While discussing his latest exhibition Drawn Together, Robert Crumb spilled some of his morning coffee on the floor of David Zwirner’s New York outpost. The underground comic artist — whose irreverent, impeccably rendered work has been massively influential since the 1960s — was, for most of the 20-minute talk, unaware that the piping brown brew was puddling next to his shoes. He was listening intently to Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his wife and collaborator, explain the expansive selection of wildly confessional work in their exhibition.
Part retrospective, part family photo album, part new chapter, Drawn Together collects 40 years of the Crumbs’ collaborative comics, as well as personal mementos from their rich lives. The show (a version of which was previously presented at Cartoonmuseum Basel) positions ink illustrations from the pair’s ongoing “Aline & Bob” series alongside photobooth snaps of their younger selves embracing. Drawn Together also includes record sleeves Robert has illustrated, as well as portrait paintings that normally hang on the walls of their house, an 11th century château of sorts, located in a small French village where Aline teaches yoga three times a week. Both see their union (to this day, a committed open marriage) as somewhat cosmically foretold. Robert created a character, Honeybunch Kaminski, long before meeting Aline — who not only shared a similar last name with Honeybunch, but looked like her, too. The original Honeybunch rendering hangs on Zwirner’s main wall among a constellation of other Crumb creations, some of which are also dotted with coffee stains.
By the time they met in early 70s San Francisco, both artists were well-established pioneers in the underground comics scene. Aline — who’d arrived in the bohemian Bay Area by way of her native New York following a brief peyote trip in the Arizona desert — contributed to the earliest editions of the all-female anthology, Wimmin’s Comix. Inspired to express her troubled teenage years on Long Island, and her experiences as a woman in the turbulent and transformative 70s, Aline’s frank, unapologetically funny, and autobiographical work opened the door for a new generation of graphic artists to tell the personal stories that shaped them.
Though they’ve continued to publish independently over the course of their careers (in fact: a brand new story of Aline’s, which will appear in the forthcoming issue of Love That Bunch, has its own room in the Zwirner show), their collaborations began in 1972. Aline broke her leg in a fall, angry when one of Robert’s girlfriends showed up to shack up in their cabin, situated in a hillside commune in Northern California. Trying to keep busy while on the mend, Robert suggested he and Aline make comics together. “We started doing this rambling, ridiculous story that had no beginning and no end. It was just to get through this rainy winter,” she explained. Eventually, a publisher wanted to print the work, so the couple showed it to a friend. “He read it and said, ‘This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever read; it’s like you’re airing out your dirty laundry.’ So I said, ‘Oh, we have a title! And Dirty Laundry comics was started,” Aline laughed.
Drawn Together is a completely unique portrait of the artists’ realities, struggles, affection, dreams, fantasies, fears, hopes, and lives shared. It captures the tenderness of their relationship as well as their towering individual influences. We caught up with the Crumbs once the coffee was cleaned up.
How does it feel being back in New York?
R: Every time I come back here it’s like this old, familiar, dirty, funky feeling.
A: We’re staying on the Lower East Side, which is where I used to live. I walk down the sidewalk and all the angst of walking around New York comes back to me.
R: We were walking down 2nd Avenue the other day, and it reminded her of when she was young, walking the streets looking for something —
A: Action! There’s that existential loneliness of being in a city and not being able to connect with people and wanting to so desperately. The sidewalks bring that back to me because I’ve walked them so much. Even though I haven’t lived here for, what, 49 years? I lived on 3rd between B and C. My rent was $35 a month, but I was mugged three times. Once at knifepoint, right up my neck.
R: A lot of violent junkies then.
A: I was going to Cooper Union then, and I had a night drawing class from 7-10. Once it ended, I had to walk home. It was so dangerous.
Has your collaborative process changed over the years?
A: I always think of us as George and Gracie.
R: They might be too young to know who George and Gracie are.
A: A husband and wife comedy team.
R: George would give her a feed line, ‘So Gracie, how’s your mother?’, and just set her off.
A: We always kind of get into that state of mind when we work together, and it really has a life of its own. It is our life, but it’s another form.
R: Now, we script more, we plan more than we used to. The beginning was more spontaneous, and we just sort of made it up as we went along.
A: I think working for The New Yorker changed us permanently. It was very exacting. They’d give you three pages and send you to Cannes, and you have to come up with a story.
R: And they fact check.
A: And spell check.
R: And they were very particular about punctuation.
A: You can’t say ‘fuck’ or anything; you kind of have to grow up. But it made the thing so tight, and forced us to really edit ourselves. I think it had a good effect — it made us be cohesive and less self-indulgent, in a way.
I’ve read a lot about your involvement in the Wimmin’s Comix scene, Aline. I think what it set out to do — build a women’s-inclusive creative space without the pressure of having men tell you how things should be done — is what a lot of women continue to strive for now. What do you say to people looking to create these spaces?
A: Well, I think it’s a different environment now, and I think it’s better in a lot of ways. Because during that period, there were a lot of rabid feminists who were really angry, and that group was very divisive. It was not a supportive group; women were not nice to each other. It was really two camps: women who liked men and wanted to be sexy and bad on their own terms, and women who wanted to be political and not have anything to do with men. That was a huge divide, and I got a lot of flack, especially for being involved with him. I drew comics before I met him, but they forgot that. It was not an easy time.
R: Feminism was so combative then, but I think it had to be. You can’t imagine what it was like before that — the different male and female roles in America in the early days of the hippie culture. Hippie males kind of caused feminism by just expecting the women to do everything. Do the cooking, do the cleaning, and guess what, provide the money and a place to live, too! A woman was expected to provide everything.
A: In high school and junior high school, before the hippie thing took over, I remember having to wear a girdle, curl my hair, put Scotch tape on my hair to make my bangs stay down. It was such torture, such hell. My mother wanted me to get a nose job, but I managed to escape high school with my nose.
R: Barbra Streisand helped.
A: No, it was Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joan Baez! That was such a huge liberation, getting rid of all that stuff and being able to relax and breathe. But the early feminist period was a very difficult, complicated period. It wasn’t all a free, open situation. I remember getting a letter after the third Wimmin’s Comix came out saying “We don’t feel that your feminist consciousness has risen enough from this story to this story, so we’re not going to print your story in this issue.” But because it was a cultural revolution, there was a window of opportunity where anything could get published. Things that got published then would never get published now.
R: But later on, there was a period of really excellent women cartoonists: Phoebe Gloeckner, Marjane Satrapi, Carol Tyler.
Speaking of Marjane: today’s comics and graphic novels have been adapted into really important productions. Persepolis was nominated for an Oscar. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s memoir, was nominated for like 12 Tony Awards. You laid a lot of that groundwork for these autobiographical stories, Aline.
A: I did, yeah. I know that everyone that came afterwards was influenced a lot by my work, because it was autobiographical. It gave women the permission to see how they could work, as I was given by a male artist, Justin Green. He was the person that inspired me, but then I went on and did so much autobiographical stuff, poured out so much personal stuff, gave a lot of women that permission.
It’s just crazy to see the different kinds of autobiographical stories that are being told through comics now — stories that we still don’t see in films or on television. Blankets, Fun Home, I learned about the Iranian Revolution through Persepolis.
R: I did, too!
A: It’s incredible. I’m really happy for these artists, and to see such a high quality of work that’s coming out from these later generations. Now, you can go to school to study comics. If you go to Harvard, you have to study my work now, thanks to this woman named Hillary Chute, who did her PhD thesis on my stuff. So people are getting educated about comics now, they take it seriously and study it. The comics that are coming out now are highly polished and well scripted. There’s all kinds of amazing stuff.
‘Aline Kominsky-Crumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn Together’ is on view at David Zwirner New York through February 18, 2017. More information here.
Credits
Text Emily Manning