By Maria Popova

In the early 1990s, two titans of the artfully cynical and subversive joined forces in an extraordinary collaboration: Legendary cartoonist and album cover artist Robert Crumb illustrated two short books by Charles Bukowski, “BringMe Your Love”   and “There’s No Business.” Crumb’s signature underground comix aesthetic and Bukowski’s commentary on contemporary culture and the human condition by way of his familiar tropes — sex, alcohol, the drudgery of work — coalesce into the kind of fit that makes you wonder why it hadn’t happened sooner.

In 1998, a final posthumous collaboration was released under the title “The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship” — an illustrated selection from Buk’s previously unpublished diaries, capturing a year in his life shortly before his death in 1994.