The comic took a sidereal trip in the San Francisco of the late sixties and early seventies.
In that California city , hippies, yippies,
pimps, drug dealers, hustlers, whores, geeks, eclectic musicians, revolutionaries of all walks of life, and bikers
gathered .
Also illustrators who wanted to stir consciences by drawing that crowded environment of acid trips and joint smoke.
Two names stood out in that scene: Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky.
The first as the internationally visible head of a highly sexualized comic, abundant in shapes and backgrounds, brilliant in wits of all kinds.
The second as a standard-bearer of a biographical line with hairs on the tongue, but not precisely because of modesty or shyness.
Both were part of the collective of cartoonists
underground comix.
The couple, who married in 1978, had their own career and their comics circulated profusely among half the world's comic scene.
It was the enlightened gap and his work set a trend, they spoke of the intersections out of focus of the
American way of life
(the American way of life).
More information
Journey to the Planet by Robert Crumb
The publisher Reservoir Books publishes for the first time in Spain
Querido Callo.
Food, sex, death, happiness, love, pain,
by Aline Kominsky-Crumb, a compilation of all her work that has also become a posthumous tribute, after the death of the author last November.
The book tells the life of the author in the first person, from when she is a teenager and she has her first sexual experience until she goes to live in a castle with her husband in the south of France and later the daughter Sophie makes her a grandmother.
A true vital hit against pacata morality or emasculating religions, also a manifesto of independence and vindication of desire.
A journey loaded with sex, drugs, music and autobiographical experiences without modesty or social formalities.
Kominsky-Crumb also recounts her first-time adoration of her by the Beatles, her atomic relationship with her family or her passing through the group of women cartoonists Wimmen's Comix.
Comics author Aline Kominsky-Crumb, in an undated image.Lora Fountain (Reservoir Books)
For Sophie Crumb Kominsky (Woodland, California, 1981), the daughter of both illustrators, her mother was “a true
outsider
even within the
underground
, a 100% original artist, self-made.
Her humor is very specific, not necessarily accessible to everyone, and it draws her naive and anti-academic.
This book is like a UFO.”
Sophie, who is also a noted illustrator, notes by email that she is "so proud to be her daughter" of hers.
On the idea of “
outsider
” from her mother, makes a clarification in relation to the debate then and now: “She brought sexual freedom to feminism, the right to be anti-politically correct, to be hypersexual, to love and also to be spanked.
And that's a huge part of what it means to be a free woman, it's about not worrying about the rules or not caring about being accepted by a group.
She was, in my opinion, a punk."
As with punk, at least in its original version, Kominsky-Crumb surprises and shocks an audience not used to breaking the rules in almost equal measure.
In the epilogue to the Spanish edition of the book, Hillary Chute, an art professor and comics expert at Rutgers University in New Jersey, notes: "His work exceptionally combines images of desire and revulsion and brings visibility to the disgusting aspects of the bodies and desires of women.
And the teacher adds about the autobiographical nudity of the author: "In these times in which moral judgment weighs on maternal behavior, admitting to having consumed lots of drugs during pregnancy is not a conventional fact that is revealed in public, especially because he does not apologize and does not feel the slightest bit of shame”.
Double page spread of 'Dear Callo', by Aline Kominsky-Crumb, published by Reservoir Books.
The title of
Dear Callo
it has to do with the nickname that Aline Kominsky-Crumb chose to define herself.
A nickname she decided to give herself because it sounded repulsive.
For Sophie Crumb Kominsky her parents were "the best artists in the world".
And she adds about her mother that she admires her “her originality, her humor and her realism.
She always had a weird and hilarious comment to make, a weird face to draw, or a quirky idea to come up with."
For Jaume Bonfill, literary director of Reservoir Books, who met the author in 2016, she "was a woman full of energy, highly educated, charming and seductive."
He considers that the work of the American “blows your mind” and adds: “She throws formal radicalism down the street and deliberately strange drawing, at the service of a truth that is hers.
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