The cover to Mystic Funnies #3 (Fantagraphics) is reassuringly familiar to anyone who's followed underground comix guru Robert Crumb all these years: a car-choked urban setting where Flakey Foont - Crumb's whiney everyshlub - is being lectured by a typically statuesque femme. "Out of the pain comes the pleasure, out of the pleasure comes the pain! Okay?" she states, pointing an assertive finger with one hand, holding a shopping bag for "The Fru Fru Frippery" in the other. Another day in the dirty ol' city for expatriate Crumb.

Reading a new R. Crumb comic is like playing a newly released disc by some randy blues geezer: you pretty much know what you're getting - the interest lies in the artist's ability to find small bursts of expressiveness within a rigidly predictable structure. Crumb's newest has all the elements we've come to expect: big butt babes & brandished dicks, whining misanthropy & images of urban sprawl at its ugliest, elegant cross-hatching & base human behavior - all the things that make Crumb the comix artist so lovable and irritating at once.

May seem odd to use "lovable" re: an artist who came across so obsessively creepy in Terry Zwigoff's Crumb documentary. But for all his milquetoast's rage & misogyny, there remains something endearing about Crumb's work. Perhaps it's his ability to look at his own appalling impulses and render 'em with such kid-like clarity. This is the guy who once accurately named one of his underground titles after Freud's Id, after all.

Mystic #3 has a few short strips devoted to familiar Crumb cast members: Foont, Mr. Natural, Stan Shnooter (the oily mainstream comics spokesman). But the book's prime feature is a nineteen-page meander featuring "The Hipman," a middle-aged trend slave who pursues and struggles to impress one of Crumb's towering, capricious thick-legged goddesses. We've seen variations on Hipman before (in the 60's & 70's, he would've been an arrogant hippie cocksman): Crumb loves taking preening alpha males and humiliating 'em almost as much as he digs visually assaulting big asses. The tale itself ends on a typically ambiguous note: our hero embracing his steatopygic conquest and thinking to himself, "Somehow I'll pay for it later, I know." Right he is, the cartoonist agrees.

The "plot" of "Hipman" is repetitive and rather aimless. We get that his hero is a shallow boob pages before Crumb stops belaboring the point. But with the exception of two panels that look like the artist has momentarily channeled the neo-primitive talents of wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, the whole thing is wonderfully rendered. Few graphic artists can capture urban seediness as recognizably as Crumb.