RIP Aline Kominsky-Crumb

Goodbye To A Comics Underground Original

The very sad news reached us last night that underground comics cartoonist/ editor Aline Kominsky-Crumb has just died. Here’s a few details of her career courtesy of wikipedia and a few tributes from people i the industry…

Kominsky-Crumb’s work, which is almost exclusively autobiographical, is known for its unvarnished, confessional nature. She was married to cartoonist Robert Crumb, with whom she frequently collaborated. Their daughter, Sophie Crumb, is also a cartoonist.

Kominsky-Crumb met underground cartoonists Spain Rodriguez and Kim Deitch early in her career through former Fugs drummer Ken Weaver, who was living in Tucson at the same time. They introduced her to underground comix, inspiring her to begin making underground comics herself and to relocate to San Francisco.

In 1972, soon after she arrived in San Francisco, Aline was introduced to Robert Crumb by mutual friends, who had noted an uncanny resemblance between her and the coincidentally-named Crumb character Honeybunch Kaminski, (who had been created in 1970). Their relationship soon became serious, and they began living together.

Kominsky-Crumb married Crumb in 1978. Their daughter Sophie was born in 1981. Starting in the late 1970s, Aline and Robert produced a series of collaborative comics called Dirty Laundry (also known as Aline & Bob’s Dirty Laundry), a comic about the Crumb family life. They both drew their own characters for the comic. Around this time, Kominsky-Crumb began calling her comics avatar “The Bunch,” a reference to the similarly named Crumb character. Later installments of Dirty Laundry feature contributions by Sophie, who also began producing comics in her teens.

For several years during the 1980s, Kominsky-Crumb was editor of Weirdo, a leading alternative comics anthology of the time, taking over editorship from Peter Bagge, who had previously taken over from original editor Robert Crumb. Her editorial reign was known as “Twisted Sisters”, reviving that title.

From 1991, Robert and Aline lived as expatriates in a small French village.

Kominsky-Crumb and her husband had an open marriage, and Kominsky-Crumb’s “second husband”, French printmaker Christian Coudurès, lived with the family (as did his daughter, Agathe McCamy, who assisted Kominsky-Crumb in colouring her comics).

As well as her comics work, Kominsky-Crumb was a painter. After moving to France, she focused more on painting and less on producing comics. In February 2007 she released a memoir entitled Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, a collection of her comics and paintings, along with photographs and autobiographical writings.

Here’s a selection of some of her art over the years.

Tripwire would like to offer our condolences to her friends and family.