The overall effect is of an ululating yawp of forced barbarity.

To watch her constantly shaking off her mannered inclinations in favor of ferocious, childlike scrawling is exhausting. Her natural register seems to be static, almost enameled drawings heavy with detail. One frame may have an elegant hatched pattern in the background another, a haunting face or intriguing layout.

The constant chaos gives the eye a grueling workout.Įvery now and then, though, Kominsky-Crumb slips up and reveals her solid (and thus, she seems to think, boring) talent. Her compositions are haphazard, her figures follow no consistent anatomical rules and her word balloons are blobby and crowded. Instead, she makes each panel a brutal, torturous act of rebellion against the very idea of artistic standards. Married to one of the 20th century's greatest draftsmen, she doesn't even try to compete. Kominsky-Crumb's main weapon against banality is her distinctive style. Her denunciations of nose jobs, aerobics, pretension, the 1970s California lifestyle and (mostly) her own foibles are diverting, but repetitive. Crumb's Awesome, Affecting Take On 'Genesis' The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books R. She insists her artistic background is a sham, calling herself 'a good little copier' in 'Why the Bunch Can't Draw.' ('The Bunch,' her name for herself, is from Honey Bunch Kaminski, a character created by Kominsky-Crumb's husband Robert.) She points out that even though her mother came from money, her father didn't, and they couldn't really afford the big suburban house in which her parents subjected her to emotional and physical abuse.

Throughout Love That Bunch, her hefty new retrospective, she wrestles grimly with normalcy. The one thing she's desperately tried not to be is a plain old Jewish girl from Long Island who grew up well-off, went to art school and became a housewife and mother. She's been fractious, she's been lawless, she's been rowdy and wayward - thoroughly unruly from her head to her nib. Since the '70s, when she started publishing her works in various fringe comics magazines, she's specialized in assaulting readers with overly intimate personal revelations done in a hasty, messy style. Aline Kominsky-Crumb is eager to claim all of them. You've got disorderly, rebellious, impulsive and recalcitrant then there's turbulent, unmanageable, restive and riotous. If you look up 'unruly' in a thesaurus, there are about two dozen synonyms. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Love That Bunch Author Aline Kominsky-Crumb

Love That Bunch by Aline Kominsky-Crumb