Not the most ambitious Crumb work, but there’s a lot of love here.
A scrapbook from the first family of American cartooning, containing collaborative strips that date back to the mid-1970s.
The title serves a dual purpose, underscoring the claim, made throughout the book, that the authors are “The World’s Only Cartooning Couple,” as the two-headed cover proclaims, but also indicating the qualities that drew them together and keep them together. In a flyer for the aptly named Dirty Laundry Comics, Robert Crumb dubs them “the John and Yoko of Underground Comics!!” There are some parallels. In both cases, he had a wider following, and some fans have suggested (as these panels admit) that she was horning in, co-opting his work by capitalizing on his renown. In both cases, he proved to be his wife’s strongest defender, suggesting that, if anything, she is carrying him. “Aline, I can’t do this without you,” he writes in one of the four-panel “The Crumb Family” strips (changes of pace from the longer, more elaborate narratives that dominate). “If I tell stories about my life it just comes out grim & sad.” Not only does her presence provide comic relief, but the two of them present her as the stronger, both physically and emotionally. And then there’s the sex (and there’s plenty of it). “I go where the butt goes,” he reflects while she beams, “So nice you’re actually moving to a remote village in a foreign country just to satisfy an impulsive whim of mine!!” Generally, each of them draws themselves, though the panels make note of occasional reversals. The collection documents the changes in their lives as they’ve grown older, had a daughter (now a published cartoonist herself), moved to the south of France, and received more attention than they’d wanted through a couple of films (a documentary on the Crumb family and the adaptation of American Splendor, the acclaimed bio-pic of friend and collaborator Harvey Pekar). From the bathroom to the bedroom, they respond to the question of just how open and honest a marital comic can be.
Not the most ambitious Crumb work, but there’s a lot of love here.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-87140-429-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book...
Memory comes alive in this compelling amalgam of drawing, narrative and archival photography.
A prolific illustrator of children’s books and an artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and other magazines, the author made a major leap into memoir with Mendel’s Daughter (2006), his debut in the genre. Where that well-reviewed volume focused on the Holocaust from the perspective of his mother, this follow-up continues the story of Lemelman’s family through the author’s Brooklyn boyhood. Though there’s an innocence to his tales of working at his father’s candy store—squashing cockroaches, playing pranks and exploring the worlds of the streets (“There was always something going on at the Market…Life was everywhere”)—this was not an idyllic childhood, nor is it rendered sentimentally. After immigrating to America following World War II, Lemelman’s parents turned family life into an ongoing battle as they balanced the nonstop demands of a neighborhood shop with the challenges of raising two rambunctious sons. “Deh Tateh” had served in the Soviet army after surviving the Holocaust, complained incessantly about life in America and barely hid his alcoholism. “Der Mameh” refused to back down to her husband, insisted she was more of a help in the store than he thought she was and left her son feeling deprived. The author and his brother Bernard became both allies and antagonists within the family dynamic. It all comes to vivid life through the artist’s drawing and through a narrative that conjures the voices of his dead parents to complement the author’s perspective, which retains a childlike spirit. The family chronicle unfolds against the backdrop of a tumultuous era—the assassination of a president, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, perhaps most significant for the family, the changing demographics of a neighborhood that initially brought new waves of customers but saw a rise of anti-Semitism that drove so many families and businesses from what had long been their home.
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book that is both a celebration and an affirmation of life.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-004-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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