All You Need Is...

Last year set a benchmark for women cartoonists with nearly a half dozen major works published, including three in my top ten. This year looks to continue this important upswing with the appearance of Aline Kominsky Crumb's Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir (MQ Publications; 383 pages; $30). Another in the long line of interesting female artists who get overshadowed and even vilified as a result of being married to a beloved male artist (in this case, Robert Crumb), Kominsky Crumb gets the solo attention she deserves with this new book. Need More Love delivers some of the most endearingly uninhibited comix ever put to paper.

An artist who exclusively explores her own life for her material, Need More Love reveals Kominsky Crumb as one of the pioneers of the "autobio" style of comic making. Need More Love smartly arranges this work in an order that tells her life story, alternating with photos and short texts that knit the pieces together into a full memoir. Smart, funny and seemingly completely open about her life, Kominsky Crumb has assembled the best, most colorful and even juicy personal history of a baby boomer yet seen in this medium.

Born in Long Island, New York, in 1948, Kominsky Crumb grew up in the type of family she characterizes as "post-war jerk." Kominsky Crumb's rejection of America's "jerk" culture becomes the recurring leitmotif of the book. For her, anything jerk involves "sleaziness, out of control materialism, upward striving, tension, financial problems, selfishness and misery." The early chapters gleefully kick over the rock of the American family. One story, "Wiseguys," for example, details her "loser" father's various bottom-feeding money schemes, including a burglar alarm company whose name, "B.A.R.G." he explained was "grab spelled backwards! And our motto is 'grab your money and run!'" Another story tells of how her little brother, who was a little too "sensitive" for such ambitious parents, suffered endless acrimony. His fantasy for his teddy bear was that "teddy wants to die."

Kominsky Crumb deals with her mother, called Blabette in the book

Out of this horror show of raging fights, "mother's-little-helpers," and constant humiliation, Kominsky Crumb establishes the sub-themes that will run through her life and art: negative self image, always striving to please others and the need to escape. Subsequent chapters detail the author's early adulthood as the quintessential hippie chick. At 19 she hangs out in New York's Lower East Side and soon becomes pregnant amidst a series of lovers, none of whom she can recall since she was so high all the time. These stories of free love, massive drug and alcohol abuse and the sense of being part of major cultural movement have all been seen before, but the author manages to walk the fine line between idealized "you had to be there" representations and a jaundiced review of her youthful indiscretions.

After giving up the baby for adoption and getting a quickie marriage to get herself out of New York, Kominsky Crumb winds up in San Francisco where she discovers the circle of early women comix artists who would establish "Wimmin's Comix," the pioneering feminist underground comic book. While acknowledging the importance of her meeting this group, her characterization of the core contributors ("a backbiting, nasty group of women") typifies the author's blunt and often surprising revelations in this book.

Around the same time as she begins creating work for "Wimmin's Comix" she meets Robert Crumb, marrying him a few years later. Their atypical marriage, with his open philandering and her taking a permanent lover she calls her "second husband," seems par for the course for a woman determined to escape the banality of "ordinary" American life. In spite of its unconventional nature the Crumb's relationship certainly appears to be a model of support and mutual fulfillment. Can it really be true? While Need More Love reveals all the pain of growing up, either Kominsky Crumb has been blessed with a near perfect marriage or something's missing.

The relationship has been a mixed blessing on Kominsky Crumb's artwork, raising its exposure while exposing it to unfair comparison. Even worse, she says, people assume that her husband does all the writing and drawing on their collaborative works. In many ways her artwork perfectly counterbalances Crumb's. Where he has one of the finest drafting skills of any living cartoonist her "tortured scratching" (her words) makes a mockery of proportion, weight and space. People hate her for it just as people hate Robert Crumb for his outlandish depictions of women and blacks. But just as Crumb's art comes from daring to confront his own prejudices, it takes guts to put your cartoon's next Crumb's, and Kominsky Crumb's artwork has a brutish appeal in her flat, crude style. It suits her content in its bluntness and in its literal "colorfulness."

The last third of the book concerns her final move, to France, along with her husband and their child. It's easily the least interesting part of the book as it's also the most narcissistic of an already intensely self-involved work. It ends poorly, with pointless photos of her French chateau alongside a fatuous interview by her publisher. Filled with advice like, "shopping can pick you up, just by distracting you from grim realities..." It reads more like a spread from InStyle magazine than a continuation of the earlier, penetrating work. Giving benefit of the doubt, it could be read as failed sarcasm. If that was the point, the failure, interestingly, is in the lack of any comix. Kominsky Crumb's artwork clearly changes the tone of her artistic voice, allowing the humor to come out.

When it works, which is 90% of the time, Aline Kominsky Crumb's Need More Love provides a fascinating opus of an important cartoonist's work and a model for autobiographical comix. Kominsky Crumb seems to hold nothing back and has created a startling, frequently uproarious snapshot of art and life in postwar "jerk" America.

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