Duke the Crow Background R. Crumb was still a teenager when he made the character Fritz the Cat for self-published comics magazines he made with his older brother Charles. The character first appeared to a wider public in Harvey Kurtzman's humor magazine Help! in 1965. The strips place anthropomorphic characters—normally associated with children's comics—in stories with drugs, sex, and other adult-oriented content. Crumb left his wife in 1967 and moved to San Francisco, where he took part in the counterculture and indulged in drugs such as LSD. He had countercultural strips published in underground periodicals and in 1968 published the first issue of Zap Comix. Crumb's cartoons became progressively more transgressive, sexually explicit, and violent, and Crumb became the center of the burgeoning underground comix movement. Fritz became one of Crumb's best-known creations, particularly outside the counterculture. Ralph Bakshi majored in cartooning at the High School of Art and Design. He learned his trade at the Terrytoons studio in New York City, where he spent ten years animating characters such as Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, and Deputy Dawg. At the age of 29, Bakshi was hired to head the animation division of Paramount Pictures as both writer and director, where he produced four experimental short films before the studio closed in 1967. With producer Steve Krantz, Bakshi founded his own studio, Bakshi Productions. In 1969, Ralph's Spot was founded as a division of Bakshi Productions to produce commercials for Coca-Cola and Max, the 2000-Year-Old Mouse, a series of educational shorts paid for by Encyclopædia Britannica. However, Bakshi was uninterested in the kind of animation he was producing, and wanted to produce something personal. Bakshi soon developed Heavy Traffic, a tale of inner-city street life. However, Krantz told Bakshi that studio executives would be unwilling to fund the film because of its content and Bakshi's lack of film experience. While browsing the East Side Book Store on St. Mark's Place, Bakshi came across a copy of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat (1969). Impressed by Crumb's sharp satire, Bakshi purchased the book and suggested to Krantz that it would work as a film. Bakshi was interested in directing the film because he felt that Crumb's work was the closest to his own. Krantz arranged a meeting with Crumb, during which Bakshi showed Crumb drawings that had been created as the result of Bakshi attempting to learn Crumb's style to prove that