![]() Instead, the strength of Love That Bunch lies not in striking moments but rather in the accrual of many such moments. Looking back over four decades at the strips that originally had a kind of punk rock allure, they instead feel a little bit quaint. In retrospect, though, those early diary comics aren't really shocking at all. And the fact that she illustrated these taboo stories with crude illustrations that didn't look traditionally beautiful only angered the establishment even more. Not a lot of women were openly and frankly discussing sex and periods and body image issues when Kominsky-Crumb started out. Kominsky-Crumb made her name with a kind of brutish honesty that at the time felt revolutionary. (One of my favorite panels is of Kominsky-Crumb's daughter, Sophia, vomiting while shouting "I HATE YOU, FRANCE!") The drawings become smaller and smaller, focusing more on figures than backgrounds or settings.īut when you flip to "Dream House" at the end of the book, you can see Kominsky-Crumb's cartoons have come full circle: once again, she's allowing more room for her art to breathe, and she's not bombarding the reader with too much over-explanation. Eventually, Kominsky-Crumb's narration dominates every page, with up to six individual word balloons per panel. But as you scan through the chronological progression, you can see words start to spread throughout the comic, like a mold outbreak on clean white tile. Her early work looks more like traditional comics, with smaller word balloons and more room for the art. The act of simply flipping through Bunch can teach you a lot about Kominsky-Crumb's evolution as an artist. ![]() Bunch collects her early work from the 1970s and 80s, and it also includes a long new story, "My Very Own Dream House," that looks back on Kominsky-Crumb's childhood. Thankfully a new reissue of Kominsky-Crumb's solo comics, Love That Bunch, reminds us that she's a cartoonist in her own right, and not simply an extension of her husband's drawing hand. For a few years, Drawn Together, the collection of the married couple's collaborations, has been the only work of Kominsky-Crumb's in print. The ironic cutesiness of those comics is nearly indiscernible from real cutesiness, and the juxtaposition of Crumb's formalist rigor next to Kominsky-Crumb's primitive illustrations is only good for a momentary thrill, and not a continued investigation. ![]() “Reading and drawing and painting were the things that saved me from a very difficult childhood,” she said in 2019, “with somewhat harsh parents.I'll admit, I'm not a huge fan of the jam comics made by the husband-and-wife team of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Robert Crumb. And it’s a liberated and liberating way of looking at oneself.” “They are just trying to live and breathe as women with all their contradictions. “She has something in common with Lena Dunham, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, women who are trying to grapple with their identities in a way that is not prettified,” Spiegelman, author of “Maus,” said in 2018. ![]() Much more recently, she said she also admired Lena Dunham and her HBO show “Girls,” and was thrilled to learn that Dunham had said she was influenced by Kominsky-Crumb’s artwork.Īuthor Art Spiegelman made a similar connection. Kominsky-Crumb said her creative influences included both German Expressionist art and the late comic Joan Rivers, whose standup routines she admired partly for their self-deprecating nature. Self-portraits that illustrate life stages of the iconic drawer.
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