![]() Another story I've read at least a dozen times is "Why the Bunch Can't Draw", which goes deep into exploring Kominsky-Crumb's tortured relationship to art and creation (more on this story below). One of Kominsky-Crumb's best-ever comics is the hilarious, warts-and-all "Of What Use is a Bunch?", in which she gleefully demonstrates thirteen reasons why she’s an unworthy person (#7: “She is lazy and self-indulgent”). ![]() The book begins with early, somewhat harsh tales like "The Young Bunch" (subtitle: "An Unromantic, Nonadventure Story"), in which Bunch is indeed quite unromantically (but explicitly) deflowered in the back of a car by an attractive lout, and “The Story of Blabbette ‘n’ Arnie", a harrowing account of her parent’s unhappy, abusive marriage and the toll it took on Kominsky-Crumb and her little brother. To wit: an animated version of Kominsky-Crumb appears as a quasi-fairy godmother in the excellent 2015 film of Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic memoir, Diary of a Teenage Girl, officially sealing Kominsky-Crumb’s rep as a genuine legend of underground comix.Īs in the first volume, all the Bunch classics are here. This tendency earned her legions of detractors from the get-go, but also a small but devoted fan base, which has only grown through the years. She consistently eschews the idealized, role model-type imagery championed by a particular branch of feminism in favor of self-deprecating but humorous honesty. Kominsky-Crumb reflexively lays bare intimate details of her life through her cartoon alter-ego, The Bunch, including explicit particulars of her bodily functions and sexual escapades, along with her fears, insecurities, self-delusions, feelings of guilt, and outright self-hatred. Her line appears untrained and often downright crude, but fearlessly committed to paper with a laissez-faire panache. ![]() Unlike some of her critics, I love her in-the-moment, scrawly, obsessively cross-hatched drawings. I became an instant, rabid fan and began seeking out her work, which I found hilarious, inspiringly candid, complex, and full of personality. Specifically, it was her midlife-crisis story, "Ze Bunch de Pareé Turns 40". I first encountered Kominsky-Crumb's comics in an old late-'80s issue of Weirdo. It's been a long, fraught journey and Kominsky-Crumb tells you all about it, in sometimes mortifying, often hilarious, occasionally moving, but always engaging detail. In the 1980s, she settles down into relatively sedate southern Californian domesticity with her (in)famous husband Robert Crumb and their young daughter Sophie, before finally moving to a small village in the south of France in the early 1990s. ![]() She begins with her childhood in a largely Jewish suburb on Long Island, raised by highly dysfunctional, neglectful/abusive parents, then charts her escape into post-college artistic bohemia in the Southwestern desert, then to life in the Bay Area underground comix scene of the late '60s and '70s. Taken together, the stories in Love That Bunch provide a compact, thematically rich autobiography, touching on every important aspect of Kominsky-Crumb's existence: family, sexual obsessions, food, motherhood, art, and various philisophical musings. The new edition features even more vintage comics than the original, plus significant recent work such as the thirty-page "Dream House". And this deluxe hardcover reissue of the original 1990 paperback Love That Bunch is a very welcome return indeed. Aline Kominsky-Crumb, the self-described Yoko Ono of comics-aka "Yoko Buncho"-is back.
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