In my opinion, she was a punk.”Īs with punk, at least in its original version, Kominsky-Crumb surprises and shocks an audience that’s unaccustomed to breaking the rules. And that’s a huge part of what it means to be a free woman, it’s about not caring about norms or being accepted by a group.

Her humor is very specific, not necessarily accessible to everyone, and her drawing is naive and anti-academic.” Sophie, who is also a noted illustrator, notes by email that she’s “very proud to be her daughter.” On her mother’s idea of being an “outsider,” Sophie observes that her mother changed the meaning of what feminism meant: “She brought sexual freedom to feminism, the right to be anti-politically correct, to be hypersexual, to love and to be spanked as well. Sophie Crumb Kominsky (Woodland, California, 1981), her daughter with Robert Crumb, says that her mother was “a true outsider even within the underground, a 100% original, self-made artist. Comics author Aline Kominsky-Crumb, in an undated image. Kominsky-Crumb also told of her early adoration of the Beatles, her volatile relationship with her family, and her tense time at the women’s comics collective Wimmen’s Comix. She depicted her life and journey full of sex, drugs and music, and did so without modesty or social formalism. Her comics were testaments to independence and vindicated desire while rejecting moralistic morality and emasculating religions. She detailed her life in her comics, from her first sexual experience as a teenager to going to live in a castle in the south of France with her husband to becoming a grandmother when her daughter Sophie had her own child. Her work focused on food, sex, death, happiness, love and pain. Their work was trendsetting and they talked about experiences beyond the typical American way of life. Each had their own career and their comics circulated widely around the world. Both were part of the Underground Comix cartoonist collective. The latter was the creator of biographical works that were less flashy but not exactly out of modesty or shyness. The former was the international figurehead of a highly sexualized comic who employed a wealth of forms and backgrounds he was brilliantly sharp in all areas.

Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky were two names that stood out in that scene.

Joining them were illustrators who wanted to blow people’s minds by drawing that atmosphere of acid trips and joint smoke. In the 1960s and 1970s, comics took a sidereal trip to San Francisco, then a city in which hippies, yippies, pimps, drug dealers, hookers, whores, freaks, eclectic musicians, bikers and revolutionaries of all stripes gathered together.

Love that bunch by aline kominsky crumb