Robert Crumb's work makes a slightly uncomfortable fit with a gallery space, which has more to do with the personality of the artist than with the format of his work. It doesn't seem odd at this point to have pages originally published as underground comics carefully curated and nicely framed - the loop of culture is as permeable as it's ever been. But while Crumb is a genuinely towering presence in the comics world, he became that crowning figure in part through the practice of self-mockery. The confessional, warts-and-all approach to the contents of his head made him revolutionary - that, and to a lesser degree, his willingness to deprive that self-exposure a heroic dimension.

It's the combination of abasement and elevation that makes for the discomfort. There's a whiff of domestication to the show, but the tensions of high and low, street and gallery, are foregrounded in Crumb's own love for blues music: he's well aware of his sincere and ridiculous role as white connoisseur. So here we are with him at the YBCA: faintly ridiculous appreciators of the sublime.

The exhibit spans the length of his career. After some examples of his juvenilia, there is the eruption of his 60s work, a combination of observational sketchbook pages and comics. The style here is appealingly loose, pliable - with Peter Max and Victor Moscoso, he shared a tendency to melt everything. Even tall brick buildings look like they're made out of rubber, or pillows. Reflecting a 60s stylistic tic, it still feels unique and off-kilter the way Crumb handles it. With Max and Moscoso, there's something decorative and pretty in the flowing forms, a sense of decadent and loose abundance: art nouveau filigrees slicked up into chrome and neon. With Crumb, the soft declension of the world seems more genuinely organic - perhaps the forms sag because there's a bit of rot underneath. The doughiness of the people and the buildings is slightly rancid; it's a woozy world.

Crumb would use the visual flotsam of his times in his own way. Though he helped define the style of the 60s, he's one of those exemplars of an age who turn out, in retrospect, to be one of the age's chief skeptics. There's a freewheeling sense to the 60s strips collected in the exhibit, but it's remarkable how little fun seems to be had in them - or at least how much of the fun is sadistic. People get dosed, deflowered, swindled, stabbed, busted, and it seems all in a day's work.

While the 60s strips are full of frenetic activity, the activity seems to go nowhere; characters don't move forward, they make hamster wheels of their ruts (and their rutting). There's a lot of talk in the word balloons, but it's all pretty gassy stuff, full of hipster slang - "It's a trip, man." - "Solid!" - "Drop Out!" - that seems to have already made the transition from empty argot to empty advertising slogan, leaping down the chain of language via echolalia. The phrases chase each other off the cliff of meaning like lemmings. It's exhausting to read, though in one signature strip, Meatball, the centerless buzz is propped up as a winking metaphysical principle.

The excesses on display - sexual, transcendental, pharmacological - perhaps inevitably overlap with excesses of imagery. There's the notorious "Angelfood McSpade," a blubber-lipped, mostly-naked jigaboo caricature. She's entirely offensive as a character, and she's meant to be - she exists not to denigrate blacks, but to rub white noses in the manure of their own culture. Harder to take as satire, because the stereotypes are more bound up with the artist's deepest desires and beliefs, are the repetitive scenes of sexually abused and pliant women. Sometimes he draws about his "troubles with women" with a bracing self-awareness; at other times he just lets his id off its leash. Part of the problem is that the entwined desire and contempt for women in the pages really isn't really at odds with the dominant cultural stream - it's just a more hysterical form of it.

Perhaps the strongest story on the wall is "Patton," a short biography of blues musician Charley Patton, dating from Crumb's 80s run in Weirdo magazine. To my mind, the 80s were Crumb's period of most sustained accomplishment, and "Patton" is representative of the maturation of his style in that decade. The forms are still organic, but more solidly put together, with the foursquare substantiality of good carpentry. He's still dealing with stereotypes to a degree, but they're fused to folk imagery, and a real sense of character. The stereotypes operate as containers that real human beings are clapped up in, the orbit of their experience banging up against what's allowed and expected of them. The sometimes sordid details of Patton's life are made into iconic dioramas, a poor man's stations of the cross.

There's something almost stupidly blunt about the way Crumb presents the scenes, like the lyrics of a blues song: there may be flickers of poetry, but they float through a telling that's plain and straightforward. It's built out of matter-of-fact details that escape cliché by virtue of the weight of feeling rolled up behind them. In working this out, Crumb is perhaps also working out a model for himself as an artist: how to be both abject and legendary at the same time.

Aline in Stella McCartney (New York Times Series), 2005
Ink on paper

Robert Hughes has compared Crumb to Brueghel; I was reminded even more strongly of two other inveterate cross-hatchers, the English satirists James Gillray and George Cruikshank. They all share a gleefully savage exuberance to their contempt - a pleasure in ridicule, not just because it provides an opportunity to smear idols with shit, but because through the venting of outrage it provides an excuse for contact with shit. They express a belief that the real purpose of shit, sputum, and blood isn't biological, it's psychological (for the inventory of this palette, Crumb's only innovation has been the fountains of jism).

Beyond this, Gillray and Cruikshank were brought to mind as hermetically weird expressions of their age. Their images were built on the kind of ideogrammatic shorthand that allows us to see a donkey and elephant fighting, and understand it as a commentary on the Democratic and Republican parties. Turns of phrase are literalized into imagery. But the language and the politics - the inundating context, the sea in which their prints were suspended - have both drifted, drawn back, leaving the drained reefs of drawings as promontories, with their utterly strange topographies exposed and naked. The chatter of the age has been fossilized into a graphic surrealism.

As someone who didn't actually live through the 60s, whose main contact with the decade is through imagery, much of it restaged, recycled, or debased by commercial nostalgia, I find Crumb's 60s comics both raw and distant. He had an avid desire to take what was floating in the air at the time - the gestures, the rhetoric, the symbols seen on billboards and in the corner of the eye - and assemble it into a self-sufficient visual world. There's an element of the work that's almost reportage, but through it I can catch a glimpse of the 60s standing as remote and foreign as the monarchist England of King George III.