>>139042043>>139042045This is a repost, but I think it nails down just what Crumb's differences were with Bakshi
I think Crumb hated Fritz Fritz to him was the guy Crumb couldn't be, and wouldn't be if his art didn't catch on. Fritz got women off his own charm, got to go out and live his own life while Crumb was tethered to his neurotic family. I don't think crumb went to college, he just worked straight after high school for a milquetoast greeting card company where I'm sure he barely scraped by.Fritz was probably the kind of guy at Crumb's highschool who'd call him a queer and fingerbang the 6/10 frumpy girl Crumb was obsessed with and then never acknowledge her because she's nothing to him. I always get the feeling that there's a sort of longing yet contempt in Crumb's comics where he hates that these people were lucky enough to have the life experiences he can't. Lucky, dumb all american kids who were confident and had sex
Bakshi on the otherhand seemed to like Fritz and his world. There's a lot of nostalgia dripping in the movie, Crumb was writing what he thought these people were like but Bakshi seemed to be creating from experience as a New Yorker in the 60's. Sometimes I wonder if that's part of the disconnect with Bakshi and crumb. Bakshi seemed more forgiving to Fritz's flaws as a young dumb kid doing what any dumb college kid would be like- prone to his own self-obsessed notions of how the world was like, thinking he had everything figured out. A loveable scamp, compared to Crumb's take on him as a more despicable self-serving asshole.
Of course, Bakshi has also said that Crumb mainly took offense to Bakshi's director's credit taking priority over his "created by" credit, and thought people would think Bakshi created Fritz.
But I don't think my theory is entirely wrong. In some ways there's a sincere love letter to an era from Bakshi in the movie.