Aline Crumb and Robert Crumb attend A Night at Crumbland celebrating Stella McCartney and Robert Crum Collaboration and the R. Crumb Handbook at the Stella McCartney Store, in New York City, April 12, 2005. (Nick Papananias\/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
So when an actual strong-legged Jewish cowgirl named Aline Kominsky walked into his life, it was love at first sight, and never wavered.<\/p>\n
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who died Wednesday at 74 in France of pancreatic cancer, was late to the revolution her husband launched in comics a few years before they met, with his Zap Comix. The \u201cx\u201d was a signifier of what was then known as \u201cunderground\u201d comics and referred to the unfiltered treatment of humanity that censorious publishers, politicians and public figures had all but washed out of the art.<\/p>\n
She soon fully embraced the art form and then helped transform it.<\/p>\n
Working with her husband and then on her own, Kominsky-Crumb brought to comics raw self-lacerating accountability and subverted crude stereotypes about Jewish women \u2014 including those peddled by her husband \u2014 by taking possession of them.<\/p>\n
She started out as a self-acknowledged sex object reviled by second-wave feminists and became a hero of younger feminists for modeling unfettered sexual expression. She was the brassy Jewish stereotype who became the muse who guided her husband to a deeper consideration of Judaism.<\/p>\n
Kominsky-Crumb, born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in 1948 in the Five Towns, a Jewish enclave on Long Island, had a Jewish upbringing that was in many ways conventional, horrifying and both at the same time. She wrote about the warmth of her grandparents\u2019 home and how she sought in it succor and about the pressures her materialistic parents placed on her. She said she was named for a Five Towns clothing store, Aline Ricky, that sold French fashion knockoffs. She resisted her mother\u2019s pressure to get a nose job.<\/p>\n
In one autobiographical comic, she recalls seeing one Jewish girl after another coming into school after plastic surgery. \u201cMe \u2018n\u2019 my friends developed a \u2018big nose pride,\u2019\u201d she writes, and one of the characters says, \u201cI could not stand to look like a carbon copy!\u201d<\/p>\n
She told fellow Jewish cartoonist Sarah Lightman about the ordeal. \u201cLike, I kept my nose, but it was really a close call, because my mother had me in Doctor Diamond\u2019s office and he measured my nose. I remember that. They took an instrument and measured your nose. And then he took a piece of paper and he said,\u2019 look, we can make it look like this.\u2019 And I said, \u2018Oh my God.\u2019 My mother said, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s gorgeous, gorgeous.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In her teens, Kominsky-Crumb fled the suburbs for Manhattan. She studied at Cooper Union, an art school, and lived on the Lower East Side, earning plaudits from her instructors for her painting, but getting bored. She had a baby and gave it up for adoption to a Jewish agency, an experience that scarred her, and later led her to become outspoken in advocating for abortion rights.<\/p>\n
After she married Carl Kominsky, they moved to Tucson, Arizona, which she called \u201chippie heaven.\u201d There, she left her husband for a cowboy who lived with two brothers and his father in what she said was \u201cthe middle of nowhere\u201d where she helped out on horseback, albeit under the influence of hallucinogens. (She said her beau was killed in a shootout with a romantic rival after she left.)<\/p>\n
In Tucson, she met two pioneers of underground comics, Kim Deitch and Spain Rodriguez. They encouraged her to move to San Francisco, which was the scene of the burgeoning movement.<\/p>\n
She did and met Crumb at a party in 1971, within three years of his having created \u201cHoneybunch Kaminski, the drug-crazed runaway\u201d (1968) and \u201cDale Steinberger, the Jewish Cowgirl.\u201d Kominsky-Crumb, who had kept her first husband\u2019s last name because it sounded more \u201cethnic\u201d than Goldsmith, was so taken with the her husband\u2019s lustful Jewish imaginings, and how closely she physically resembled them, that when she started creating her own, she named her avatar \u201cBunch,\u201d a shortened version of the character whose name most closely matched her own.<\/p>\n
It was kismet, except it wasn\u2019t at first. Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb got together, but maintained open relationships. Crumb endured Kominsky-Crumb\u2019s dalliances with other men for decades, but Kominsky-Crumb was not as able (or willing) to reciprocate. When one of Crumb\u2019s exes arrived at their commune in Mendocino, she told The Comics Journal in 1990, she was furious. \u201cI had a total s\u2014 fit,\u201d she said, \u201cI was wearing these giant platform shoes. I ran out the door and I fell and broke my foot in six places.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crumb sent the ex on her way and entertained the recovering Kominsky with a pastime he and his brother worked out as children: They would co-create a comic.<\/p>\n
That process drew the couple closer, and also became a decades-long unflinching chronicle of a relationship. A culmination, \u201cDrawn Together,\u201d was critically acclaimed when it came out in 2012.<\/p>\n
In one passage in the 2012 book, she gently chides her husband for resorting to antisemitic tropes \u2014 although it was tropes about loud, slightly unhinged, sexually voracious Jewish women that drew them together.<\/p>\n
One page depicts the couple in bed. Crumb is stung by an accusation of antisemitism from Art Spiegelman. (Spiegelman joined with Crumb to launch the underground comics scene in the 1960s, but they grew apart as Spiegelman, who would author the Holocaust chronicle \u201cMaus,\u201d sought to attach an overarching philosophy to the genre, while Crumb continued to crave crude authenticity.)<\/p>\n
Crumb says that Spiegelman \u201cseems to be taking my ruminations about the Jews as antisemitism \u2026 I certainly didn\u2019t mean it as such.\u201d Kominsky-Crumb draws herself into the panel, listening to her husband, as a little girl wearing tefillin, a T-shirt with \u201ckosher\u201d in Hebrew and a Star of David pendant. In the next panel, once again appearing as a grown woman in a negligee, she makes clear to Crumb why she feels vulnerable as a Jew in the marriage.<\/p>\n
\u201cDahling, you do call the Jewish religion \u2018Brand X\u2019,\u201d she says.. \u201cNow I might even think that\u2019s true in some ways \u2026 and I\u2019m one o\u2019 them \u2026 I\u2019m allowed to say that!\u201d<\/p>\n
Crumb draws himself as wounded but also awakened. \u201cOh, I see \u2026 ulp.\u201d Crumb dedicated his masterwork, \u201cThe Book of Genesis,\u201d a searing illustrated narrative of the Bible\u2019s first book, to Aline.<\/p>\n
The Crumbs\u2019 collaborative work was celebrated among aficionados, but it wasn\u2019t until 1994\u2019s \u201cCrumb,\u201d a documentary directed by Crumb\u2019s close Jewish friend, Terry Zwigoff, that she emerged into the broader culture. A vibrant, peripatetic Kominsky-Crumb cares for their daughter, Sophie, and revels in their life in a small French village, where they had moved a few years earlier, while Crumb continues to hold back, playing the wounded, misunderstood artist.<\/p>\n
It was an arrival of sorts for Kominsky-Crumb. She had for a time been marginalized even on the underground scene, her deceptively simple art derided as sloppy. She helped found the Wimmen\u2019s Comix collective in 1972, and wrote about her Jewish upbringing in the first issue, a piece entitled \u201cGoldie: A Neurotic Woman.\u201d But she was soon frozen out because some of her colleagues thought her musings about longing to be dominated (and her tendency to dress that way to please Crumb) were denigrating to women. \u201cThe Yoko Ono of Comics,\u201d is how the New York Times described her early years.<\/p>\n
She left the collective and joined another Jewish woman artist, Diane Noomin, in launching \u201cTwisted Sisters\u201d in 1976. Its cover depicts hers seated on a toilet wondering \u201cHow many calories in a cheese enchilada.\u201d The message to her erstwhile colleagues, who depicted women heroically, was clear: Kominsky-Crumb would indulge her full unvarnished self.<\/p>\n
It would take decades, but a later generation of feminists would come to understand her autobiographical \u201cBunch\u201d not as a self-loathing caricature but as a means of understanding ones whole self. In 2020, Lightman launched an interview with Kominsky-Crumb by reviewing a 1975 cartoon, \u201cBunch plays with herself\u201d that shocked even the underground scene at the time with its graphic depictions of a woman exploring every corner of her body.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t do it to be disgusting but it\u2019s, like, about every horrible and fun thing you can do with your body,\u201d Kominsky-Crumb told Lightman. \u201cI think it\u2019s an amazing piece of feminist art,\u201d Lightman said in the interview, \u201cbecause women are drawn to be gazed at, and [here we see] their bodily juices, and everything. \u2026 The last panel is the best. \u2018My body is an endless source of entertainment\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2007, she and Crumb created a cover for the Jewish counterculture magazine Heeb, where she is cradling him in her arms. \u201c\u201dI feel so safe in the arms of this powerful Jewish woman!\u201d Crumb says.<\/p>\n
By 2018, she was scrolling through her phone to show a New York Times reporter pictures of Crumb cavorting with the grandkids. (Daughter Sophie in adulthood also is a comics artist.) The photos then transition to photos of women\u2019s behinds, taken in Miami.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m enabling his big butt fixation,\u201d she said. \u201cWell I don\u2019t have a big butt anymore so I have to offer him something.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was her energy that transformed the American Crumb family into a Southern French one, with her daughter Sophie living, marrying and having three French children there,\u201d the official Crumb website said in announcing her death. \u201cShe will be dearly missed within that family, by the international cartooning community, but especially by Robert, who shared the last 50 years of his life with her.\u201d<\/p>\n
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