New Light on Crumb's Boswell

This article considers a pair of strange bedfellows, the diarist James Boswell and the cartoonist R. Crumb. In 1981, Crumb published a comic-book adaptation of Boswell's London Journal. This essay considers that comic from several angles: as a veiled autobiography, as a Hogarthian satire, and as a parody of the Classics Illustrated comic books of the forties and fifties. Crumb's adaptation, I argue, helps us to a new appreciation of key aspects of Boswell's text: its visual properties (or lack thereof), its generic status, and its relation to the 1950s world which provided it with a mass audience.