Hillary Chute's Reading List

"You can’t know how dark this book is until you start reading it. I met Drnaso in Chicago. He was a student of my friend Ivan Brunetti, who’s a fabulous cartoonist, and does a lot of really amazing New Yorker covers, and a friend of my friend Chris Ware, who’s also a famous cartoonist. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One of the things that he captures so incredibly in this book is that it’s not just a ‘slice of life’ look at suburbia. There are a lot of comics like that, capturing the texture of everyday life. Chris Ware is the master of that form. This book is about really dark things, from the very first, fascinating and incredible story about race to the story that feels really relevant right now, about a teenage girl who fakes an abduction and says that she’s been abducted by an Arab man. The community starts producing this anti-Arab sentiment. There’s the story about a child named Tyler, who has a form of OCD. He has these unwanted thoughts so that everywhere he looks, he sees people being killed and dismembered. I actually found that hard to look at. Deeply disturbing. And that tension—between the surface of a page, what it looks like, what certain colours make the reader feel—and the content is something that comics excels at. This book, Beverly, really excels at it. Part of what is so interesting is its style and the bleak pastel colours. Nick Drnaso worked very hard to create this style. There was an interesting interview with him in the Comics Journal when this book came out. He said that he wanted to tear things down to their essence in the way he draws people and places, which I think he is very good at. The faces of his characters are very simple. They have these weird, blocky, abstractly husky, Midwestern bodies. He also talked about wanting to make the work very still, very bleak and frozen. Part of the effect of that for readers is that we do the animation ourselves. We’re filling in a lot of information when we’re reading. Then, in a story, like the one with the child who keeps seeing bodies around him, we don’t know if this is something he is revelling in and takes pleasure from, or if this is something that he experiences as very horrible. That is part of the tension created by the story. In comics, you can present a character’s interior psychic landscape. That’s an incredible narrative thing to be able to do — and to toggle back and forth between the third person narration and the first person visualisation. … or storylines or universes. Very unsettling. It’s a devastating book. I actually find this book really hard to read. The characters walk on and walk off. Then we find information about them parcelled out, across the entire narrative, in really powerful ways."

"I love this book. Cosplay is a portmanteau word combining costume and play or player. For someone who has never encountered or seen it, ‘cosplay’ means people dressing up as various characters. It’s an incredible show of creativity from the ground. Some people buy costumes, but a lot of people spend hours and hours and hours creating costumes themselves. It’s a form that is open to anybody. When I was at Comic-Con , there were people dressed up as all sorts of different things. It was three days where people could just let their freak flags fly in a space of total permission. I’ll always remember being in a café, right near the convention centre, and seeing a man walk in in a full metal suit of armour, including a face grate, opening the visor, and ordering a latte — and the barista not even batting an eyelash. There’s something really moving, to me, about this creation of a certain kind of popular culture that anybody can access. Yes, there are hundreds of DIY cosplay websites. There are some books coming out. It’s about people extending information to be better able to express themselves freely. There’s something very moving about it. There’s also a whole lot of stuff going on with cosplay and gender. There’s a form of cosplay called ‘crossplay.’ This doesn’t come up so much in Dash Shaw’s book. All it means is people dressing up in costumes to deliberately play with gender norms. For example, at the San Diego Comic-Con this past summer, there were several male-Princess-Leia-as-slave cosplayers. There was a whole group of female Wookiees from Star Wars in pastel colours, wearing go-go boots. Part of what I love about this book, aside from the fact that it is a moving narrative about two young female cosplayers—everything comics tends to be gendered male still, and here is a nice story of female friendship—is that it’s about media in a fascinating way. It’s about different forms of communication. They are making films and uploading them, so it is about film, it is about the internet, it is about photography, and it is about the printed medium of comic books. There’s this dramatic scene, at the end, when they look at comics in a comic book store. It becomes, also, about the self as a medium. You show up to a convention and you are the medium. You put on this costume and you become someone else. I feel this book is really savvy. It’s not pro-digital or anti-digital, but it shows the ways that different forms produce different versions of self. It’s about people creating their own media as opposed to being sold a life by somebody else. Yes, I love that about it. Cosplayers actually came out as physical comic books before it came out as a book, so Dash Shaw was really going for that angle."

"One of the things I love about Anouk Ricard, the French artist who does Anna and Froga, is that she’s also an exhibiting painter. She’s worked in a bunch of different media, and the style that she has in her paintings is pretty much like the style she has in this book, which is for children but is a completely compelling, charming, serious story for adults too. Or, to put it another way, in terms of contemporary children’s books, it is the one that I most enjoy reading to actual children. I actively enjoy it. She has a pared down style and a certain kind of sophistication and lightness that mixes together in the story, about a group of friends who are not quite children and not quite adults. One of them is a human, then there’s a frog, a worm, a dog, and a cat. They are in the so-called ‘funny animal’ genre of comics, which means that they act like humans even if they have animal faces. There’s an openness and a porousness to her drawings and also to her dialogue that is just incredibly appealing for kids, and it is incredibly appealing for me, as an adult. There’s not a lot of play with panels the way there is in other sophisticated comics works. She has used these clean frames, six or so frames a page, but each episode is punctuated by really gorgeous splash pages in which she paints a scene that loosely connects to the story, but is not exactly part of the story. The book has a visual layering that’s very appealing. I love how she inverts the idea of the splash panel—the conventional language of a typical comic—in which the opening panel encapsulates the story in this visually virtuoso way, to draw the reader in. Instead, she leaves that to the end as a kind of epilogue. So she is playing with comics conventions in an artistic way. One of my favourite characters is the worm named Christopher. Some of these stories have jokes about the fact that Christopher has no arms because he is a worm. In the first story, which is about them making Christmas presents, one of the characters says, ‘I’m making an ashtray for Christopher,’ and Anna, the main character, says, ‘For Christopher? He doesn’t smoke.’ The idea of a smoking worm is hilarious, and they make him a scarf instead. This is what I mean, dialogue that’s not quite kid stuff, and not quite adult. They do adult things, but in an innocent universe of picnics and vacations and neighbours and that type of thing. This is the fifth Anna and Froga book from Drawn & Quarterly, which is arguably the best publisher of independent comics today. They did something really brilliant by translating this book. I hope that there will be more because it really caught on in audiences of all ages."

"Yes, this series has been a cultural and a publishing phenomenon in France, and I think now it is starting to be in the US, too. This is The Arab of the Future 2. The Arab of the Future [1] came out last year in English translation. In the US, every major literary mainstream publication was publishing reviews or think pieces about The Arab of the Future . It’s similar in some ways—and radically different in others—to Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Both are a view of conflict in the Middle East. Persepolis is about the Iran-Iraq war, the Islamic Revolution, and a right-wing, Islamic viewpoint, which The Arab of the Future also deals with, in part. Both have a child at the centre of the story. The child anchors the narrative, and we see events unfolding in a chronological, linear way from the point of view of the child. That was something that Persepolis established as a really compelling form. The Arab of the Future has echoes of that. In this particular book, the protagonist is six, so the book starts off with him as a young boy. Like Persepolis , it also mixes the heavy view of world political-historical conflicts with a charming, accessible and quite light-hearted retrospective narration. There’s a focus on the child but then a retrospective narration that gives us an adult point of view at the same time, which is very effective. Another thing that is very effective about The Arab of the Future is the colour palette, which is very friendly — mostly pink and black, with a little bit of red and green coming in. The surface of the book is very accessible, whereas the content is often very difficult, like children being brutally beaten at school, for example, or an honour killing which forms a big part of its plot. Flipping through pages which are mostly pink and drawn with a certain kind of lightness and exaggeration, you wouldn’t expect something as serious as a murder. There are other translations planned, and the latest editions in the series are already available in France. It is an ongoing serial book project. The story is given even greater resonance by the fact that Riad Sattouf was the only cartoonist of Arab descent on the staff of Charlie Hebdo — and for over 15 years. He had actually just stepped down from his position at Charlie Hebdo —for reasons unrelated to the content of the magazine—before the shooting in January 2015. As someone closely aligned with Charlie Hebdo , he did a piece for their first issue after the massacre. People have been very curious about his point of view as a Frenchman and as a Syrian. He actually had a very moving quote in a profile of him in the Guardian in which he said, ‘I’m not French. I’m not Syrian. I’m a cartoonist.’"

"Charles Burns, in my view, is a real master of the creepy. He is a lovely person, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life, but, in his comics, it’s hard to be as creepy as Charles is. Part of what is interesting about Last Look and really attracts me to it are the cultural references. You mentioned the really strong French comics tradition which is also referred to as the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, with works like Astérix and Tintin being globally famous. Charles Burns created this trilogy specifically to the physical dimensions of the Franco-Belgian album format. He did that on purpose to pay homage to the Franco-Belgian tradition that produced Tintin . This book is a kind of skewed take on the Tintin adventure story. A cat named Inky is like the dog named Snowy. So punk subculture is also a big thread of the book. He has this Tintin -like mask that he wants to wear when he performs his avant-garde performances inspired by William Burroughs. This book is just an incredible mashup of different cultural references. There are tons of Tintin references, to specific panels from Tintin . There are references to Burroughs, and Burroughs as a figurehead for punk culture and to cut-up culture in general. Romance comics are also a big theme of this book, as is art school. I love how these characters name-drop. They are talking about people like Louise Bourgeois, they’re creating art projects in the style of their favourite artists. So we get a density of references here, distilled in a really fascinating, very personal way. Yes, maybe the Oscar of the comics world. I actually went to the Eisner Awards this past summer. It was so much fun. It takes place in San Diego, the Friday night of the Comic-Con weekend. It’s worth noting that there are very few people in comics who have the virtuosity of line that Charles does. His execution and this very particular style that he has, with the thickness in black line, really sets his work apart from most other cartoonists. He is technically an incredible master of the form. You can see this in the way he uses shading, all the heavy black lines that go into it. What is interesting about this work as opposed to Black Hole —which was his other big graphic novel project—is that this is in colour. He’s working in colour for the first time in a long time, in addition to his amazing black, heavily inked pages. It is very hard to describe Charles’s style. There’s something that codes ‘retro’ about it, but it’s like retro plus, because if you go back and look at the fifties comics, then that’s what Charles does, but to excess. He combines genres like the horror comics and the romance comics with the contemporary novel. There is a story in Last Look in which one cares about characters in a way that one doesn’t really care about the pulp characters in fifties comic books. In terms of how it looks, he amplifies the style that we see in genre comics and makes it his own. It is slightly icier in his work than it is even in the 1950s comics. It looks even more artificial. It is like he’s ratcheted it up a notch. He is not so much borrowing from it, he’s recreated it."

"Arab of the Future 3 is created by the cartoonist Riad Sattouf who is both French and Syrian. His mother is French and his father is Syrian. This is the third installment in an ongoing series he is doing about his childhood in the Middle East. His parents are at the Sorbonne; his family followed his father, who became an academic to various locations in the Middle East, including to Libya. (The section about his life in Libya is in an earlier volume.) Then his father moved the family back to the village he came from in Syria. “Comics are everywhere now—in bookshops, libraries and universities” This instalment of this ongoing story takes place from 1985 to 1987 in France a bit, but mainly in a village in Syria. One really gets a sense of Syrian politics and culture in the mid-1980s, told through the lens of his family. His parents aren’t getting along very well. There are a lot of clashes between his father’s more traditional views and family and his mother’s views, forged during her French upbringing. One of the things this book does so well is to show how political the personal is, if it makes any sense to invert that idiom. It balances attention to the world historical stage with attention to what is happening within this family—like whether or not Sattouf should be circumcised, and an honor killing in the extended family. Some really serious issues are refracted through the lens of family in a really interesting way. Riad Sattouf uses color as a narrative force in this book and throughout the series. It’s most effective in this volume. He uses a dual chromatic look for the world that he’s creating in his comics. Different countries are associated with different colors. The parts that take place in Syria tend to be pink and black. Pink is pretty pastel color that sometimes works at an angle to the violent content of the book. In France, the dominant colors are black and an icy blue, which actually lacks the warmth of the pink associated with Syria. Then, whenever there’s a scene representing anger or violence, it tends to be illustrated in red. I actually mentioned this in a review of this book that I published in my New York Times Book Review column: it’s almost like red is this free-floating country—that he visits more than he would like. It’s a really ingenious use of color to express an emotional landscape. When I was writing about diagrammatic capacity in Why Comics? I wasn’t thinking of color, but of course color can obviously be part of what one looks at when one looks at a diagram. In a way, yes, the color is functioning as a map or a diagram of Sattouf’s world."

"Julie Doucet, a French-Canadian cartoonist who lives in Montreal, decided to call her comic book, which she started self-publishing in 1987, Dirty Plotte . Just to translate, plotte means ‘cunt’. Julie is widely revered by all sorts of people, so the publication of the Complete Julie Doucet in a box set composed of two hardcover volumes was a huge event in the world of comics. I’ve actually written about her before for ArtForum . She did these incredible comics from 1987 until she stopped making comics in the year 2000, when she turned to printmaking, bookmaking and collage. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are a lot of gems in this collection. Many of the comics’ plots are feminist, focused on reclamation of the bodily. There’s a lot about sex and menstruation—classics like a well-known comic called “Heavy Flow,” in which she turns into a Godzilla-like figure, bleeding and tearing down buildings while looking for a Tampon. She depicts a surrealistic fantasy escape in which the attention to women’s bodies is violent. There are comics in which the female protagonist character rips off her own breasts and guts herself. A lot of penises get chopped off. There’s a lot of lopping off of body parts in general. Doucet is known for this incredible psychic landscape. “A lot of penises get chopped off. There’s a lot of lopping off of body parts in general” That dark, surreal work is beautifully combined with brighter pieces that are more tethered to reality. There’s an autobiographical story called “My New York Diary” which ran across several different issues. It anatomizes the life of a young woman moving to New York City to move in with a boyfriend. The story tracks the decline of their relationship. It is a signal text in feminist autobiographical comics. So it’s really exciting to get all of her different kinds of work collected together here. Interesting. So, I think it’s similar to literary publishing. All sorts of terms stick and don’t stick. “Alternative comics”—heavy quote marks—was a phrase that really stuck to describe work that was happening in the 80s and 90s. Many of the same comics artist like Charles Burns and the Hernandez brothers are still publishing, but people don’t call their work ‘alternative’ anymore. Alternative was just one of those eighties and nineties terms anyway, right? Like alternative music. These days, people talk about ‘indie music’ and ‘indie comics.’ So there are all sorts of appellations for comics. “Independent comics publishing is auteur-driven” But I think the only one that’s been really important is the distinction between underground—an independent—and commercial. You mentioned Julie Doucet started off in the underground. What that means is that she literally self-published her work. Dirty Plotte used to be a self-published fanzine. Again, there’s so many different words for the same thing, people now call fanzines ‘mini-comics.’ But self-published work is underground work: in other words, outside of any commercial systems of distribution. Returning to the example of Doucet, she was picked up by Drawn & Quarterly , which is an independent publisher. The independent publishers are distinct from huge commercial companies, like Marvel and DC. They’re not owned by media conglomerates. Independent publishers don’t employ teams of people to produce comics. Independent comics publishing is auteur-driven."

"Nick Drnaso made my top five in 2016; I’ve been a fan of his for a long time and I was really happy to see that other people have become big fans of his too through the attention surrounding the Booker Prize. Sabrina has a really startling story and a really startling style. It’s an amazing economical example of comics fiction today and was appropriately embraced by the world of fiction. For instance, not only was it recognized by prize committees, it also attracted blurbs from the literary likes of Zadie Smith. It’s a very dark story about the kidnapping and murder of a young woman, and the aftermath of that murder and how her boyfriend tries to cope with her death. “The simpler the rendering, the more a reader can see themselves in the characters portrayed” Part of what this book does really powerfully is pay attention to the process of mourning and grief. It’s also a searing media critique: it comes out in the story that the person who had murdered Sabrina had had filmed the murder, and the tape is leaked. The book takes on the painful subject of conspiracy theorists who deny that the murder happened. So it becomes a book about mourning and modern media, rendered in a minimalist style that’s very stripped down and effective given the maximalist parameters of the plot. A couple of things. First, there is a lot of attention to expressiveness in this book. The characters’ rigid, blocky bodies draw readerly attention to the characters’ faces. For instance, the cover is just a stripped-down, three-quarters-angle portrait of Sabrina. So, like all the panels, attention is drawn to the face. It invites readers in a participatory way to look for reactions in gestures, body language, and facial expressions. This is a quality of comics that Scott McCloud talked about: the simpler the rendering, the more a reader can see themselves in the characters portrayed. Sabrina is a really good example of that. We find ourselves searching the faces on the page."

"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."

"Ariel Schrag, who’s now in her late thirties, started doing autobiographical comics about her life when she was in high school. She did a separate comic book series for each year of high school; they have separate names and series names like Awkward and Definition and Potential. She’s very good, though not as prolific these days, so it’s so exciting to have a new autobiographical work from her. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book has an ingenious structure. It flows year by year through her young life, through collected chronologically-ordered autobiographical stories each labelled with a title, a year and an age. The first story is called “Jilly,” which is the name of a childhood friend. Unlike Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who weaves in and out of fantastical stories, we can follow this protagonist’s development, including her attempts as a young person in middle school to fit in, and then her coming out and then her attempts as an older person to fit into different kinds of social scenes. The dominance of digital and internet and online everything in our lives has made us all more sophisticated about the interplay between words and the images that inundate us, the logos, graphics and photographs. But there is something specific to the simplicity and intimacy of the dynamics between drawing and words that makes comics more relevant today. I feel like all of the work that I chose exploits that intimacy in different ways."

"Alison has a strip that’s been running for a long time called Dykes to Watch Out For, but this is an autobiographical book. ‘Fun Home’ is short for the funeral home Alison’s dad ran when she was a child. It’s a book that blew me away and continues to blow me away every time I read it – and I must have read it five or six times by now: probably the best book I’ve read in the past ten years in any genre or form. It’s an incredibly crafted book in which the chapters are not chronological but thematic, and each chapter is keyed to a book that her father loved. So it’s not a book about what happened to her father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide a few months after Alison herself came out when she was 19. It’s about looking through a family archive to try and get a sense of her father’s particularity. She gives the plot away right at the beginning. He jumps backwards in front of a truck on the Pennsylvania highway, and the rest of the book is this incredibly moving, powerful investigation of her own childhood. An adult investigation of a family archive of documents, photographs, diaries, objects, which belonged to her father. She’s searching for his identity; how she can relate to him and where the points of disconnection are. She’s investigating what the lived life of her closeted gay father must have been like. But part of what’s fascinating to me about the book is that she redraws the archival material by hand: the photographs, the letters, the police reports, even her own childhood diaries. When comics are interesting, they’re a hand-made form. That’s the connection between comics and autobiography . On every page of the comic you have an index of the body of the person making it. I think redrawing all these documents gives her a way of going back into her family history and marking it with her own body. It’s an amazing act of self-possession – taking control of the archives, making a shadow archive, mimicking. It’s very much about being a child – what it’s like being a child relating to parents."

"I would say that Art Spiegelman is the most famous and influential cartoonist alive. And I would also argue that he’s the most important figure in the literature of the boomer generation. Paul Auster and Art are friends, and Art nominated Paul when I suggested this to him. The publication of the first volume of Maus in 1986 was absolutely a terrain-shifting moment. It was nominated for a National Book Critic Circle award in the category of biography and people freaked out. In 1991, the second half was on the New York Times bestseller list on the fiction side of the ledger. Art wrote a letter to the Times complaining and, for the first time in the history of that list, they published his letter and moved it to non-fiction. So it’s this pushing on taxonomy that Maus accomplished and which fascinates me so much. Maus changed the face of comics and also modern literature. Breakdowns was first published in 1978 in an edition of 5,000 copies, 1,000 of which were ruined in an accident at the printers. For years it’s been a rare, coveted book, so when Pantheon republished it in 2008 it was unbelievable. I remember seeing a used first edition of Breakdowns in a New York store for $375 and it was on sale. It was the book everybody wanted but couldn’t afford, and now it costs $27.50. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book collects all of Art’s work from the 1970s, when he was really pushing on received notions about what comics as a narrative form could do. Broadly, the comics in Breakdowns are heavily modernist or avant-garde comics. They play with conventions of time, space, causality, setting the bar very high for comics quite early on. But a lot of people haven’t been aware of Breakdowns until recently, when the Pantheon edition came out. It’s a collection of several different stories, one of which is a three-page version of ‘Maus’. There’s ‘Prisoner on The Hell Planet’, which would later appear in Maus. But there’s also ‘Cracking Jokes: A Brief Enquiry into Various Aspects of Humour’, which is kind of the first comics essay, featuring, amongst other things, Freud as a character. It’s Art really going out on a limb, without a supporting culture already there, taking comics as far as they can go."

"Joe Sacco is the foremost figure in what he calls ‘comics journalism’ – he really established this category. He’s done several other really powerful and important works, like Palestine and another about Bosnia. But what’s so powerful to me about Footnotes in Gaza is the way it examines an event that happens in the past, and the way that event has affected the present and is affected by the present. The relationship is really on the surface. He conducted a lot of research about 1956, a lot of research into the massacres that happened then, and then he drew them. He makes his investigation really explicit, the business of both writing and drawing the past. So, for example, he includes passages where he’s tracking down the very few remaining survivors of these massacres and he fills out their testimonies with his own sense of what their accounts would actually have looked like. Spiegelman calls this ‘materialising the past’. In Maus, Art materialises his father’s and his own history. And in Footnotes in Gaza Joe Sacco is interviewing people and doing his own research and then very meticulously materialising this history."

"One Hundred Demons, yes, I suppose. Though it’s still reflecting on history . Joe calls his work ‘comics journalism’. Lynda Barry calls hers ‘autobifictionalography’. Which I think is brilliant and hilarious. So on the table of contents page, which is this beautiful, dense, colourful collage, she draws two check boxes after the question: ‘Are these stories true or false?’ She ticks both. She’s interested in telling us from the very beginning that she’s subjective. Well, the content’s pretty dark: suicide, sexual abuse, so forth. One’s about growing up in a Filipino family with neighbours that aren’t. It’s not for children, but it’s definitely about children. What I love about this book is that, like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, it’s a life story but it isn’t told chronologically. It’s told thematically, so there’s one chapter that’s called ‘Girlness’, another called ‘Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend’. It’s a constant circling in to certain issues, and each chapter is preceded by a beautiful, dense, two-page collage. It’s a book meant for a wide audience but which also contains these stand-alone art pieces. It’s also one of the funniest books I’ve read in my entire life."

"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’."