Need More Love

Aline Kominsky-Crumb is the wife of her much more famous and lauded husband, Robert, but she’s also a talented and distinctive artist in her own right.

Need More Love is an autobiography of sorts. It’s made up of short text pieces, paintings, photographs and excerpts from the comics work that she’s produced over the years. It’s a handsomely produced, weighty volume.

AKC has from the outset been a pioneer in the field of autobiographical comics, as well as being one of the earliest women underground artists. As she explains in this book, she didn’t really have any interest in the comics medium when she was younger, but she did train at art college. When she did enter the comics arena she’d no real preconceptions about what the medium should and shouldn’t be producing.

It also meant that her grasp of the medium, particularly at the beginning, wasn’t always what it should be. Those early comic strips are expressive and revealing (AKC is never less than engagingly honest) but at the same time they’re cluttered with too much detail and difficult to read. The style though, is unlike that of any other comics artist around at that time. It’s primitive, scrawling, with thin scratchy line work, and in places resembles nothing less than a primitive cubist sketch. It is and isn’t accomplished at the same time.

More successful is the subject matter. AKC was inspired initially by the autobiographical works of Justin Green, and took this idea and made it her own. She shares with Green some of his jokey approach to ostensibly serious topics, but there’s a neuroticism running through her comics that Green doesn’t always make so evident.

The early strips concentrate on her early life, as the initially pampered child in a ferociously dysfunctional family which has aspirations beyond its means and abilities. As she gets older, she discovers that her father may be loosely connected to the mafia, that’s he’s a chancer, a get-rich-quick schemer who is always doomed to failure. The family teeters constantly on the edge of bankruptcy. She’s physically and emotionally abused. She’s clever, but ugly (or at least draws herself as being ugly as a child. One of the things that the photographs in this volume reveal is that, despite the way she depicts herself, she’s actually an extremely beautiful woman). In her teenage years she rebels, discovers drugs, becomes happily promiscuous, and falls head-first into the alternately idealised and nightmarish world of the 1960s. Which is the path that leads her onto comics, and onto meeting Robert Crumb, and a life of relative stability and prosperity.

Many of the later strips are taken up with the years that she spends in the company of her husband and her daughter, and their extended family of relationships. By this point she’s grasped the basic techniques of comics storytelling without losing the individuality of style and these are very fine works indeed. Of particular interest are the comics that she does in conjunction with her husband – published initially in the Dirty Laundry comics – where they freestyle and bounce against each other within the confines of a comics narrative (AKC draws herself. RC draws himself). They’re inventive and funny and revealing, and it’s something that’s seldom seen in the comics medium.

With hindsight, although she’s still not hugely well known, AKC’s influence is considerable. You look at the plethora of autobiographical comics out there, and you realise that they’ve come directly or indirectly from the work that AKC pioneered.

This isn’t a completely successful collection. The prose style suffers from an abundance! of! exclamation! marks! Which is incredibly annoying. I could have done without the interview at the end where she lays out her philosophy of life. But the comics are never less than interesting, and her non-comics art – mainly paintings and collages of found objects, often featuring creepily glassy-eyes dolls – is possibly even more accomplished. And she’s lived an interesting, eventful life, even if, at times, it’s not one you would have wanted to live yourself.

A comprehensive collection of AKC’s comics work is long overdue, but this is a good overview of her career thus far. It no longer appears to be in print, but remaindered copies are readily and cheaply available from the lies of Amazon and eBay. Recommended.