I was raised on a certain kind of Jewish fatalistic humor where you make fun of yourself, to make other people laugh. The reason it’s important with her is because her approach to cartooning isn’t so much “warts and all” as “distill everything out except the warts.” The very first comic Aline ever published included a panel of her masturbating with fruit and being crushed by guilt! She says: It’s especially interesting in Crumb’s case because we see her sometimes reiterate the same information in different ways with different effects.

I don’t know why more people don’t take this approach to memoirs. It’s comics, prose, paintings in various media, photos, collages featuring cheap plastic jewelry and Barbie dolls and glitter among other things, individual pages from longer comic stories, individual panels blown up (and colored after the fact?), occasional essays by friends and family, and even ends with an interview by her publisher. But it’s not all comics, or even mostly comics. The book takes us through Crumb’s life, from birth to childhood to hippie-hood, to cartooning, marriage(s), motherhood, and moving to France, to the present, aged 58-59 at the time of the book’s release. In fact Crumb is so aware of her own work as an artist that I could skip reviewing the book and just pull quotes out of it to do the same job. I honestly don’t think this makes my work less interesting, just very expressionistic and often very ugly. I draw, erase, and scratch out some tortured looking image that clearly shows how much I am struggling with the medium. I was trying to think of a way to describe Aline Kominsky Crumb’s art, and then she went and described it perfectly herself:

Need more love a graphic memoir