Through the persona of the Bunch, Kominsky-Crumb explores her childhood and the Jewish community and culture that she was raised in, her parents, her lifelong experiences in the world of love and sex, her artistic development, her marriage (to the famed cartoonist Robert Crumb), motherhood, and aging.
Important pieces of information are sometimes referenced, but not delved into, a mechanism that allows us to glimpse things that, in a more linear memoir, might be the driving dramas-the Bunch becomes pregnant at a very young age and gives the baby up for adoption, the Bunch and her husband both have other lovers throughout their marriage-but here are simply pieces of a life that feels much larger than what “happens” within it. Love that Bunch is a graphic novel in short stories, a blend of memoir and fiction, a nearly Sebald-esque swirling exploration in which stories from earlier in the collection are often told again at different moments in the artist’s life. But perhaps I also came back to it because that sentiment- Nobody cares if I do this or not, but I’m still gonna-colors every frame in this book by a gifted female cartoonist who is extraordinarily open about her experiences, hilariously critical of herself and, in her own words in Hillary Chute’s foreword, had ‘no success, ever.’ We get the feeling that her work is born from the freedom of thinking “nobody’s ever going to give a shit” and Kominsky-Crumb’s productive compulsion to examine her reactions to the world, especially those that conflict with (or conform strictly to) society’s idea of what a woman should be. Perhaps it is because I am a writer and Kominsky-Crumb sums up so succinctly with that phrase the daily fortitude required to write or create. As I read each one of the stories-in-comics in this collection, I kept coming back to that moment in Kominsky-Crumb’s childhood, to the dogged perseverance and defiance of The Bunch as we see her grow from a child on Long Island into a mature woman. Nobody cares if I do this or not, but I’m still gonna, thinks the Bunch-the heroine and persona avatar of Aline Kominsky-Crumb in the newly expanded edition of her collected comics Love that Bunch-as she sits in her room, making art despite her parents’ decision not to waste more money on art school.
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