Aline Crumb

I never know. Yesterday it was Minnesota. There are Jews in Minnesota.

They called me.

Actually we’re setting up stuff for February when my book comes out. I’m going to get to talk at the New York Public Library with Robert. I’m also doing an exhibition of my work. So I’m here to organize that as well. I’m having fun too. It’s my hometown.

No. He’s home. He’s only coming for a very short time In February. He’s agreed to interview me for my book. It’s like his Valentine’s gift to me to appear but he’s going home immediately afterwards. He hates stuff like this.

He likes to hang out with his record collecting buddies and stuff like that and look for junk. He doesn’t like media stuff.

Yeah, I know. He goes to New Jersey. He hangs out with record collectors and they trade records. It’s the ultimate nerd activity and that’s where he’s happiest.

I’m having lunches and dinners every day with old friends. I’m going to check out the Halloween parade and I’m going to do some serious shopping. I also buy art supplies, things I can’t get in France and certain food items.

Well some things are cheaper here so I like to load up on certain stuff. I have to go to New York Central Art Supply and get paper there. I like the Strathmore pads you can get here. In France, you can only get them in single sheets. Also I have a certain kind of scratchboard I like to get and some things are cheaper and New York Central will send your items back home. So I buy stuff there and send it home. I like to go to Kiehl’s and get certain perfumes and products that I like.

Yeah. I have an email address and everything. We have high-speed Internet in our medieval village. But they don’t have the same stuff online that they do at the actual Kiehl’s store. You don’t get free samples either.

That was my and our publisher’s idea. I did a very limited edition of a book called The Sweet Side of R. Crumb. I did it in 2000 for the Angouleme International Comics Festival. I made it in a cave in the garage. I hand glued all the covers and hand printed about 150 copies. It was sold as an art object. The publisher and I were looking at the book one day and we thought “We should do a bigger version of this because it’s such an interesting book.” So then I proposed it to Robert. When we put the book together and looked at it, we realized it isn’t sweet at all. It’s actually melancholy and existential. But he doesn’t really have a sweet side. It’s just that when you take out the shocking stuff, there’s something else that comes through in his work. It’s a certain attention to the details of daily life and a certain feeling for his surroundings and the people around him. It’s sad and nostalgic. I really like that aspect of his work.

Exactly. It doesn’t exist. But that’s why it’s called The Sweeter Side. What it means is the less objectionable side. You could give this book to your mother, even though it’s existential, sad and melancholy. But she wouldn’t be horrified, whereas if you gave his normal work to your mother, she would be horrified. It’s the sweeter side in the sense of being more palatable to many people. But it has this melancholy longing for things gone and this incredible affection for nature and objects of daily life that I find really moving. It’s something completely different.

The person he’s sweetest to is Sophie. He really loves me and he’s very supportive of me. But sweet? I don’t know if I’d go that far. We’ve been together 35 years. Obviously we love each other and we’re very supportive of each other. Neither of us are what I would call “sweet” people. We’re both edgy people. But with his daughter, he has a tenderness that is beyond anything I could describe. She’s the one that really gets to him.

Yeah. She moved back to France now and is living near us. We’re really happy.

Yeah. The Jewish mother in me is very happy.

She put out Bellybutton 1 and 2. She just did stuff for Jane Magazine that’s going to come out soon. Robert’s working on a book called Genesis: The Illustrated Bible. Sophie’s doing the color work for that book. So they’re working together.

That makes me cry every time I read them. That to me is the truly sweet thing in the book. Also I think his landscape drawings are incredibly evocative. The drawings of me I think are all really nice too. But his range of drawing styles and approach to things is really amazing to see in this book. When you’re not being shocked by his sex obsessions, you actually get to see other stuff and I think that’s interesting.

Yeah, I’ve done a lot of stuff for The New Yorker with Robert. But I’ve actually been painting for the last five years. I’m having a show of my paintings in France in December. So I’ve been doing a lot of other art work. I haven’t been writing comics as much. I started off as a painter when I was eight. I have a degree in painting from Cooper Union and it is still one of my major passions. At a certain point, I slowed down on comics and went back to painting. So I’ve been doing a lot of that and as a result, I have a body of work that I’m going to show now. That’s really exciting.

We did the R. Crumb Handbook with them. They have a house in France near us and we met them because someone was threatening to put a horrible toxic waste dump right near the village where we all live and we made a huge demonstration against it and we defeated it. They had this publishing company and they did a lot of cookbooks, exercise, lifestyle books and stuff like that. Really nicely done stuff. They started doing a series of handbooks and they had done a few already and they proposed doing one of Robert. He never wants to do anything, but at the time our friend Pete Poplaski was broke and Pete said he would put it together, so Robert said yes. Then, of course, me and Robert ended up doing most of it anyway. But I think it came out pretty good. So they got more interested in Robert’s work and my work as a result of working with us. So they proposed doing a book of my work. With a publisher behind me and Robert encouraging me to write, I decided to a complete book.

I know. We started this 35 years ago. So it’s satisfying to see that we’ve spurned other generations of artists who are successful and that a new audience is now interested in our work. That’s another reason why I decided to do it but then I would do things like with Fantagraphics and they would sell 200 copies. I didn’t feel that my work was reaching an audience that I wanted to talk to. 14 year old comic book fans are not interested in my work and there’s no way to reach intelligent people my age because they didn’t read comics. Now I feel like I have a chance to actually reach a larger public and at my age, I want to get my work out there finally and have it be read by people. That’s why I decided to put this book out now.

Yeah, he does. He draws in restaurants, on placemats. He’s put out books of drawings from the restaurant tablecloths. The book’s called Waiting for Food Volume One, Two and Three. In France you have to wait so long to get your dinner served so he draws on the tablecloths and on the paper placemats. Now he’s drawing probably less in his sketchbook because he’s drawing Genesis so much. It’s such a giant project and the drawing is so challenging that he’s putting most of his energy into that. It’s really going to be an incredible thing.

Probably in 2009. He’s been studying this material for five years and been thinking about it even longer. He has 68 pages done and it’s going to be 175 or 200 pages.

Totally faithful, but he’s using several different versions and he’s putting them together in the way that he finds to be the best. But the text is totally faithful and then the drawings are his interpretation, which are totally outrageous. That’s why these fucking right wing fundamentalists cannot argue because he’s not changed one word of the text. The illustrations merely show what’s already there. I think that’s really important.

I can’t remember when we got married. It’s been a long time. But we’ve been together for 35 years. We met in San Francisco in October 1971.

Yeah. He was really burned out from his first wave of fame and he was a total wreck when I met him, a total catastrophe. He had been this total reject that nobody paid attention to and all of a sudden, every rock and roll star wanted to party with him and girls wanted to do it with him and he was completely overwhelmed. It made him completely depressed and crazed.

Yeah. Women went for him just because he was famous, but he wasn’t really connecting with anybody. His life was totally chaotic. He had all these people hanging on him and wanting stuff from him, but he doesn’t know how to say no to anybody. His life was completely chaotic and out of control. I think he would’ve died if he didn’t end up with me. I’m being honest with you. Maybe the same is true for me, because he was also a really stabilizing force in my life as well. So it’s mutual.

I certainly was. I was part of the early Wimmens Comix movement. If you look, I’m in the first Wimmens Comix.

Trina Robbins hates my guts. She thought Robert was the ultimate male chauvinist pig and she didn’t approve of me going out with him. So that started back then.

Two facelifts later and she can’t get over her anger. What can I tell you? She still holds a grudge towards me. It’s not mutual. I don’t care at all, but she for some reason, has hung onto that one.

He had drawn a character before he met me called Honeybunch Kaminski and that’s my last name. But people starting saying, “R Crumb drew you and he doesn’t even know you.” I thought that was really weird. So Spain Rodriguez brought me to meet him at a party. When I met him, he had a wife and a girlfriend so it wasn’t exactly like a perfect situation. I had to make an ultimatum and say, “If you want to be with me, you have to resolve the other relationships one way or the other.” That dragged on for awhile and then he finally did dissolve the other relationships, which were not healthy anyway. They were on their last legs. But he had trouble extricating himself emotionally from the mess he had created. But then he did finally leave those relationships and then we started living together.

First of all, I was really attracted to his work, his mind and his vision. I wasn’t necessarily personally attracted to that, but I was interested in knowing him. Then he was really cute and touching in a way that really surprised me. I also just had this sinking feeling when I met him that our destinies were entwined. I had never had that before. I didn’t particularly want to be married or be involved with anybody at that point. I was having too much fun. I just met him and I thought, “Oy. Something serious is happening here.” I just had this unbelievable feeling that my destiny and his were going to be involved for a really long time. You can call that love at first sight or dread at first sight but I knew right away.

What’d he say?

I agree. I thought it was a harsh, exaggerated stereotyped performance. It didn’t capture any of the humor and softness and tenderness of Robert at all, which is all mixed together in him. It was very harsh. I saw that with Robert and afterwards I said, “If you were like that, I would divorce you right away.” I couldn’t stand it. That actor came up to Sophie at a comic convention and introduced himself. He had long blond hair and Sophie said it was really weird.

He didn’t like his performance too much either, but he said the movie was okay. It was interesting. The movie was very interesting and certainly experimental. The thing that didn’t work for me in that movie is that actually I like the real Harvey [Pekar] better than the actor and I like the actress better than the real Joyce [Brabner].

About 15 years ago.

No. We’re very reclusive in our life. I’m having a show because I’ve been working for two and a half years on this. But now that you mention it we’re having a Crumb family show this spring in France. Paul Morris, who is Robert’s art agent in New York, organizes all these shows and he takes care of everything. We don’t even pay attention to it. He’s really good. He sells Robert’s work to museums and collectors so we’re able to live decently because of him. There’s a show in San Francisco of Robert’s work at Yerba Buena [Center for the Arts]. There’s going to be a show in Brussels. The family show going to be me, Robert, Sophie, Max and we asked Robert’s son Jesse to be in it. We don’t know if he’s going to participate or not. That’s going to be this spring.

The next thing that’s coming out is my book called Need More Love. That book is coming out in February with MQ Publications. That’s a graphic memoir. It’s 382 pages with text, photos, comics and paintings. That book is coming out on Valentine’s Day, February 14th. Then on February 15th, I’m having a show at Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. Need More Love is really big. I tell everything in there. If you want dirt, get that book. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there about my early involvement in comics. The whole thing starts off with me being born on Long Island and my Jewish childhood on Long Island and it goes all the way up to the present.

Where are you from?

Yeah. I’m from Woodmere. My mother lived in Hewlett for years.

What’s your last name?

I’m probably your parents’ age.

Yeah. I graduated from Lawrence High in 1965.

That’s in Lawrence isn’t it?

I know where that is. It’s at the other end of Central Avenue. I went to Lawrence High. I lived in Woodmere. When my father died, my mother moved to Hewlett to those garden apartments across from Loehmann's.

My mother lived there for years until she moved to Miami.

My maiden name is Goldsmith.

Yeah. My father died years ago and my mother remarried. I left there in 1965. I never went back.

I hated it there. I write about it a lot. A lot of my stories are about growing up there like how I went to high school with Peggy Lipton. I had a story that I did about her because she was the blonde goddess that was placed there to torture the rest of us. I was miserable the entire time I was in junior high school and high school. I hated it there. It really formed my personality in a lot of ways. I was so alienated. When I was eight, I realized I was an artist and I had no interest in any of that crap. It’s such an upward striving disgustingly materialistic crass place.

Oh, it’s unbelievable. I didn’t want to have a nose job. It was difficult to escape from there without a nose job. It really was a horrible place for me. But it provided rich material for comics. I have to say that. A lot of my work is based on those early years there. So much material.

Yeah and that’s a real extreme place. It’s worse than Queens or Brooklyn in a certain way because people have more money and they’re so competitive. In school the kids are all really smart and really competitive. It was like the volume was way turned up. My favorite movie is Goodfellas because it takes place in that area and when the Jewish guy gets beat up in that film, I could totally identify with that.

Yeah. We used to go to a beach club in Atlantic Beach. It was like one of those beach clubs there along the strip. That was the hang out place in the summer. I was born in Long Beach actually. My grandfather had a yacht and my mother went into labor on his boat. So they had to pull up to the hospital with a dock and I was born there. That’s where my book starts with. Then the book keeps going through when I was a cowgirl in Arizona for awhile and then when I moved to San Francisco.

No, we didn’t talk about it and decide to do anything. Life is never like that. Robert doesn’t have a monogamous nature. We were both very young when we got together. He still is lusting after other women and he couldn’t stop himself. So I accepted him the way he was and he is the first person I can stand to be around on a daily basis. The bond between us is really deep, so we tolerate behavior in each other and the whole thing evolved in a point where it just works. We don’t know why and we don’t recommend it to anybody else. We are bohemians. The monogamous marriage form doesn’t worked for most people in case you haven’t noticed. But most people lie and sneak around about it. We are open about it because we feel that deception is the most destructive aspect and that’s what undermines the relationship.

Yeah, a lot of people are really straight but some people mate for life and they are okay with that. They just shutdown and turn their lust off and other people don’t. We really live the true Bohemian life, we haven’t confirmed in any way so why should we ever conform in that way. These all goes together, we just acting it out. We never recovered from the 60’s.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck