Biography

Brother of Robert Crumb, Maxon Crumb, son of Beatrice Crumb, uncle of Jesse Crumb, Sophie Crumb.

Brother-in-law of Dana Morgan (Robert Crumb's first wife; mother of Jesse) and later Aline Kominsky-Crumb (Crumb's second wife; mother of Sophie).

During his adult life, he never left his family home, and rarely ventured outside, where he lived with his mother. At this point, his artwork exhibited repetitive and painstaking concentric lines, filling in otherwise normal, Crumbesque drawings, reflecting an obsession with filling every last centimeter of white space.

Charles Crumb and his artwork received wide public attention, as a result of the success of the 1994 feature-length documentary film Crumb, in which Charles and some of his work are featured prominently.

As Charles entered adulthood, he began showing signs of mental illness, due to what he himself described as his "homosexual pedophiliac tendencies". As a teenager, he had already developed a particular obsession for Bobby Driscoll, child star of the film Treasure Island, and much of his artwork focused on themes and characters from the film and novel.