Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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.
Finally, tell us about Love That Bunch by Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
I just met with her in France.
Two great cartoonists living together. Because she’s married to Robert Crumb, right?
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.’
How does her style look to you?
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’.
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Hillary Chute is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and her new book, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, comes out in October this year from Columbia UP. She is also associate editor of MetaMaus, a project by Art Spiegelman forthcoming from Pantheon in 2011.
