, walk in virtually blind, and shoot everything that moves, assembling the mess later into something seemingly coherent, but ultimately dishonest. Zwigoff, on the other hand, has made a movie about someone whom he already knows thoroughly and finds fascinating.

There's one thing Zwigoff doesn't tell us, however, and that's why Crumb has become such a cult figure. People—or should I say men—are obsessed with him. Collectors leave no avenue untrammeled in their efforts to acquire everything to which his name is attached. As Zwigoff told Cinemonkey in an interview at the Mallory Hotel, in Portland, Oregon, collectors have been besieging him for months for Crumb memorabilia. One wanted an original birthday card Crumb had sent Zwigoff, offering $500 for this unique item (Zwigoff sold it).

But the "ordinary" Crumb fan, the one who doesn't need to own original comic book pages, or Crumb T-shirts, decals, stickers, or puppets, the fan who simply wants to read his work, knows exactly what sparks the obsession. Crumb is the optimum common man, one of those artists able to put into print what it's really like to live in America. He feels the difference between what we are inside and how we come across in the hard real world and puts it on the page. He's a champion of the regular Joe's life in the quotidian. By being himself, he tells us about ourselves.

Victorian writers and poets, those brilliant pre-moderns who thought of themselves as modernists, lamented the fact their true self resisted revelation. Somewhere between thought and execution, this self was lost, and they could only look on as that lesser "them" was put forward to the outside world. In "The Buried Life," Matthew Arnold groaned that men had grown alienated from their real selves: "I knew they lived and moved / Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest / Of men, and alien to themselvesŠ / And long we try in vain to speak and act / Our hidden self, and what we say and do / Is eloquent and well—but 'tis not true." His pal Arthur Hugh Clough knew what Arnold was talking about: "Excitements come, and act and speech / Flow freely forth;—but no, / Nor they, nor ought beside can reach / The buried world below." Such lamentations make the Victorians seem as much like us as the befuddled characters in a Woody Allen movie, and Crumb's great achievement is to capture in the modern era this same problem of the buried self.

Crumb both expresses the problem and conquers it. In his own drawings starring himself—and Crumb has always used himself as a character in his comics—he is the humped, awkward figure who can't get the girls, who rages at the hypocrisy of society, at the vacuity of media, but who can't do anything about these problems. Crumb seems to have a direct line into male angst, and any male reading it knows exactly where he is coming from.

Take his comic story "Dirty Dog," which originally appeared in Zap number 3 and can now be found in the 5th volume of Fantagraphics's ongoing set of the collected Crumb.

The story is a brilliant defense of pornography. Dog, walking down the familiar urban street landscape of so many thousands of Crumb strips, bemoans his inability to meet women. At a Don't Walk sign he attempts to initiate conversation with the "bitch" standing next to him. She stares straight ahead. He gives up and heads to the porno store, where other hunched, isolated characters are crowded before the shelves. Dog picks up a magazine ("Lez be Friends"), and in his mind he enters into a tussle with the cast of the book. Nervously buying the magazine, Dog returns to the street, happy, cartoon exultation beams emanating from his head. This three-page story is a brilliant defense of smut as solace in a cold, ungiving society.

Though most reviews have so far been positive, Crumb has been attacked, notably by Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer, for its central character's misogyny (Zwigoff trots out two requisite, ironclad feminists—cartoonist Trina Robbins and Mother Jones editor Deirdre English—to spout the predictable "woman hating" line on Crumb). But if you step outside the approved cultural appreciation of women, Crumb can be viewed as one of the bravest, most vocal fans of the strong women.

Crumb has made no secret, for those willing to see it, of his fascination for Amazons. The typical Crumb woman, as shown in hundreds of comic book stories, is, for him a collection of fetishes: "big fine legs," boots, a buttocks with what he terms the shelf effect. In one of his sketchbooks, Crumb says to the reader, "The reason my marriage broke up, was, well…basically it was because she hates to have anything on her feet and I'm a shoe fetishist!" In a story in Zap number 9, little Bobby Crumb feels the first glimmerings of sexuality. He looks at his mother's friend Doris and thinks, "Her boots give me a hard on." Crumb starts out humping boots and ends up in a wild flying fantasia. It's only a short leap from this emblem of dominance to the big legged Amazons in his strips, rooted, he says in Crumb, from the TV show Sheena Queen of the Jungle he saw as a kid.

Most Crumb women are big and bossy. They are alternatives to the dominant female role that Crumb sees women playing in the culture. According to the late Marty Pahls, Crumb's childhood friend and biographer, "The theme [of Crumb's early comics] is almost invariably the sensitive young man against the callous, misunderstanding world. Girls are brainwashed victims of Hollywood and Madison Avenue; guzzling Cokes and wetting their Capri pants over Fabian, not noticing that Mr. Sensitive even exists. Guys are Big Booby Bastards, period."

One would have thought that the counter culture that coincided with the emergence of Crumb would have promoted this artist as an alternative to conventional views of sexuality. Instead, he has been steadily attacked, and it turns out that feminists would prefer to cleanse Crumb of the perverse element of his works. Instead, since the early '70s, Crumb has increased his iconography of boots, feminine superiority, and S&M. Crumb says that he is "revealing something to myself," and tells a reporter in the film in a blend of mea culpa and defiance, "I can't defend myself." And why should he?

Where else did Crumb's sexuality, sense of justice and observational skills originate but in that unyielding nightmare, the American family. One of five siblings in a Catholic family, Crumb was born to an "overbearing tyrant" and a woman of whom one brother says, "You can't tell my mother the absolute truth."

Reviewers across the nation have described the Crumbs as the most dysfunctional family in America. Sensible people watching the film will see them instead as the most typical. All families are weird, if you look at them from the outside. Maybe even the inside.

His brother Charles, as competitive as Crumb himself, seems to have had a love/hate relationship with his brother, but also started the brothers on the whole comic thing early on. The unwashed reclusive Charles, who looks—what with his lack of teeth and the dents in his head—like a reformed alcoholic, is the other fascinating character in Zwigoff's film. Crumb's second brother Maxon is a Buddhist, an epileptic, a molester of Asian girls, and a painter. They are members of a family that is so hypersensitive and highly sexual that its members cannot cope with stimulation, like the shy kids chronicled in the work of psychologist Jerome Kagan. Crumb's attitude to his family, viewed as callous by some reviewers, is to laugh. But instead of showing Olympic disdain for them, his jokey sympathy shows him treating the sedated Charles and mystic Max as a normal people, who don't make him, at least, nervous or uncomfortable.

In the film, Crumb says that around the age of 17 he felt the need to succeed in art as an act of revenge against all the school girls and bullies who abused him. Now, despite all his angst and despair, Crumb is doing quite well for himself. He lives in France. His marketing arm has come up with everything from plastic figurines of Mr. Natural to screen saver software and candy bars. He has been bibliographed. And Crumb is considered so important an artist that even his sketchbooks are published. That hasn't happened since Leonardo. As his brother Charles might have said, "How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure."

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