In Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin’s new documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, Robert Crumb is the man who came to dinner.

In one of the film’s central scenes, Crumb and his late wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb join longtime friends Art Spiegelman and his wife Françoise Mouly to break bread and discuss their respective connections as titans of the ’70s and ’80s underground comic movement. For purposes of this scene, Crumb is just a friendly and reflective old guy, a normal person having a normal dinner with his normal, if culturally significant, pals.

Crumb’s ease in this scene is disarming because while here he’s simply a peer and a colleague, he’s something much more significant in a broader cinematic context. Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb casts an impossibly long shadow over any nonfiction film about artists, comic or otherwise, but really over any biographical documentary of any kind.