Arcade the Comics Revue #2 Complete 5-Page Story "Let's Talk Sense about This Here Modern America" (The Print Mint, 1975)

Crumb flexes his social-critic muscles to spectacular effect in "Modern America." Here is a plateau of accomplishment that reinforces the Underground Comix movement's position as a cauldron of civil unrest and a nagging, irreverent conscience for the broader community of editorial cartoonists as a class. Crumb had dealt in instinctive satire since his schoolboy-sketchbook days of the 1950s-1960s, but in this one story he mustered the ornery gumption to define the United States as "America the Cruel Bully ... the Glutton ... the Greedy ... the Ugly," and back up the arguments with wit and visual appeal. Arcade's editors, Art Spiegelman and Bill Griffith, as working cartoonists in their own right, encouraged Crumb, their star player, to cut loose with all the rancor he could muster -- which in turn triggered the accompanying sense of humor (Crumb describes himself in the byline as "that cranky old fuddy-duddy"). The story's uncompromising insistence would point Crumb toward a 1980s publication called Winds of Change, an environmentally astute counterculture journal, where the artist ironically found his attitudes hobbled by a humorless editorial policy that demanded political correctness. Only in the true Underground setting, such as Arcade provided, could Crumb have the freedom from censorship to speak his mind as outrageously as his talents would direct him. Crumb's son, the late Jesse Crumb, often argued that Robert's audacious boldness in various stories for Arcade had motivated the governmental persecution that ultimately prompted his resettlement in France in 1992. The further significance of "Modern America" is that the story helped to inspire experimental stage producers Johnny Simons and Michael H. Price to develop the 1985 musical play R. Crumb Comix, in collaboration with Crumb. Abundant detail distinguishes the artwork, itself, with incidental visual references to G.B. Trudeau's Doonesbury and the Monopoly board-game mascot, Uncle Pennybags.