Today I learned the sad news that the lovely, ever generous, and formative cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb died at the age of 74. To know Aline is to be friends with the most vivacious of people; a woman generous with her love and time; an indefatigable supporter of art, especially for her people—fellow cartoonists. What follows is a newly edited version of my introduction for Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s book launches for our 2018 reprint of Love That Bunch…
This may seem unrelated, but as someone in comics, I get asked one question over and over again: did you read comics growing up and what comics did you read? And yes, I did, of course, but not in that maniacal, obsessive way that makes everyone in comics feel not worthy when they haven’t read the complete canon of comics. So I won’t bore/horrify you with the details of which comics I read growing up, I will just start with what I feel is the first pivotal comic book I acquired and consumed. As an adult living in New York City’s East Village, while going to university in the early-90s, I bought the iconic Twisted Sisters: a Collection of Bad Girl Art anthology. A book I have carried from apartment to apartment, from the US to Canada, that I have opened so many times it has torn in two. A book that I just revisited with the recent death of Aline’s friend, fellow cartoonist and co-conspirator Diane Noomin. I didn’t expect to pick it up again so soon. The collection was edited by her friend Diane, and it’s original incarnation was a follow-up of sorts to Aline and Diane’s original iconic series of the same name from 1976 that ran for two decades.
Twisted Sisters blew my mind. This paperback collection unwittingly set me on the path to Drawn & Quarterly ten years later, and to become the publisher twenty years later. I don’t know if while reading it, I really understood its importance in the way that I do now. Its historical context, its contemporary context at the time, and the influence it would eventually wield. I just remember being at the Tower Records, and seeing the self-portraits of female cartoonists and wanting to read it. In this book, I encountered D+Q cartoonists such as Julie Doucet, Debbie Drechsler, and Mary Fleener, as well as Carol Lay, and other female cartoonists. And of course, the one and only, Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
The next time I came across Aline was the original out of print edition of the book D+Q would eventually reprint, Love That Bunch, which I found in New York City. Again, I was completely awestruck by how raw, unfiltered, and real Aline’s comics were. We live in a world now with no filters, no boundaries, but this wasn’t the case in the seventies. I was creeped out but enchanted; disturbed but fascinated. It’s not a lack of vanity that I find compelling in Aline’s work, but the recognizing of her actual vanity—our vanity—in a simple straightforward way.
Much like I had never seen anyone talk about their period in contemporary pop culture like Julie did in Twisted Sister, reading Bunch Plays with Herself was indescribable to me as a “new adult.” Popping her pimple, okay. Her finger up her dirty smelly butt, ummm say what?? Masturbating. Yes, all that. “My body is an endless source of entertainment.” Amazing in 1975, amazing in 1992, and still amazing today in 2022. Why does anyone care about Aline? This is why.
Cut to a few years later, when I read her memoir Need More Love, which I became obsessed with. This book, decorated with glitter and barbies. While Aline needed more love, I needed one thing–to know whether or not the comics and stories Aline told were actually Aline. Or if it was a show. No one could be this honest, especially about her relationship with her husband, I thought. She must be putting us on. And this book is singular in so many ways. It’s part photo album, part monograph of her comics and paintings, and many short autobiographical essays recounting her childhood on Long Island: how she went to school with Peggy Lipton; how she met her husband Robert; and what it was like to draw autobiographical comics in 1971.
Then, in 2007, I found myself alone at the Angoulême comics festival and walking down the aisle in the Nouveau Monde Tent, I looked up and saw Aline sitting at the back of a booth, all by herself, with no fanfare. I stopped in my tracks. I looked around to see if anyone else noticed, no one cared, and I gathered up my courage and introduced myself. She invited me out for a glass of wine. (Chat Noir, mais oui) And we spoke about many things, but the one thing that I remember most from this evening is telling Aline how I had moved to Montreal and was struggling to learn French, to which she told me that the surefire way to learn French is really easy: I should find a French lover. And she meant this. Then I had the answer to my question of whether the Aline we see in her comics is really Aline, if the honesty from Need More Love is real, and I knew that it was.
Our edition of Love That Bunch had been in the works, in many forms, ever since that meeting. Originally published in 1989, it has been out of print ever since. In fact, when preparing for our store event, a coworker asked me “if it could be” that Aline had no books under her own name in the market. Yes, before May of 2018, you could not buy a new copy of any book by Aline Kominsky. Many of her male peers from that era had their books, and there were worthy and rightly-expensive collections, but no single book by Aline Kominsky. If you were lucky, you could score a copy of Need More Love from a reseller.
D+Q’s 2018 Love That Bunch edition features comics from various Weirdos, Twisted Sisters, Power Pak, and more.
I visited Aline in 2017 in France as we were putting the book to bed. I got to sit down with her for the first time since that initial meeting ten years earlier, and I realized how big of a deal the new edition of Love That Bunch was for her. And how that might be the last time she would have a book tour, which sadly now is fact. (For the tour for Need More Love, the original publisher went out of business at the same time as the tour.) Mainly, I realized how she had never been accepted as a cartoonist in the company of her peers separate from her husband, and frankly how she was okay with that. It was me who was bothered! I also realized, most importantly, that while living in France she had never met many of the current cartoonists and readers she has inspired. I was able to hear her talk about how electrifying it was to read Julie Doucet’s work for the first time back when she was an editor of Weirdo.
When I was in my twenties reading my Twisted Sisters collection, there was no internet. I didn’t know about how it fit into history, how it followed Wimmin’s Comix. I do now. And if you don’t, get your hands on Fantagraphics’ wonderful Trina Robbins edited collection. I have read Aline’s oeuvre many times now and I realize how significant these comics are—and this edition is—on my own life, but also how much it influenced cartoonists and professionals in and around my age, such as Lauren Weinstein, Vanessa Davis, Leela Corman, and Jessica Campbell. The influence of Aline, as well as the other cartoonists from Wimmin’s Comix, finally received their due in the 21st century.
While editing this book I was nervous how the comics would be accepted forty years later—Aline’s early work is very much underground comics. It was the early ’70s, Bay Area. Comics historian Hillary Chute wrote the introduction to D+Q’s career-spanning collection and stated perfectly what Aline’s comics meant in the early ’70s: “There were few stories then—in comics or anywhere else—that captured the texture and range of women’s lives, demonstrating the reality of abjection and pleasure and everything in between,” going further to note how Aline perfected relaying the complicated, contradictory lives of women.
My favorite comics in the collection, however, are the newer comics Aline created later in her life.
Rereading “My Very Own Dream House” today, it now serves as a mini-autobiographical overview of her life, a plane crash that connects her present life to her past. But it recounts moving to France and learning french as an adult, as I stated, an act that I can very much relate to. So this panel of her phonetic and frenetic French while speaking to a woman with perfect French, makes me laugh every time. When I visited her in France, listening to Aline speak in her Long Island proudly imperfect French was delightful. French is not a generous language to make mistakes in. But Aline spoke it with such don’t-give-a-damn panache. It gave me more courage to “parler plus en français.” I never did get that lover though…
And if the last panel Of What Use Is An Old Bunch doesn’t make you laugh, then why are you even reading this tribute.
It’s not often I get to spend quality time with cartoonists outside of a convention. And sadly with COVID, even spending time at a convention is now rare. For the release of Love that Bunch, Aline came to Montreal and I was able to spend a few days with her along with my coworker Julia, including a five-hour train ride to Toronto. What did we talk about on a train? Well, obviously: how we are mutual fans of her creative peer Betsey Johnson and how to buy vintage ’90s Betsey Johnson online, (Aline told me she bought it from Depop and Poshmark).
A few highlights from 2018’s events:
Aline outside Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.
Hearing Hillary Chute interview Aline in Montreal with such knowledge and respect, using her research and insight into Aline’s work to highlight her importance as a cartoonist to the audience.
Going out for dinner in Montreal with Aline and Julie Doucet whose monograph we published in 2018, Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet. Aline and Julie hadn’t seen each other in twenty or more years. The mutual respect and admiration was electrifying. After all of those years, it was only in 2018 when Julie was able to share a meal and spend time with Aline, and as Julie likes to note, at a dinner that was mostly attended by women.
We then went to Toronto, where we had Aline’s event in a church, and she stated how much she LOVED christian imagery.
Hosting the Toronto event was comedian and writer Monica Heisey (who at the time was writing for the sketch comedy show Baroness Von Sketch) trace Aline’s comedic lineage to today’s female comedians. (Psst Monica has a book coming out this January.
The audiences in both Montreal and Toronto were almost entirely women. The men who attended were cartoonists. I can’t explain how rarely this happens. Here’s a couple of superfans in Toronto.
Hearing writer and editor Serah-Marie McMahon stand up in the Q+A and tell Aline in Toronto “Aline, you have such a sense of clothing in your comics, I have never really come across this in comics.” Aline was tickled with delight. To think that in 2018, someone is reacting to the style choices Aline made in 1978, and that they still think it is singular. Here’s a photo of Serah-Marie with Joe Ollmann.
Whenever anyone comes to town there is one cartoonist they want to see, and that cartoonist is Chester Brown. Chester and Aline hadn’t seen each other since the Steve Solomon days of the Beguiling. Also in our company in Toronto were fellow cartoonists Jillian Tamaki, Ebony Flowers, Nick Maandag, and Joe Ollmann attending dinner to meet the one and only Aline, as well as writer Anna Fitzpatrick. Because who doesn’t want to meet a legend, if you can?
Just. Listening. To. Aline. Talk. Especially in the CBC: Q studio interview, which is how we ended our trip. Listen to it.
Thank you to everyone who has our edition of Love that Bunch. I felt a sense of urgency at the time to showcase Aline: the Cartoonist, and to organize a tour that provided the space and the dialogue for Aline to reflect on her career, meet her peers, and her fans. I just didn’t realize how urgent it was. It still feels ludicrous to think Aline is no longer with us. Aline was beyond spry. Handstand, headstand, face pose—Aline could do anything. I’ll miss hearing her speak French by way of her Long Island-NYC-West Coast accent.
Thank you to everyone involved with the 2018 tour: Hillary Chute, Monica Heisey, Peggy Orenstein, Naomi Fry, Type Books, Green Apple Books, Word Books, Librairie D+Q, St Stephens in the Field Church, Housing Works, and Bay Area Book Festival, who gave Aline Kominsky her place in the sun to shine as the legendary, complicated, and oh-so-funny cartoonist she was and will always be. Thank you to her agents Lora Fountain and Judy Hansen, who when I became a slight stalker insisting Aline needed and deserved her own context, they could have published her anywhere, they could have done nothing, but they listened.