Shortly after Robert and Aline Crumb moved from the US to a small village in this valley in the South of France, they were asked to participate in a summer medieval festival.
For the event, local politicians don robes like those once worn by feudal lords, and most of the citizens wear peasant rags.
Crumb, timid, like the famous cartoon caricature of himself he draws in his comic strips, is not one for parades. The father of Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural and Devil Girl declined to participate.
Aline Crumb, bold, like the red-haired cartoon version of herself she draws, agreed to join the procession and asked for the cotton rags. The festival organizers would not hear of it. "They told me, 'No, you have to get a costume of a lady in waiting because your husband is an important person,"' Aline Crumb, 59, recalled over breakfast at their 13-room house, parts of which date from the 11th century.
Although the brocaded costume was stiflingly hot — "I felt like a giant sweating chair," Aline Crumb said — it turns out the townsfolk were prescient. In a twist as unlikely as the plot of an R. Crumb comic, the couple, known to many from the 1994 documentary Crumb, which portrayed Robert Crumb's troubled early family life and adult predilection for riding piggyback on large women, have become something of a lord and lady in their village. They are surrounded by a bohemian court of artists, lovers, sycophants and jesters engaged in fits of intrigue.
"We live in Crumbland," Aline Crumb said.
They moved to France 16 years ago, sickened, they said, by the infiltration of their once sleepy California town, Winters, by newcomers who bulldozed hilltops for McMansions. The Crumbs also wanted to shield their daughter, Sophie, from a growing conservative and fundamentalist Christian influence while continuing to educate her in what they consider the classics. They reared her on Little Lulu comics from the 1940s and 1950s and Three Stooges videos.
It was Robert Crumb's absorption of such popular culture that led to his signature style. He applied a lowbrow, all but forgotten crosshatched technique to a kaleidoscope of sexual fantasies, controversial racial topics and images of the hippy counterculture. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for adult-theme graphic novels, influencing everyone from Daniel Clowes, the creator of Ghost World, to Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus.
"He's a monolithic presence, who rewrote the rules of what comics are," Spiegelman said.
Much of Crumbland's energy is devoted to preserving space for Crumb, 63, to continue his work and for everyone to feed off it.
When the Crumbs moved to their village west of Nimes — which they asked not be named, fearful of attracting streams of fans — many old houses were empty. Villagers preferred modern homes with square rooms across the river, where streets are wide enough for two cars to pass.
But since the Crumbs' arrival, many of the achingly quaint, empty stone houses have attracted other newcomers. One of the first was Aline Crumb's brother, Alex Goldsmith, who lives in the lower ramparts of the Crumb home. Goldsmith, 54, said he had fought drug addiction, and if his sister had not welcomed him to France, "I'd probably be in prison, if I was alive."
He earns money buying used R. Crumb comics on eBay, taking them upstairs for Robert Crumb to sign and reselling them "for quadruple" on the Internet, Goldsmith said, smiling.
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