The legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille, director of “The ten Commandments”, once summed up his maximalist film philosophy in one sentence: “it starts with an earthquake and then it goes up”. In her own way, Aline Kominsky-Crumb (1948-2022) fulfills that precept: at the beginning of this compilation of her best strips –of a very variable length, ranging from one page to thirty– she tells us how she lost her virginity to the in the seediest and most miserable way possible, when she was a young lady from bourgeois Long Island who made escapades in the direction of the bohemian locales of the Big Apple. And then she continues to rise: in sleaze, in shamelessness and, above all, in humor.
It is inevitable to look at Aline’s second last name: in effect, it was the wife of Robert Crumb, the father of the North American indie comic, which led to her being nicknamed “the Yoko Ono of comics”, although, after reading of this forceful volume, she would rather deserve to be recognized as the stepmother or godmother of the female (and feminist) autobiographical comic in its most punk aspect. Under the name Callo (which she chose because she found it both funny and unpleasant), we find ourselves with a complex, funny and wild character, someone who is impossible not to like.
The author tells us about her life, strip after strip, with a tone that is not that she is politically correct, but rather that she is located in the opposite hemisphere of what is politically correct. Among her most memorable are: “Arnie and Parrot”, a crude dissection of his parents’ marriage, which makes you understand the reason why during his youth his greatest desire was to get away from them; “What Good Is a Callus?”, in which Kominsky-Crumb applies her merciless lens on herself, with hilarious results; “Why the callus does not know how to draw”, that it is an implicit mockery of those who criticized his drawing, doubtless very imperfect, but impregnated with the same ferocious vitality of his stories; “Dearest Mama Callo”a great miniature about the experience of a first-time motherhood; “Lustful Housewife”, in which she explores with her usual frankness the intimate obsessions of a woman who has reached her forties; and what is probably the jewel in the crown, the longest comic of the set, “My dream house”, in which he revisits the different homes he has had over time, from Long Island to San Francisco, from southern California to a small French town, where he spent his last years with his family. In passing, she also gives us a side view of his domestic relationship with Robert Crumb, which has absolutely nothing to do with that of a traditional couple.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb passed away last year. After reading “Dear Callo” We know two things about her: that she was a great comic and that she lived a life that deserved to be told, a life that she spent until the end.