The artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who died on November 29th of pancreatic cancer, in the South of France, at the age of seventy-four, was a true original—a force of nature and a radiant light for all who encountered her or read her work. In many of her eulogies, she is being remembered for the comics that she created with her husband, the cartoonist R. Crumb, and for her relationship with him. But, to me, what stands out the most is her reality as a woman who was equally an artist, a mother, a wife, a friend, and a neighbor. Trained as a painter, she became a cartoonist after moving to San Francisco in the seventies and discovering the raw power of the underground-comix movement that introduced confessional autobiography to the medium. Inspired by personal storytelling in works such as Justin Green’s “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,” she made her own, using comics to portray her innermost reality. “It’s the only thing I know about,” she used to say. Even in that counterculture, where most of the published authors were straight white men, it was unusual—even radical—for a woman to appear in her own voice. She revelled in portraying herself in unvarnished words or crude drawings that made the reader feel one was peeking inside a diary, not a published work. Asked in the Guardian what it was like to live with a genius, she replied, “Robert is the best dishwasher I’ve ever met and he’s fun to talk to at the breakfast table. He always laughs at my jokes and is my best fan. And that’s what it feels like to live with a genius to me.”
My own husband, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who has been friends with Aline since their time in San Francisco, says, “She is the precursor to Lena Dunham, Amy Poehler, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman—women who are trying to grapple with their identities in a way that is not prettified. They are just trying to live and breathe as women with all their contradictions. And it’s a liberated and liberating way of looking at oneself.”
The following is a short strip that Aline wrote and drew recently with her daughter, Sophie, also a cartoonist.
Sourse: newyorker.com
