Speaking of "crummy," R. Crumb talked about an afternoon he spent driving around the suburbs in the 1980s taking pictures of houses, streets, and strip malls so he could draw realistic backgrounds for his comics.

> “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing,” he says, “The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”

https://time.com/3802766/r-crumbs-snapshots-source-material-...

I don't have a reference for it (it might be from the film "Crumb") but I remember him saying that people would rave about how he artistically exaggerated the proliferation of poles, signage, and overhead lines to create over-the-top dystopian images, when he was just copying backgrounds from photographs of suburban California.