R. Crumb: TALES OF PARANOIA
When you can’t tell if it’s clarity or madness

David Zwirner Los Angeles presents drawings and prints by underground comix pioneer R. Crumb, on view October 10 through December 20, 2025. These works mark Crumb’s first extensive solo comic work in over two decades—created in the wake of his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s 2022 death. At 82, Crumb reflects on aging, conspiracy, and what he calls the “post-truth” era, oscillating between genuine suspicion and paranoia. “The thing about paranoia is it means that it’s not based on a full knowledge of what’s going on,” Artsy Crumb explains. The show includes pieces for his forthcoming publication from Fantagraphics and marks his first Los Angeles exhibition in over fifteen years.

This is unflinching self-examination—Crumb doesn’t perform vulnerability, he lives in it. Created without his late wife’s grounding presence, the work spirals inward with the kind of rawness that only comes from actual uncertainty. He’s not trying to look troubled; he’s genuinely unsure whether his paranoia is perception or delusion, and that ambiguity saturates every line. The work refuses resolution, which makes it honest in a way that feels both uncomfortable and necessary.

But that honesty doesn’t translate into guidance. The work names what it’s like to live in constant question—aging, grief, conspiracy, medical anxiety—and it does so with precision. Yet it doesn’t offer pathways through. It witnesses the spiral without showing how to stop spiraling. For some, that witnessing alone is valuable. For others, it might deepen the very patterns it describes. This isn’t a guide; it’s a mirror. What you do with your reflection is entirely up to you.

Crumb captures something essential about paranoia: it lives in the gap between what you know and what you’re certain someone’s hiding. That unbearable middle space—where suspicion feels justified but certainty stays just out of reach—saturates pieces like “What is Paranoia?” It’s the territory where anxiety becomes its own obsession, where the search for truth becomes indistinguishable from the fear of being deceived.

“Paranoia lives in the gap between what you know and what you’re certain someone’s hiding. It’s the space where suspicion feels justified but certainty stays out of reach.”

The work also reveals what happens when grief has no counterpoint. Without Aline, Crumb’s voice spirals inward. Her grounding presence is gone, and no one’s left to interrupt the loop. The drawings show what happens when your anchor disappears—not resolution, but repetition. Grief that circles back on itself, becoming its own fixation.

If you recognize these patterns in yourself—the constant vigilance, the mental spiraling, the inability to land anywhere certain—there’s work to be done. Notice when your mind is building constructs to feel safe, and recognize that the building itself drains your presence. Constant mental tinkering keeps you from what’s actually happening. Drop the reconstruction. Land in what is, not what you’re trying to make manageable.

“Notice when your mind is building constructs to feel safe, and recognize that the building itself drains your presence. Constant mental tinkering keeps you from what’s actually happening.”

Learn to distinguish between anxiety that’s information and anxiety that’s just noise from an overactive system. Ask yourself: Is this telling me something real, or is my nervous system flooding me with static? Not every alarm is a fire. Some fear is signal. Some is just the system running hot. Your capacity to discern the difference determines whether anxiety serves you or consumes you.

When grief spirals without resolution—as it does throughout this exhibition—the work isn’t about solving it. It’s about building relationship with what’s been lost. You don’t need answers. You need to stop demanding that loss make sense. Let it exist without fixing it, be present without collapsing into it. Grief doesn’t resolve through understanding. It integrates through presence.

“Grief doesn’t resolve through understanding. It integrates through presence.”

But there’s a tension here that can’t be ignored. Crumb’s historical work contains violent misogyny and racist caricatures—imagery he has defended as “satire” or self-examination rather than acknowledging as harm. His early comics depicted Black people in blackface stereotypes, women being raped and dismembered, and disturbing sexual content. While he’s admitted to “hostility toward women,” he hasn’t offered meaningful repair or accountability—just justification. The institutions that continue to celebrate him don’t acknowledge the real harm his earlier work perpetuated. Engaging with his current work means holding this contradiction: you can witness his late-career introspection without erasing what he put into the culture. Notice when genius is used to excuse violence. Notice when institutional validation stands in for ethical reckoning.

“Notice when genius is used to excuse violence. Notice when institutional validation stands in for ethical reckoning.”

Crumb’s work doesn’t tell you what to believe—it shows you what it’s like to not know. And in a culture that demands certainty, that refusal has value. But witnessing paranoia isn’t the same as working with it. If you find yourself circling the same fears Crumb names—about authority, about being deceived, about your own mind betraying you—use that recognition as a starting point, not a landing place. Notice where you’re building mental structures to feel safe, and ask if the construction itself is what’s exhausting you. Let the work reveal your patterns without letting those patterns become your identity. Your response to the uncertainty tells you where your real work begins.