Set in a "supercity" of anthropomorphic animals, it focused on Fritz, a tabby cat who frequently went on wild adventures that sometimes involved sexual escapades.

[1] The look of Fritz the Cat comics was characterized by the use of the Rapidograph technical pen and a simple drawing style Robert Crumb used to facilitate his storytelling.

[11] Several characters from the anthropomorphic universe of Fritz the Cat appeared in another Crumb comic strip, The Silly Pigeons, drawn in 1965 and intended for Help!

[3] Thomas Albright describes Fritz as "a kind of updated Felix with overtones of Charlie Chaplin, Candide, and Don Quixote.

According to Pahls, "For years, [Crumb] had few friends and no sex life; he was forced to spend many hours at school or on the job, and when he came home he 'escaped' by drawing home-made comics.

When he suddenly found a group of friends that would accept him for himself, as he did in Cleveland in 1964, the 'compensation' factor went out of his drawing, and this was pretty much the end of Fritz's impetus.

[26] In this debut story, Fritz brings a young female cat home and strips all her clothes off before getting on top of her to pick fleas off of her.

In this episode Fritz is a guitar-playing pop idol and he brings Fred, a female pigeon groupie, to his hotel room and proceeds to eat her.

[3] In the summer of 1968, Fritz the Cat strips appeared in the Viking Press compilation titled Head Comix, which focused exclusively on Crumb's material.

[31] Crumb abandoned the character the same year as the Ballantine collection,[10] but previously unpublished stories appeared in Promethean Enterprises No.

[32] "Fritz the Cat 'Superstar'" — featuring the death of the character — was the last new story released; it was published in The People's Comics (Golden Gate) in 1972.

[5] The strip's association with the 1960s counterculture is so strong that for example the 1975 song Motorcycle Mama, being a nostalgic remembrance of the 1960s, by Swedish singer-songwriter Harpo mentions Fritz the Cat among other cultural icons of the decade such as Sgt.

Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Easy Rider, Woodstock, Bob Dylan, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and according to Dez Skinn, author of Comix: The Underground Revolution, the strip served as an inspiration for Omaha the Cat Dancer.

In Graphic Novels: A Bibliographic Guide to Book-Length Comics, D. Aviva Rothschild criticized the stories printed in the collection The Life & Death of Fritz the Cat as being misogynist, racist, and violent.

[47] In 1969, New York animator Ralph Bakshi came across a copy of R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat and suggested to producer Steve Krantz that it would work as a film.

[48] Fritz the Cat was the first animated feature film to receive an X rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

"[49] Released on 12 April 1972, it opened simultaneously in Hollywood and Washington, D.C.[14] The film became a worldwide hit, grossing over $100 million (USD) and was the most successful independent animated feature ever.

[33] After the film's release, the American humor magazine the National Lampoon published a comics story written by mordant humorist Michael O'Donoghue, and drawn by Randall Enos in a parody of Crumb's style, called "Fritz the Star in 'Kitty Glitter.

'"[52] The four-page piece portrayed the Fritz character as a jaded and complacent Hollywood star going through the motions of celebrities of the day: appearing on talk shows, commercials, and telethons mouthing vaguely liberal platitudes, before cynically guiding the conversation over to promoting his next movie.

[54] The strip ends with a nightmarish full-page vista of "Crumbland", where all of Crumb's countercultural icons have been turned into commercial commodities.