‘My Dinner with Crumb’ II Posted

Rob Ullman’s posted the second installment (the first is here) of his “Traffic and Weather” comic strip documenting a recent bizarre happenstance in which we both wound up going out to dinner and drinks with a number of folks, including R.  Crumb.  We’d just finished hearing Crumb and Françoise Mouly speak about Genesis in Richmond and were standing around in the lobby with Ed Sizemore trying to get a few folks together for some drinks.  Pretty much everyone Rob and/or I knew, though, seemed to have somewhere else to be, so we parted ways and started heading for Rob’s house.  Rob mentioned on the way home that Richmond writer/comics scholar Tom De Haven said that he and a few folks (including his wife, pictured there in the middle)  were going to a nearby hotel restaurant, so on a lark we decided to stop by there.

According to that first strip, Rob was apparently aware that there was some possibility that Crumb and Françoise Mouly might be joining the group we were heading out to meet; I, on the other hand, just thought we’d be meeting Tom and maybe a few other Richmond comics folk.  I was about as surprised seeing R. Crumb and Françoise Mouly show up at our table as I would have been if we’d been joined by Osama Bin Laden and J.D. Salinger.  Like Rob, I didn’t talk to Crumb much at all–which is actually OK with me, since I can’t imagine what in the world I’d have to talk about with Robert Crumb (and as depicted, there was some guy chewing his ear off the whole time anyway).  I did, though, get a chance to talk with Kim Deitch and his wife Pamela.  While Crumb is obviously the underground comics guy historically-speaking, I’m actually a much bigger fan of–and am a lot more familiar with– Kim Deitch’s work, so hanging out with them was a real treat for me.  I tried not to pester Kim about comics stuff overmuch, though, so we mainly talked about cats.

I spoke a bit to Françoise Mouly as well toward the end of the evening.  In a testament to my complete and utter lack of self-promotional business acumen, I talked to her mainly about my daughter’s love of Jeff Smith’s Little Mouse children’s book, which is published by her TOON Books imprint, never mentioning that I’m a cartoonist myself.   It occurred to me, though, that being out of town in Richmond, VA may be just about the only time the art director of The New Yorker can go out for a meal in peace with out a bunch of hard-up freelancers putting the pester on her for work.

All in all it was a really fun trip to Richmond all around–from the talk, to hanging out with Rob and his wife and daughter, to the dinner with so many fun folks.  Can I put “Had dinner with R. Crumb” on my resume?