R. Crumb at David Zwirner

R. Crumb, Tales of Paranoia (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, Los Angeles. Photo: Angel Xotlanihua.

In R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia at David Zwirner, the octogenarian cartoonist reanimates his lifelong obsession with suspicion, guilt, and cosmic absurdity. A genre-defining cartoonist who first came up in the underground comics scene of the ’60s and ’70s, Crumb mined the personal and social mores of postwar American consumer culture through a grotesque, ecstatic visual idiom. Now, some of his framed drawings are installed in clusters across the gallery walls, while the center of the space is staged like a living room. The faux-domestic setting of the exhibition is telling: Where paranoia once read as a countercultural stance against mainstream American life, here it appears as the condition of everyday experience.

The exhibition is titled after a new comic book by Crumb, his first in 23 years, out via Fantagraphics this month, which features a series of black and white illustrations as well as older comics. In the artwork Cover: Tales of Paranoia (2025), Crumb’s alter ego—bespectacled with strained, veiny eyes—looks tensely at a series of four headshots in the left margin of the composition, as if part of a conspiracy board. Beside them, an intricate cell tower transmits unseen signals. Within a thought bubble, he parses whether “Pete Cornell,” “Deep State Woman,” or “The Doctor” are covertly influencing his life.

Taut and neurotic, Crumb’s signature cross-hatching now registers like overthinking made visible, a hand trapped in its own repetition compulsion. In What is Paranoia? (2025) Crumb narrates a banal social scene in which the central figure leaves a gathering to use the bathroom, then returns to find the room suddenly quiet. The narrator treats this shift in mood like evidence of a plot against him. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” the first panel reads, with “they” and “you” standing in for the acquaintances in the scene, but also suggesting other arbiters of control, like government agencies and media conglomerates. If his ’60s and ’70s comics ridiculed repression through grotesque libido, these late works lampoon the collapse of shared truths alongside the prioritizing of our own conspiracy-inflected beliefs.

The exhibition also tackles more intimate facets of the artist’s life. Following the death of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his wife and collaborator, Crumb’s internal monologue has grown almost claustrophobic. In The Crumb Family Covid Exposé (2021), co-authored before her passing, the family’s reactions to his paranoid psychosis doubles as a form of intimacy. By Deep State Woman (2024) and The Ultimate Paranoia (2025), that intimacy curdles into solitude. After Aline’s death, the comics express what happens when there is no second mind to absorb and challenge the spiral. Crumb’s experience is one that mirrors the broader cultural moment, in which the erosion of trust in each other leaves us increasingly alone.

R. Crumb: Tales of Paranoia runs from October 10-December 20, 2025 at David Zwirner (616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004).

R. Crumb, Tales of Paranoia (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, Los Angeles. Photo: Angel Xotlanihua.

R. Crumb, Tales of Paranoia (installation view) (2025). Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, Los Angeles. Photo: Angel Xotlanihua.

Isabella Miller lives and works in Los Angeles.

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