Back in 2004, one of my earliest articles to appear in a print publication was a piece I did for FATE Magazine called “Voices in the Dark: Do Sasquatches Have a Language?” The article examined reports of encounters with Bigfoot where people, on occasion, had described hearing odd verbalization, sometimes amounting to little more than chatter, but nonetheless which might be construed as some form of “language.” In particular, among the Chehalis natives that settled near Harrison Lake, British Columbia, there had been stories described for decades that involved wild people in the mountains that spoke a language similar to the Chehalis dialect, albeit a much older variant (they had a name for this, calling it “the Douglas Dialect”).
When FATE published the piece, I was thrilled not only to see they had run with the idea, but that they had hired an illustrator to depict a frightened Albert Ostman, surrounded by Sasquatches in a moonlit forest. The style was unmistakable, even without having to give credit, but with certain excitement I read the caption of each panel, which bore the legendary insignia “R. Crumb.”
Robert Crumb has illustrated comics and album artwork for decades, though the majority of his best-known work generally falls well outside the so-called “mainstream” art audiences. With his rich, colorful style (somehow, it remains colorful even when it appears in black and white), he has long been a fan of musicians in particular, even taking occasional forays into the performing arts himself with his group “R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders.” A regular contributor to magazines like The New Yorker, Crumb’s depictions of Sasquatches, namely in a strip called
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