Biography:'People ask 'Why the title Need More Love?' Well, obviously that is what I find lacking in human relationships and society in general." So begins this quirky autobiography, which features the author's drawings, paintings, photo-stories, family album and comic strip collaborations with her husband, Robert Crumb.
Her quest for that elusive goal takes us on a 58-year roller coaster ride from riches to rags and back again via Long Island, Greenwich Village, Arizona, California and the south of France.
Born Aline Goldsmith, in 1948, to Arnie, a small time Jewish businessman, and Annette, who was difficult, she was the golden girl for whom nothing was too good. Her dream of becoming an "Ahtist" was early and generously if uncomprehendingly indulged. But family tensions all too soon rendered her a deeply neurotic and introspective teenager, overweight, acned, self-hating and given to sneaking into Greenwich Village to get high and hang with The Fugs. Obsessed with The Beatles, she flung herself across a barrier on an appalled George when they eventually landed at JFK and her parents were not amused to see her on the evening news being dragged away by a brace of scowling cops.
The 1960s found her in the Village where the psychedelia and social unrest mirrored her own mindset. "For the first time I had tons of boyfriends - even pregnant I was popular with the hippy guys." Doing lots of drugs up to the moment of birth, she gave the child up for adoption. When her father died, in order to avoid the "living hell" of moving in with mother she married boyfriend Carl Kominsky, moved to Arizona, and enrolled in university. Here she fell in love with the desert, and peyote.
Her marriage did not long survive affairs with her three fine-art tutors, a dazzlingly handsome cowboy drunk, shot in the back at 23, and everyone in the Tally-Ho Bar. Clutching her degree, she moved to Tuscon. Here she encountered the work of Justin Green, whose confessional-autobiographical comics showed her the way her career must go. Here too she met her future husband, underground cartoon supremo Robert Crumb. His character Honeybunch Kaminski eerily prefigured Aline with whom he developed an instant rapport. After a mercifully brief flirtation with Trina Robbins's Wimmins Comix (overly right-on feminist for her taste), Aline pioneered her confessional manner, founding Twisted Sisters with her pal Diana Noomin, pioneering her own utterly original and idiosyncratic style, taking George Grosz and Alice Neal as spiritual exemplars.
Hooking up with Crumb in a California commune they lit out for red-dirt, Grapes-of-Wrath nowhere and spent 15 years in Winters, a backwater on Putah Creek. Rejecting the shallow modernity of America they furnished their cottage with 1920s and 1930s appliances from salvation army stores, and learned traditional music from local families - "This was a deeply moving experience that had a profound effect on a middle class brat like me" - and produced the "sexploitational", two-hander comics dubbed Dirty Laundry by Terry Zwigoff (afterwards director of the cult biopic Crumb).
HERE, ON SEPTEMBER 27th, 1981, arrived their beloved daughter Sophie Violet, later to feature and collaborate in her parents' comics. But the idyll soured. Governer Reagan's policies (slash property taxes, no funding for art or music in schools) resulted in a glut of McMansions, fake medieval forts, Swiss chalets and worse. The voices of tractor and bulldozer were heard in the land.
"Randy, our Viet Nam neighbour, lived on the highest hilltop across the road. He skydived for relaxation when he wasn't motorcycle racing. One year, he had a big party for this birthday, and he and his Vet skydiving pals got real high and then went for a jump. We all watched as the pretty chutes opened, but Randy was so stoned, he forgot to open his, and he landed, or actually exploded, in the middle of his partying wife and friends. An ambulance came and took his body away, but everyone kept on partying as he would have wanted them to."
All this and constant gunshots and Christian Fundamentalism. Something had to give. And it did. In April 1990, La Famille Crumb moved to the south of France. Here they acquired (by accident) a 13-room mansion in sleepy nowhere, fully furnished with drapes, carpets and fittings untouched since the 1920s, the ideal cocoon. Now fabulously well-to-do, Aline, at 58, has never been fitter. She teaches aerobics. She travels the world, sketching, painting and collecting. Her "Gawgeous" home is fitted with her artwork, dolls, and altars made of junk. She has two "husbands", sharing Robert with handsome neighbour Christian. She models designs by Stella McCartney, Vivian Tam, Narciso Rodriguez and Marc Jacobs. And she regularly collaborates with the most famous cartoonist of his generation in the New Yorker magazine. Where did it all go right?
This funny, humane, beautifully designed celebration of life as its zaniest is a feast of anecdote, sex, art and wonderfully cynical Jewish humour. Go out and buy it.
Tom Mathews is a cartoonist and writer. His weekly Artoon appears on W8
Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir By Aline Kominsky Crumb MQ, 384pp. £20