‘Is This the Real Me? What Is the Real Me?’: Deconstructing Authenticity in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love

Abstract

In spite of being a central figure in the underground comix scene, a trailblazer in the field of female-authored comics, and one of the progenitors of the graphic memoir, there has been relatively little scholarship on Aline Kominsky-Crumb. For much of her career, she was in the shadow of her husband, Robert Crumb, an iconic figure of the counterculture, and any attention she has received for her own work tended to be marred by condescension or predicated on the naïve assumption that, as Susan Kirtley claims, it ‘showcase[s] a raw, unvarnished authenticity’. It also tended to ignore her writing, focusing almost exclusively on her artwork. In this essay, I analyse her anthology, Need More Love, paying particular attention to the nuances of its uses of text, to argue that Kominsky-Crumb’s work might be read as a sustained, self-reflexive interrogation of the idea of authenticity.