> I don't think you could publish that now

Maybe you'd struggle to get widespread (physical) distribution, or to build an audience, or to make a living off it. I don't think anybody would stop you printing it, or take down your website or whatever.

It wasn't mainstream or uncontroversial in the '60s either.

Wally Wood did "The Disneyland Memorial Orgy" (Google it) around the same time.

I'm pretty sure it was banned (not anymore, as that Google It will show).

there are plenty of things published today that push boundaries in the same way

> I don't think you could publish that now.

What would prevent you from publishing something like that today?

It's not merely that 50 years is a long time. There's a profound cultural watershed between the Before Times, the overcontrolled, neurotic world of roughly up to the late '60s, and the narcissistic/sociopathic world of today. Robert Crumb, and the whole Crumb family, embody that change in an unusually extreme way.

Agree, and the bizarre things that the family members were into have simply been replaced with a new set of things. Arguably the only difference is back then they weren't thrown out on the streets due to high rents

Yes, but they tend to be 'off' in quite different ways. Crumb's father was the kind of hyper-repressed figure who for most of us nowadays only exists as a boogeyman character in fiction, but who was much more of a reality in the pre-1970 world.