Love That Bunch

By Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Hardcover, 208 pages, B&W and Colour, 2018 (originally published 1990)

The early work of the pioneering feminist cartoonist plus her acclaimed new story “Dream House"

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.

"[There is a] pioneering quality of Ms. Kominsky-Crumb’s own work — nakedly self-revealing and self-obsessed years ahead of the rest of the culture ... her messy self-examinations seem even more relevant today."—New York Times

"Today the significance of Kominsky-Crumb’s oeuvre — not only to emerging comics artists but also to writers and comedians well outside the comics industry — cannot be overstated… Almost 50 years into her career, Kominsky-Crumb is an underground hero whose enduring influence isn’t quite so underground."—Huffington Post

"Aline Kominsky-Crumb confronts the crazy, ever-shifting expectations of how women are supposed to be — and blows them to smithereens."—Village Voice

“This retrospective collection from underground comics legend Aline Kominsky-Crumb is the only book devoted to her work, tracing a path from unpretty youthful bodily explorations to quotidian adventures.”—Elle

"One of the best things about Kominsky-Crumb is that she is not only aware of the possibility of her readers’ discomfort—she exploits it... Love That Bunch is a bitter, poignant, satisfying epic of how one Jewish woman survived her Jewish 20th-century family. If I had a daughter, I would make her read it.”—Tablet

"Borrowing unapologetically from life, Kominsky-Crumb draws with a line that is unmistakably her own."—New Republic

“Raucous and raunchy… This is a perfect book to give to any woman, of any age, in your life.”—Nylon’s Best Illustrated Books of 2018