228 FRITZ THE CAT
(1994), involved neither Crumb nor Bakshi. In protest over the fi lm (which had been
negotiated by Crumb’s fi rst wife Dana), Crumb killed Fritz off in a fi nal strip, “Fritz the
Cat, ‘Superstar’ ” (fi rst published in Th e People’s Comics , 1972), and has fi rmly resisted
resurrecting the popular character ever since.
Fritz was based on drawings of Fred, a Crumb family pet and the lead character in
home-made comics by the teenage Robert and his brother Charles: in early full-length
stories like Robert’s “Cat Life” (1959–60, fi rst published in 1978) “Fred the Cat” is
indeed a cat, walking on four legs and unable to speak, although his thoughts appear
in word balloons. Shortly thereafter, the character, now named Fritz, was fully anthro-
pomorphized, indebted to the tradition of funny animal comics that was clearly one
of Crumb’s inspirations: now walking upright, talking, and wearing clothes (though,
in Disney tradition, he eventually lost his pants), the early Fritz demonstrates Crumb’s
nascent ability to breathe life into distinctive characters through remarkably expressive
faces and gestures. By 1962, a series of full-length Fritz comics (fi rst published in 1988
in volume two of Th e Complete Crumb Comics ) edge toward greater social satire , and
depict him as a romantic (though still chaste) lover; but by 1964 (in a story published in
1969) Fritz is seducing his innocent but nubile sister on a visit back home.
While working for American Greetings in Ohio, and struggling to establish a career
as a cartoonist, Crumb revived Fritz for his fi rst published comic strip, “Fritz Comes on
Strong,” in his idol Harvey Kurtzman’s Help! #22 ( January 1965); other short Fritz
pieces followed, and in 1968 the long stories “Fritz Bugs Out” and “Fritz the No-Good”
were serialized in the men’s magazine Cavalier , just as Crumb was emerging in San
Francisco as the most prominent and prolifi c creator of underground comix. With
Crumb’s increased prominence, many of the Fritz strips were gathered together in pub-
lished collections, including Head Comix (Th e Viking Press, 1968) and R. Crumb’s Fritz
the Cat (Ballantine Books, 1969), an oversized volume whose three stories (the Cavalier
stories plus “Secret Agent for the C.I.A.”) also appeared simultaneously as a series of
three small, oblong books. After the animated fi lm derived from these strips made Fritz
even more popular, Crumb’s disdain for the fi lm, the exploitation of his work, and per-
haps celebrity culture more generally led him to permanently dispose of the character
he might have profi tably marketed for years to come. As Crumb explained in his intro-
duction to Th e Complete Fritz the Cat (Belier Press, 1978), “I felt compelled to have him
killed. It was the only way I could resolve in my own mind what had become of him.
He’s defi nitely better off dead. Another casualty of the ‘Sixties.. .”
In his earliest longer published stories, Fritz is a hip college student drawn to bohe-
mian pleasures while suff ering comically romantic and existential crises. Crumb also
used Fritz to parody the popular James Bond novels and fi lms, and increasingly allowed
Fritz’s libido to displace his earlier, more romantic yearnings, leading to a famous orgy
in a bathtub in the story “Fritz the Cat” (1965, fi rst published in 1968). Settling into a
regular pattern, Crumb has Fritz’s personal problems at the start of each story rapidly
escalate until Fritz, an inadvertent rebel, is chased by the representatives of power amid
the chaos he has created. Toward the end, Crumb allows Fritz’s fame to fuel his arrogance
