Complete Crumb Volume 2: Some More Early Years of Bitter Struggle

One-sentence summary: Despite some peaks, this really is an edition only for the hardcore fans or completionists.

In case you don't know, the Complete Crumb Comics is a 17-Volume series of all of Crumb's work that could legally be gathered by Fantagraphics into these 120-or-so page volumes, up till a certain point in his career where copyrights start to bump into each other. As a collection, it'll take awhile to assemble if you don't want to pay outrageous mark-ups on them (they drift in and out of printing, with prices that fluctuate accordingly, though realistically they rarely go for more than 25 in an eBay auction).

Now, when I say they collect all of his work, I do mean all -- the first volume has high school doodles and attempts at comics with his brother, and this volume is still him in a very early phase of development. I'm not saying the comics aren't interesting -- Crumb's unique take on powerful women is here less embroiled in a trope and instead much fresher, as in his longer Mabel story -- just that, as a rule, it's pretty meh stuff.

Fritz the cat, while appearing briefly in the first volume, really starts to come into his own here; the final sequence in the book is an incredibly disturbing story of him going back home after an off-panel fall-out with his current teenage pet/girlfriend, a story which ends suddenly and I'm not sure I want to see the conclusion of, truthfully.

You're mostly getting comics that are somewhere between doodles and fully developed amateur work, and the last 50 pages are mostly sketches (gorgeous sketches and covers, sure, but still just sketches). Among the nicer bonuses of the Complete Crumb sets, though, are the 6-7 (large) page introductions done by people relevant to Crumb's life at the time of the material. I'm not a huge Crumb buff, so I'm not sure how readily available the material they present is, but I always enjoy the intros.

Crumb's an impressive enough cartoonist that even this early material, almost 50 years after it was first written, is interesting on its own right; however, for what you get in this trade, it's not that interesting. I'm definitely looking forward to the next volume, in which we see the bulk of the Fritz stories.