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Drag Queens and Gay Marriage Featured in R. Crumb’s Axed ‘New Yorker’ Cover (thepoliticker.observer)

Crumb's cover

**Robert Crumb**, the alt-comic writer with a piggyback fetish, has always
been ahead of his time. That's what made his comics--usually featuring giant
Amazonian women with humungous thighs as a chronic masturbatory fantasy-- so
transgressive to begin with. But for all his former subversiveness, Mr. Crumb
is pretty mainstream nowadays. Maybe not _New Yorker_ mainstream though:
_Vice_ magazine unearthed a 2009 drawing from the cartoonist that was rejected
by **David Remnick**'s magazine. Though an answer was never given on why the
cover wasn't run, Mr. Crumb suspects it was because the _New Yorker_ was too
afraid of offending people with the image of a (possible?) drag queen and a
twee person of unidentifiable sex trying talking to a sweating official from
the marriage license bureau, with a sign pointing to a "Genders Inspection"
office next to his window. Below, a high res image of the cartoon, which was
discovered at the Venice Biennale in June. Since Mr. Crumb has drawn for the
_New Yorker_ before (though now refuses to), we doubt that it was the
cartoon's scandalous nature that led to it getting the axe. The magazine just
never ran a gay marriage ...

thepoliticker.observer