It feels too reductive to label pioneering feminist cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s work “unapologetic” or some other girl-boss platitude. Her unfiltered thoughts alongside crudely drawn depictions of herself and others are honest, while at the same time fully warped by the paradoxes of womanhood and desire. Shit gets fucked up in her world, and we’re all the better for it.
After she passed in December, I picked up the more recently reissued edition of her original 1990 collection of comics, Love That Bunch. Grotesque, funny, inappropriate, and brazen, the collection, which Kominsky-Crumb started writing in the 1970s, follows her alter ego, The Bunch, through the lows, ultra-lows, and occasional manic highs of the femme womanhood experience: crushes, love, sex, date rape, marriage.
As soon as I read the panel featuring an older Bunch playing horse with her grandson and wondering, “Is this sick?,” as she fantasizes about raunchy past encounters with sexual partners riding her, I, too, was along for the ride. As she ends her own comic: “I hope not…cause we’re having fun!” —Kady Ruth Ashcraft
