My first exposure to the neurotic, psychedelic, sex-obsessed world of R. Crumb came through a course on the history of comic books during my last semester in college. Crumb is a famous recluse and misanthrope, so I was surprising just a year later when I heard he would be making a public appearance in New York in April to promote his latest release, The R. Crumb Handbook. I ventured to Manhattan specifically to see Crumb, and, slipping into the New York Public Library almost an hour late, was disconcerted and unsure I was in the right place. But when the bespectacled, scraggly bearded man up on stage started talking bout how he vomited on his wife's face the first time he took LSD, I knew I was in Crumbland.

The Handbook a compact book wrapped in a bright yellow jacket, is like Crumb 101. Crumb and collaborator Peter Poplaski weave together an Crumb's autobiographical narrative with selections of his artwork that go as far back as the childhood comics Crumb produced with his brother Charles. Crumb lays it all out, from his obsessive fetishes and bouts with depression to his love for old blues records and fears of old age. A handy "Depression Graph" inside the back cover charts Crumb's highs and lows, and the book even includes a CD of Crumb's banjo music. Old-school Crumb fans won't find a lot of new stuff in here, but The Handbook is the perfect introduction.

Of course, you know who Crumb is, even if you can't place his name. His most famous creations are those Keep on Truckin' drawings, with the big-footed, long-nosed characters strutting down the street. The real meat of Crumb's work is his ultra-violent, highly sexual, deliriously bizarre creations like Projunior and Anglefood McSpade, the places where he really gets down into the sordid, shameful underbelly of humanity. While his work is mostly dark, misanthropic and full of self-loathing, characters like the outspoken guru Mr. Natural and his nemesis, the anxiety-filled Flakey Foont, offer a little light among all the grimness. His creations are truly an acquired taste, and it takes a strong stomach and dark sense of humor to spend more than a few minutes with a Crumb comic.

Though Keep on Truckin' has brought him the most mainstream attention (and, because of some murky legal issues, the most financial aggravation), Crumb absolutely hates it. In "The Handbook," he calls it "the curse of my life," and says, "I didn't want to turn into a greeting card artist for the counter-culture."

But that's exactly what happened. The Handbook is filled with strips, splash pages and made-up advertisements where Crumb refers to himself, thick with sarcasm, as "America's best-loved underground cartoonist." The counter-culture embraced him even as he lampooned it, and somewhere along the way, art critics jumped on board. Former Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes, who was with Crumb at the NYPLl, has famously compared Crumb to Goya and Breughel. Not too bad for a guy who's made a career out of drawing muscle-bound, thick-legged women in various improper positions with scrawny, jittery, well-endowed guys.

But who cares about the critics? Not Crumb, certainly, because he's his own worst critic. Whatever criticism you can level against Crumb, chances are he's already drawn a comic that graphically exploits his weaknesses, foibles and fetishes. And if you think Crumb's the greatest cartoonist putting pencil to paper today, well, he's already got a cartoon that pokes holes in that theory, too. "I have an enormous ego and must resist the urge to come on like a know-it-all," he says in The Handbook. But then, further down the page, he states that, essentially, humanity is just "so much chopped liver." No matter how much Crumb hates himself, it's good to know he hates everyone else just as much.

Crumb, who left America and moved to southern France in the late 1980s, has dealt with his fame in surprising ways. He was the subject of a 1994 documentary by director Terry Zwigoff. In 2004, he was on the big screen again, this time portrayed by actor James Urbaniak in "American Splendor," the film about long-time Crumb friend and fellow cartoonist Harvey Pekar.

Crumb, however, remains famous for his loathing of contemporary pop culture, and at one point in "The Handbook" he says, "I hope that whatever synthesis I make of all this crap contains something worthwhile, that it's something other than just more smarmy entertainment-or at least, that it's genuinely high quality entertainment." It's not too tall an order. Love him or hate him, Crumb's distinctive style and sense of humor are sure to stick around long after other, lesser creators run out of ink.