Broken Frontier has a nice, short interview with cartoonist and Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings author Craig Yoe:
BF: Your own work (recent examples in Hotwire and Arf) is pretty explicit, and has a certain gleeful joy. Do you have your own story of transformation that could parallel, or shed light on the changes in the general culture?
CY: It comes back to Crumb. When I discovered his work in the 1960s I published some of it in a hippie underground newspaper I was publishing and editing in Akron. I called him on the phone to okay that and he said sure, but asked if I was a cartoonist myself. I replied in the affirmative and he encouraged me not only to reprint his stuff but to draw and publish my own comics, too. Crumb was always very evangelical about doing comics and very encouraging to young cartoonists. I mean here he was encouraging me to draw and put my own comics out and he hadn’t even seen my work! Years later I did meet him at the Angoulême, France comics festival. I showed him my art then, very surreal type work that I was doing. He said he really liked it but said I should put more sex into it! Not just because the great Crumb said it, but because it sounded right, from that day on I let that become part of my surrealistic comics. I like doing comics where everything, the lines, the shapes, the colors give the viewer a strong jolt – and having some eroticism as part of that certainly adds to that experience.
