To Aline Kominsky-Crumb—"the First Lady of Underground Comics"—there is nowhere on earth more grotesque than Long Beach, Long Island, the upper middle-class Jewish ghetto where she grew up and which she has been trying to get out of her system ever since. She claims that her father had mob connections. "He had a car dealership for a while," she told Andrew Clark, "and all of a sudden one day he owned a street ... I thought it was normal. When I saw the movie Goodfellas, it was, like, my life."

Aline began drawing cartoons at the age of eight. By the sixties, she was already developing her infamously self-excoriating style wherein the Bunch, her endlessly deluded heroine, is subjected to countless humiliations, disappointments and degradations in pursuit of the frothy fantasies she knows are pitiful but which she nevertheless can’t resist.

Her work has appeared in Wimmins Comix #1, Manhunt, El Perfecto, Twisted Sisters, Sex Crazed Housewife, Weirdo and, in conjunction with her husband, R. Crumb, in Dirty Laundry and Self-Loathing Comics. She lives in France with Crumb and their daughter, Sophie.

Below are a few pithy utterances of Kominsky-Crumb, in her own say:

"The Women's Comic Book Collective [in the ’70s] was the most back-biting group of bitches I've ever met in my life. I've never been around meaner women. This political correctness, this goody-goody thing covered up the most vicious, fingernail-scratching coven of monsters."

"As an artist, that part of me is totally uncontrollable and undeveloped and unslick and just childlike ... the story comes out almost like vomiting."

"My mother is a really insensitive lout who’s never been particularly interested in anything I do. When this Crumb film came out, she was very upset. I think it’s guaranteed that for the rest of my life that she’ll never ask me about myself or my work."

The relationship between Aline and Crumb seemed uncannily like that of my wife Coco and myself. And since their behavior appeared to be drawn straight from their daily lives, I had the bright idea of getting Coco to collaborate with me on a comic strip about the column I was supposed to be writing. Kicking and screaming, she played along for a couple of panels and then refused to draw any more ("It’s just your stupid column"). So I'm reduced to transcribing the dialogue, which went something like this.

COCO: Hi, Antonia, it’s me. Listen ... David’s writing another article about something he knows nothing about so I'm putting him on with you.

ANTONIA: What’s the subject?

COCO: Aline Kominsky—our favorite! The woman who got us through the last two decades!! And come to think of it, I don’t even know if I like the idea of David writing about her. I mean, he loves her, but I don’t know … it’s sort of sacrilegious for a dumb guy to write about her, isn’t it?

ANTONIA: He’s not THAT dumb….

COCO: Okay, okay, but you get my point, he’s a guy.

ANTONIA: Still, she does work with her husband—R. Crumb—so I don’t see any reason you can’t work with yours. In fact, the first things I remember of hers were the Dirty Laundry comic books where Crumb drew himself and she drew herself. They were all about their marriage, and of course they each wrote their own dialogue. The first issue had the two of them on the cover sitting up to their chests in a washing machine like it was a Jacuzzi.

COCO: They’re still going at it! Lately they’ve been doing Self-Loathing Comics, which is the same idea except it’s about their life in France and raising a child—who of course doesn’t think much of what they do, in fact, doesn’t even APPROVE of them. And they’re always worried that something in the comic is going to offend the kid, which of course it does. It all reminds me so much of me and David and Toby, but maybe everyone feels that way, maybe that’s the secret of their success. Now Twisted Sisters, that was my bible when I was single, starring Aline as the Bunch.

ANTONIA: And her girlfriend, Deedee Glitz—who was the complete opposite of the Bunch. Actually, I think they shared a comic book, but they each had their own strip. Deedee wore harlequin, cat’s eye glasses and had big hair. She was much more popular with guys than the Bunch and really into her appearance.

COCO: A latter-day Betty and Veronica!

ANTONIA: VERY latter day. Betty and Veronica on acid.

COCO: I always identified with the Bunch, just like I identified with Betty!! The Bunch is always taking diet pills to lose weight but ends up cleaning the house instead. Uh oh, here's David, give him some general comments—you know, what-makes-her-great type of thing so he can write his dopey column.

DAVID: Hi Antonia! Could you, y'know ... I’m a little lost here, I could use some help. Could you, like, give me sorta a rap on the life, art and meaning of Aline Kominsky?

ANTONIA: Well, in her comic strips she is a chunky gal and always agonizing over it. Clearly a product of our society and clearly not the better for it. She had this ability to see herself as if she were outside herself and comment on her own hang-ups.

DAVID: Unsparingly.

ANTONIA: Exactly. Admitting things that most women wouldn’t admit, even though they probably even do them or feel them or believe them.

COCO (grabbing back the phone): Sometimes she has a bubble with a picture of what people are REALLY thinking while they’re talking. Like the girl is thinking about valentines and flowers, and the guy is thinking about fucking her.

DAVID: It's so—

ANTONIA: Politically incorrect? Yup. That's what is so great about her comics, that she is obsessing about these things—her weight, her appearance, her lack of boyfriends, things that we’re supposedly too evolved to care about. And not like, say, Cathy does it. I mean, Aline really pushes the envelope.

DAVID: And all those embarrassing things about her personality, too, like trying to get Crumb to go to some comic book convention or do some movie for a million bucks, being pushy.

ANTONIA: And her putting herself beneath the man in all senses. I remember one panel where Crumb wants her to give him a blow-job, and she's not anxious to do it. But he insists, and she barfs right in his lap.

COCO: That’s what I call going all the way!

ANTONIA: She depicts herself as something of a masochist. And although some women won't admit it, they like to be down on their knees in front of a man.

[Coco yanks the phone away at this point.]

COCO: Okay, guys, break it up! (changing the subject) Kominsky’s into being a neurotic woman all the way, so much so that it comes out the other side as art. It’s funny, and she’s the heroine! Remember at the end of the first Bunch comic? She’s saying, "Maybe I could do a comic strip if I could only think of a character." And then she says, "Wait a minute, I'm a character."

ANTONIA: She just takes her faults and runs with them. And you feel like, Here she is saying it right out loud in a comic book. And if she’s saying it, then I can’t be all that bad.

COCO: Not only making art out of your life, but even more important to me, making life funny. Reading Kominsky, we laugh at ourselves; it’s that laugh of recognition, which is a healing laugh.

DAVID: But her style is—

ANTONIA: More primitive than Crumb’s.

DAVID: Yeah, but it really holds up against his. When they draw themselves, it looks like those Saul Steinberg drawings where the characters are drawn in the style of their personalities—the woolly Beatnik, the block-like businessman.

ANTONIA: She has the ability to get it down instead of trying to do it fancily—she goes for it.

DAVID: Sometimes her drawings look almost Egyptian, with that collapsed perspective you see in tomb paintings, her hair is like a pharaohnic wig, actually. And that thing they do where they each draw their own characters and write their own words....

ANTONIA: It’s unique. When people collaborate on comic books, usually one does the words and the other does the drawings, but here they each do both.

DAVID: It would be almost as if two people collaborated on a novel and each wrote their own dialogue. And so it was like an equilibrium between two personalities on an ontological aesthetic level playing field where....

COCO (yanking phone away): Thanks, Antonia,, your work is done! Whenever I hear him mention ancient Egypt, I know it’s time for his medication.