Nobody cares if I do this or not, but I’m still gonna, thinks the Bunch—the heroine and persona avatar of Aline Kominsky-Crumb in the newly expanded edition of her collected comics Love that Bunch—as she sits in her room, making art despite her parents’ decision not to waste more money on art school. As I read each one of the stories-in-comics in this collection, I kept coming back to that moment in Kominsky-Crumb’s childhood, to the dogged perseverance and defiance of The Bunch as we see her grow from a child on Long Island into a mature woman. Perhaps it is because I am a writer and Kominsky-Crumb sums up so succinctly with that phrase the daily fortitude required to write or create. But perhaps I also came back to it because that sentiment—Nobody cares if I do this or not, but I’m still gonna—colors every frame in this book by a gifted female cartoonist who is extraordinarily open about her experiences, hilariously critical of herself and, in her own words in Hillary Chute’s foreword, had ‘no success, ever.’ We get the feeling that her work is born from the freedom of thinking “nobody’s ever going to give a shit” and Kominsky-Crumb’s productive compulsion to examine her reactions to the world, especially those that conflict with (or conform strictly to) society’s idea of what a woman should be.
Love that Bunch is a graphic novel in short stories, a blend of memoir and fiction, a nearly Sebald-esque swirling exploration in which stories from earlier in the collection are often told again at different moments in the artist’s life. Important pieces of information are sometimes referenced, but not delved into, a mechanism that allows us to glimpse things that, in a more linear memoir, might be the driving dramas—the Bunch becomes pregnant at a very young age and gives the baby up for adoption, the Bunch and her husband both have other lovers throughout their marriage—but here are simply pieces of a life that feels much larger than what “happens” within it. Through the persona of the Bunch, Kominsky-Crumb explores her childhood and the Jewish community and culture that she was raised in, her parents, her lifelong experiences in the world of love and sex, her artistic development, her marriage (to the famed cartoonist Robert Crumb), motherhood, and aging. Both the Bunch and her creator are highly confessional and Kominsky-Crumb delights in exposing the Bunch’s hypocrisy and weakness, a move that endears the Bunch to us and makes us trust both she and Kominsky-Crumb. In a comic called “Ask Dr. Bunch,” she is depicted dispensing worldly advice to all of her friends while indulging privately in overeating, heavy drinking and exclaiming that she is a pig and hates her body. This confessionalism is not deployed merely for laughs or sympathy. Watching the Bunch move rapidly from eating to drinking to weighing herself on the scale to sticking her finger down her throat before rejecting her husband’s caresses with the assertion “I hate my body so much I can’t stand you paying attention to it,” is painfully real, a condensed version of the relationship many women (certainly this writer) have with their bodies.
Love That Bunch is a feminist book, full stop. Kominsky-Crumb depicts female vulnerability and empowerment as it exists in the wild, defying constraints of how a woman should behave or think. There is no story here of an undaunted, all-women-are-beautiful feminism. The Bunch is freed during her teenage years in the Village from shaving, bathing and wearing underwear, freed from the mother who sent her to fat camp and obsessed about her own body, only to take up the latest workout crazes in mid-life (remember Jazzercise?), to obsess about whether she is attractive, and to reflect on her pride, at sixty-five, that she still wears sexy heels and never Birkenstocks. The amount of graphic detail operating within each frame of a story allows Kominsky-Crumb to bring bodies front and center, especially the bodies of the Bunch and her mother, “Blabette”. One of the most radical and wonderful comics, “Bunch Plays With Herself,” depicts the illicit pleasures of the human and specifically female body such as popping zits, sticking a finger in an itchy anus and smelling it afterwards, picking her nose and eating it, masturbating, burning her skin in the sun, and waking up in bed naked with the sun warming her. One of the most disturbing depicts the Bunch’s first experience of sexual intercourse in the 1960s, a date rape in a car. The boy plunges his penis violently into her vagina as begs him not to, the perspective of the drawing that of close-shot gonzo pornography, impossible to misconstrue or deny. Later, the Bunch tells her friend, not that she was raped (that language wouldn’t have been available to the young Bunch), but that she “went all the way.” The friend tells her that what she did was disgusting. The comic, drawn in 1976, still feels radical in its insistence on depicting the rape so graphically, especially in the context of #MeToo, as people continue to minimize women’s accounts of assault by sowing doubts about what really happened. The act of drawing the rape is an act of saying “No, this is what happened.This was wrong.” Kominsky-Crumb also treads on much ground that is still illicit in the world of middle- and upper-class female life, particularly in her depiction of married women’s sexual desire for other men, both acted upon and not.
Kominsky-Crumb has made a masterwork of her life, as well as giving us a primary-source glimpse at being a pioneering female artist born into postwar America. In my years of gender studies and women’s history courses, I never read anything that gave me so much delight in the mess of a woman’s existence, or faith that the mess of my own might yield work the world needed, whether the world cared or not. I wish I had.
Kate Lister Campbell lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.