Aline Kominsky-Crumb 1948-2022
The mother of alternative comics has a thousand daughters.
The art of Aline Kominsky-Crumb was a raucous, lacerating laugh at herself, at the world, and at a legendary husband she gleefully (and collaboratively) brought back down to size. Would she have a place in the pantheon of graphic storytelling and comics (or comix, if you will) if she hadn’t been the wife of Robert Crumb, an artist who transformed his medium as completely as Beethoven, Picasso, and James Joyce transformed theirs? (Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. I’m not.) She certainly would have, because before Kominsky-Crumb came along in the early 1970s – along with Trina Robbins, Diane Noomin (who also passed away recently), and a handful of other women artists – the underground comix scene was a boys club, reflecting a horny, hairy rebelliousness as viewed exclusively from the male side of the drawing board and the bedroom.
But suddenly in 1973, there was Aline with her crudely drawn autobiographical tales of growing up unloved and indomitable in Long Island, with a monster mother (dubbed Blabette) taking chunks from her daughter’s soul while Kominsky-Crumb drew blood by drawing her revenge. Like Crumb and the artists he inspired in Zap and elsewhere, she laid her self-loathing and her fantasies and her sex life out in black-and-white drawings that remain as hilarious as they are outrageous. Unlike them, she was a gurl. And, unlike them, she made a lot of other gurls want to work in a lowbrow medium that suddenly seemed a lot like art.
Without Kominsky-Crumb (and, to be fair, the other artists of the pioneering Wimmen’s Comix and the breakaway title Twisted Sisters), we probably wouldn’t have Lynda Barry and Roz Chast as we know them, or Alison Bechdel of “Fun Home” and Marjane Satrapi of “Persepolis,” or a host of lesser-known but worthy talents of the 1980s and 90s – Carol Tyler, Phoebe Gloeckner, Julie Doucet, Mary Fleener, the late Dori Seda – and on into the new millennium. There are trace elements of Kominsky-Crumb’s DNA in performers like Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer — any woman who hammers her sexual and social neuroses into the weapon of comic art. But at heart, she remains the foundational role model for any teenage girl who picks up a Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen and starts putting all that mess inside her onto a clean, white page.
Okay, boys, too: Kominsky-Crumb’s fearless, anyone-can-do-this drawing style (the opposite of her husband’s Rabelaisian craftsmanship) and her staunch insistence on the comedy of this disaster we call life has a lot to say to men of all ages, as both example and corrective. But I do remember the look on a daughter’s face when she discovered Aline’s comix in her high school years and understood she’d found a soul sister and a bohemian aunt, one who gave her permission to say and think and feel everything that everyone around her said was off limits. That daughter is mourning this week, and so am I. So should we all.
(The Comics Journal has an excellent obituary on Kominsky-Crumb’s passing with fine selections of her work, including collaborations with husband Robert Crumb.)
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