Love That Bunch

by Aline Kominsky-Crumb

Hardcover, 2018

Status

Available

Call number

PN6727.K655 Z46

Publication

Drawn and Quarterly (2018), Edition: First Edition (US) First Printing, 208 pages

Description

Aline Kominsky-Crumb immediately made her mark in the Bay Area's underground comix scene with unabashedly raw, dirty, unfiltered comics chronicling the thoughts and desires of a woman coming of age in the 1960s. Kominsky-Crumb didn't worry about self-flattery. In fact, her darkest secrets and deepest insecurities were all the more fodder for groundbreaking stories. Her exaggerated comix alter ego, Bunch, is self-destructive and grotesque but crackles with the self-deprecating humor and honesty of a cartoonist confident in the story she wants to tell. Collecting comics from the 1970s through today, Love That Bunch is shockingly prescient while still being an authentic story of its era. Kominsky-Crumb was ahead of her time in juxtaposing the contradictory nature of female sexuality with a proud, complicated feminism. Most important, she does so without apology. One of the most famous and idiosyncratic cartoonists of our time, Kominsky-Crumb traces her steps from a Beatles-loving fangirl, an East Village groupie, an adult grappling with her childhood, and a 1980s housewife and mother, to a new thirty-page story, "Dream House," that looks back on her childhood forty years later. Love That Bunch will be Kominsky-Crumb's only solo-authored book in print. Originally published as a book in 1990, this new expanded edition follows her to the present, including an afterword penned by the noted comics scholar Hillary Chute. --Publisher… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member villemezbrown
Kominsky-Crumb's ugly art and perverse confessional writing style are not without their charm in this large collection of strips produced over decades, and I enjoyed the first 50 pages more than I expected as I read through them at a leisurely pace. But the book was coming due at the library and I
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decided to power through the next 150 pages in a day, and at that pace the short strips start to take on a whiny and repetitive drone.

I allowed myself to slow down for one of the last and longest stories in the collection, which benefited from having an actual structure as the author revisited the homes she has had throughout her life.

Kominsky-Crumb will never be one of my favorite creators, but this book is worth a look for its artistic and historical value.
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Language

Original language

English

Physical description

208 p.; 11.41 inches

ISBN

1770463054 / 9781770463059

Local notes

Signed
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