Love That Bunch

"This beautiful hardcover treatment of Kominsky-Crumb’s collected comics was a huge event in the world of comics. I absolutely love this work. It’s very dark, very bodily, and very funny. There’s a lot of humor in her stories about her upbringing on Long Island and her life as a middle-aged woman living in France. It’s just a really fascinating collection about the everyday qualities of life, from an author and artist who has been very influential in the world of comics. Aline Kominsky-Crumb has a totally nutty style that I find unbelievably charming. She has called it scratchy and raw and ugly; I’ve always loved it. It’s the style in which there’s not a lot of attention to things like perspective or proportion. It’s often quite anamorphic—you get a lot of shifting proportions and sizes. She even draws herself differently from panel to panel, which conveys a fluidity of self, or the the fact we ourselves are always changing and never totally stable. That’s such an interesting point. I do think that that’s true because the bar to entry is so low. That is to say, all you really need to get started is a pen and paper. Or if you’re not working with pen and paper, Allie Brosh, an incredible cartoonists who did a blog and then a book called Hyperbole and a Half , made her work using Microsoft Paint, which is a free software program that came with her computer. So a comic isn’t necessarily about beautiful rendering. It’s about a kind of expression. Unlike making a film, people can make comics without a big apparatus. Unlike writing a novel, people can self-publishing, they can find outlets in the thriving micro-presses and they can reach readers through the underground comics world. Because comics can be such a do-it-yourself medium, it is a vital outlet for alternative viewpoints."

"I just met with her in France. Yes. To me, Aline is one of the most important figures in comics, which isn’t to say that she’s one of the most well-known. She’s not. But her comics have inspired a legion of cartoonists working in comics autobiography: specifically women cartoonists, because Aline published the first ever autobiographical comic from a woman’s point of view. Robert Crumb says she’s inspired him to be more confessional, and you can see that in the trajectory of his work. They did a comic together called Dirty Laundry Comics, which came out in 1974, but was collected as a book in the 90s. Norton’s republishing them all now. But Aline has a style which I find wonderful, and which a lot of people find really off-putting and ugly. She calls it scratching. She talks about her raw scratching. Crumb’s fans love his cross-hatching and they wrote terrible letters to him saying things like: ‘She may be a great lay but keep her off the fucking page,’ or ‘You do the cartooning, keep her in the kitchen.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s conscious of its own struggle. I love the shakiness of her line. I love how expressive it is, how bodily. And her work really focuses on the body. She once did a cover to a comic called Twisted Sisters in which she drew herself sitting on the toilet with a plate of food near her looking in a hand-held mirror. I find it funny and powerful and a lot of people found it off-putting. But that was in the 70s when feminism was all about idealising the female body. Aline, by contrast, draws on a long history of Jewish comedy, and a sardonic world view in which self-deprecation is at the centre of a lot of the humour. It’s very serious but also satirical and I guess a lot of people don’t, or didn’t, understand her tone. It’s a cultural critique, not self-abasement. She’s called herself ‘the grandmother of whiny, tell-all comics’."