Love Among the Crumbs

Books

By STEVE DOLLAR
February 26, 2007

Back in the 1990s, the cartoonist Aline Kominsky Crumb and her husband, Robert Crumb — more famously known as R. Crumb to generations of underground comic book fans — launched their own autobiographical compendium. It was a kind of she-said, he-said window into their lives as married working artists as they raised a child and coped with their own neuroses and obsessions, articulated in an often extremely unflattering style.

"Giant egos. Bitterness. Intolerance," promised the handdrawn script on the cover. The collaboration's title? "Self-Loathing Comics."

There's quite a different message behind "Need More Love," Ms. Crumb's new book — she calls it a graphic memoir — which collects a lifetime of comics drawn by the 58-year-old artist, who began painting at age 8. The colorful panels, bursting with vernacular speech and graphic details, are illuminated by memoirs that follow her from unhappy childhood in Long Island to middle-aged contentment in a French village, where the Crumbs have resided for years.

"More shoes. More beauty. More spiritual enlightenment. More pleasure + fun," the cover declares, speaking to the path the artist has pursued in recent years. And, as photos inside make evident, the fitness-focused Ms. Crumb is vastly more attractive than many of her self-portraits would suggest.

"In my childhood I was treated really horribly," she said, speaking during a recent New York visit. "I grew up with a terrible selfimage. In my early comics, I'm a lot more grotesque than in my later ones." The artist jokes that in some panels, "I barely look human. But people laugh when they see that because there's always some self-recognition."

Ms. Crumb has worked alongside her celebrated husband since meeting him in 1971, though her pioneering work in what was called "wimmin's comics" has attracted much less attention over the years.

"All the work I did in underground comics reached such a small audience," she said. "The reason I did this book now is there's a much larger audience now for this kind of work, whereas before it was in the comics ghetto. And partly, it's my age. I have a lot to say at this point. With one foot in the grave, I better do it now!"

While much of the book documents Ms. Crumb's triumph over her troubled early home life — it also celebrates her unconventionally conventional marriage to Mr. Crumb, who became fixated on her outsized posterior from the outset. As fans know, one of Mr. Crumb's signatures is his flair for drawing exaggerated tushies. During their recent appearance at the New York Public Library, Mrs. Crumb gave her husband a Valentine's Day "pony ride" to the roaring delight of the capacity audience.

I'm a strong woman, I like to have my strength tested, and I like men to appreciate that I'm strong," Ms. Crumb said. "And Robert likes strong women that want to be dominated by him. It worked out pretty well." Though friends warned her that he was creepy, Ms. Crumb said she was irresistibly drawn to her future husband, whose work has always been unapologetically unpolitically correct, even while embracing and satirizing the most extravagant elements of the 1960s counterculture. "I was surprised at how sweet he was, and cute," she said. "Even though his work had all this violence in it. I like pale, skinny intellectual guys."

Reflecting on their romance, Ms. Crumb writes in "Need More Love": "After we ‘did it,' I showed Robert my comic. He really cracked up and from that moment on has always been my best audience. Our relationship could never have worked if we didn't share this mutual admiration for each other's work."

There's a third Crumb working as an artist: the couple's 25-year-old daughter, Sophie. "She's a tattoo artist, she does illustrations for Vice and Jane. Her work is her work," Ms. Crumb said, declining to make comparisons with her and her husband's styles. "She is a much better and more highly skilled artist than either Robert or I were at her age. She's got a different life experience, so it's a whole other body of work. We were a very nice mommy and daddy, but she's covered in tattoos, she lived in a squat in New York, she lived in Paris for a while. She's seen a lot already."

Given the popularity of graphic novels as a source for movie projects — a trend that may have been sparked by Terry Zwigoff's biographical documentary about Mr. Crumb, "Crumb," and continued with Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's film about Harvey Pekar's "American Splendor" series, much of which was illustrated by Mr. Crumb — it's not unimaginable that "Need More Love" could find its way to the screen one day. If it does, Ms. Crumb already has her own casting sorted out.

"Who can play me?" she asks, rhetorically. "Who's that Jewish comedienne? Sarah Silverman! Wouldn't that be good?"

An exhibit of works by Ms. Crumb is on display at Adam Baumgold Gallery (until March 17, 74 E. 79th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-861-7338).

Love Among the Crumbs

Books

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