motor city comics
Motor City Comics
Rip-Off Press April 1969
While underground comics had brought Robert Crumb significant social popularity and financial wealth by 1969, he also endured quite a bit of criticism for the way his comics portrayed chauvinism and outright hostility towards women. After the hyper-smut content of the Snatch and Jiz digests, Crumb said that he hoped the raw porn in those books had broken all the sexual taboos and would subsequently allow cartoonists to move on to something else.
Following that statement, in the spring of 1969 Crumb produced Motor City Comics #1, which introduces Lenore Goldberg, one of his strongest female characters to date. While she displays some of Crumb’s favorite physical attributes, such as muscular thighs and cheesecake cleavage, Goldberg is the most earnest feminist he had yet created.
In the debut issue, Lenore Goldberg is the leader of a group of young women who storm a meeting of liberal intellectuals to “clear the air of all this bullshit about ‘femininity’!” Goldberg declares that “men and women must get together as equals, but for this to happen the whole society must change radically.” She never explains exactly how society must change; instead, Goldberg and her “girl commandos” ridicule the sexually repressed intellectuals by pretending to flirt with and seduce them, but it’s all just a game and they exit the meeting after humbling their enemy.
When Goldberg and the commandos are pursued by police as they flee the meeting, one of them is caught and brutally punished, but this only strengthens their resolve to expand their membership and push the feminist revolution to the next level. Of course, in Crumb’s eyes, the revolution does not prevent Goldberg from giving her boyfriend a blow job the very next day (granted, only after getting orally pleasured herself).
Motor City Comics
