Drawn Together offers something different, animated as it is by the Crumbs' steadfast belief that honesty is all that matters, that their every revelation is somehow revelatory. Of course, any autobiographical work is by its very nature a mediated experience - the author directs our attention to specific moments and discrete events in an attempt to turn unstructured experience into meaningful narrative. Thus a walk through the French village they love so deeply becomes oppressive, as we watch the air grow thick with word balloons like thunderheads, forcing us to peer under them and catch only glimpses of the town itself. This tendency to underline eliminates any tension between word and image, moving the work out of the realm of true comics and into that of illustrated text. Over the decades, in fact, we see the Crumbs grow increasingly voluble, eager to lay bare in dialogue what they have taken care to depict visually. everything's laid bare! 'Ya gotta love Aline 'n' Bob!' Oh boy. "We do prattle on! Look at these pages, nothing but talking heads! No action, no suspense, no mystery. There is no shortage of petty but honest detail to be found here, from the couple's opinions of their friends to the mechanics of their sex life to sundry disquisitions on their bowel habits.ĭisagree with that sentiment, however, and you'll likely find yourself nodding vigorously as, in one panel, a worried Robert Crumb critiques one of their comics: No detail is too petty if it's honest."Īgree with that sentiment and you will find Drawn Together a richly rewarding reading experience. "I wanna feel like I'm snooping, peeking thru the keyhole into somebody's - anybody's - private hell. It is Aline who delivers the Crumbs' mission statement: "The more personal, revealing and sniveling, the more interesting," she says. Together, they produced the autobiographical series Dirty Laundry Comics. ![]() ![]() Liveright Robert Crumb and Aline Kominsky Crumb are comics artists. As a result, in panel after panel, Aline appears to float between the work and the reader, like an exuberant two-dimensional child's drawing suspended above the dark, dense, richly detailed world of the comic. Aline writes her dialogue and draws herself into the panels with less polish but more passion, using thin, wiggly line work reminiscent of naive or outsider art, and seems to relish depicting herself as grotesque. Robert writes his dialogue, and draws himself and the backgrounds in his familiar style of disciplined exaggeration buttressed by rigorous drafting skill, employing cross-hatching and chiaroscuro to lend weight and dimensionality. It's interesting, too, to watch their styles coexist without melding. ![]() As amply demonstrated in Drawn Together, which collects comics the two cartoonists have created together since the late '70s, their specific subjects may change, but how they go about depicting those subjects - their shared impulse for autobiographical, self-deprecating logorrhea - remains constant.ĭrawn Together reveals how static their writerly obsessions have remained over the decades, from the '70s (Timothy Leary, Aline's body, sadistic sex) through the '80s (the birth of their daughter, Aline's body, sadistic sex), the '90s (their move to a small French village, their dissatisfaction with Terry Zwigoff's documentary about Robert's family and career, Aline's body, sadistic sex), and the '00s (covering New York Fashion Week and the Cannes Film Festival for The New Yorker, Aline's body, sadistic sex). What happens to underground artists after they step, blinking, into the harsh, flat light of the upper world? If they are Robert and Aline Crumb, not a whole hell of a lot - at least, not in their approach to their art.
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