Aline Kominsky Crumb, Need More Love (MQ Publications, 2007). $30, hardcover.

By Hillary Chute

Most people—including many that love literary comics—don’t even know that Aline Kominsky Crumb, the wife of the hugely celebrated Robert Crumb, is a cartoonist. Yet Aline Kominsky Crumb is, in many ways, as much of a comics pioneer as her husband. Kominsky Crumb (nee Goldsmith) is responsible for publishing the first female-authored autobiographical comics story, titled “Goldie: A Neurotic Woman,” in 1972 in the inaugural issue of the underground title Wimmen’s Comix. (Justin Green, it is widely considered, was responsible a year or so earlier for kickstarting the genre with his tale of an OCD adolescence, “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.”)

A scratchy, messy comics story, “Goldie” shows the title character doing stuff such as masturbating with vegetables, thinking, “I bet no one else I know does this.” Courageous and funny, “Goldie” is a risky self-representation that fascinates not only for its taboo-breaking content and ultimate narrative of one woman’s liberation, but also for its visual expressivity. Kominsky Crumb’s page is a study in the sensual materiality of comics. Her pages look less drawn per se than like a series of marks; she deliberately rejects the fluidity of consistent style, alternating a character’s look widely from panel to panel. Her work as such registers a kind of struggle in its visual texture. Her rough and vibrant stories never feel like transparent representations; they reject an aesthetic of effortlessness. As such, they stand in contrast to the virtuosic, seemingly explosively natural drawing style of Robert Crumb. When Kominsky Crumb and her husband first started collaborating on comics together in the 1970s (a practice they continue to this day in the pages of the New Yorker), fans noted the difference—and not always politely. In the introduction to their co-authored collection Dirty Laundry Comics, the Crumbs recall a typical line on their George and Gracie comics routine: She may be a good lay, but keep her off the fucking page.

An important retrospective of this neglected artist’s work, Need More Love, alternates a selection of Kominsky Crumb’s comics from the past 35 or so years—some reprinted in beautiful color for the first time—with presentations of her paintings and glittery, colorful multimedia installations. (She’s an art school-trained painter). It also offers a range of family photographs and brief, interspersed chapters in which the author, in unpretentious prose, narrates the story of her (quite interesting) life so far: growing up in a horrible Long Island enclave with materialistic and abusive parents; running away to do drugs in the Village; getting pregnant at 19; giving up a baby; marrying young and moving out West; leaving her husband and landing in San Francisco; her meeting of the minds with a man, Crumb, vilified by the feminist community which first published her work; her escape to Southern France with her daughter and husband; and her non-monogamous yet happy and productive life with Crumb. Kominsky Crumb’s personal life—detailed so intimately in her comics stories, which are nearly all autobiographical—is riveting, but we also, importantly, get a sense here of her profound contribution to the burgeoning comics scene of the 70s, 80s, and 90s: first as co-founder of the seminal serial Twisted Sisters, which she developed as a reaction to the stifling version of feminism propounded by the Wimmen’s Comix community, and also as the longtime editor of the significant comics magazine Weirdo. 

With Kominsky Crumb’s previous collection, Love That Bunch—from which many of the comics stories here are drawn—soon to be out of print (Fantagraphics recently told me they had only 600 copies left), Need More Love couldn’t be coming out at a better moment. It showcases brave work by an artist whose style registers the ugliness of the realities she depicts with humor and sophistication. Kominsky Crumb has influenced a number of artists profoundly, from Robert Crumb to Lynda Barry, Phoebe Gloeckner to Alison Bechdel (who noted recently that Kominsky Crumb’s honesty about her sexual life was an inspiration). It’s an excellent time for her audience to be wider.