Love that bunch

Kominsky-Crumb traces her progression from nice Long Island Jewish girl to alt-comics luminary in this retrospective of four decades of her raw, iconoclastic cartooning. Drifting into the counterculture as a teen, she started drawing underground comics in the Bay Area, where she met and soon married Robert Crumb. Fed up with America, the couple emigrated to France in the early 1990s. This collection traces the trajectory of her peripatetic life, beginning with accounts of her stormy adolescence, when the self-image issues that became a staple of her comics began to manifest themselves, and her dysfunctional family. She soon began freely expressing her creativity and sexuality while coping with anxiety and self-doubt, and the conflict became fodder for her brutally forthright strips. Kominsky-Crumb's defiantly chaotic, overwhelmingly detailed drawing style is an apt match for her messy life, although the willfully ugly drawings and one-note kvetching grow a bit tiresome by the volume's end. Cringe-inducing, self-depreciating confessionals have become a pop-culture staple from figures like Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham, but Kominsky-Crumb was there first.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kominsky-Crumb's comics present a poignant and amusing look at her own remarkable development. The road to becoming an underground-comics legend begins with Kominsky-Crumb as a nice Jewish girl from Long Island, carries her to Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and to California, land of hippy cartoonists, and on to a more or less sedate life with hubby (the equally legendary R. Crumb) and daughter Sophie. Her funny/sad tales show a woman bewildered by her place in society and determined to find her own way. In ``Blabette 'n' Arnie'' Kominsky-Crumb portrays her parents and their bleak, demanding personalities. In Other stories recount her adolescence and depict her garish relatives with a mixture of casual honesty and a survivor's bemused sense of triumph. These stories touch on every phase of her existence from childhood, to sexual obsessions, food, motherhood and, of course, her art. These are comics with an edge. Kominsky-Crumb's drawing is as raw and untidy as her life, but certainly very few comics artists can take such painful introspection to such a delightful end. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This collection of Kominsky-Crumb's work from the 1970s to the present is expanded from its 1990 edition and covers the cartoonist's life from a troubled childhood and her Beatlemaniac and groupie years to her married life, motherhood, and now grandmotherhood. The black-and-white artwork (save for one color page) is a little messy, homely, grotesque, and perfectly suited to the artist's material. Her refusal to portray herself as a victim, no matter how humiliating or painful her experiences, will be refreshing to some readers and offensive to others. Her confidence shines through, demonstrated by her willingness to depict her past and present selves unflinchingly and at their most vulnerable. Note profanity, nudity, sexual content/references/situations, and references to bodily functions/odors/secretions make this for mature readers. Although clearly not for all tastes, Love That Bunch is funny, brazen, and affecting enough to make similarly brave readers start thinking of R. Crumb as the person married to Kominsky-Crumb and not vice versa. Verdict Highly recommended for all mature fans of cartooning-especially of the confessional variety-and/or biographies. [Previewed in Jody Osicki's "Graphically Speaking," LJ 6/15/18.]-J. Osicki, Saint John Free P.L., NB © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.