Early life and education Aline Goldsmith was born to a
Jewish family in the
Five Towns area of
Long Island, New York. Her father was a largely unsuccessful businessman and
organized crime associate. As a teenager, she turned to drugs and the
counterculture, and was a hanger-on to New York countercultural musicians such as
The Fugs. Relocating to
East Village during her college years, she began studying art at
The Cooper Union. In 1968, Aline married Carl Kominsky, with whom she relocated to
Tucson, Arizona. Their marriage did not last long; nonetheless, she retained the surname Kominsky after their split. During this time, she attended
University of Arizona,
Career Kominsky-Crumb was introduced to underground cartoonists
Spain Rodriguez and
Kim Deitch by former Fugs drummer
Ken Weaver, who was living in Tucson at the same time. Rodriguez and Deitch introduced her to underground comix, inspiring her to begin making underground comics herself and to relocate to
San Francisco. (who had been created in 1970). Their relationship soon became serious, and they began living together. Kominsky-Crumb also fell in with the ''
Wimmen's Comix collective, and contributed to the first few issues of that series. After she and Diane Noomin had a falling out with Trina Robbins and other members of the collective, they started their own title, Twisted Sisters. Their daughter Sophie was born in 1981. Starting in the late 1970s, Aline and Robert produced a series of collaborative comics called Dirty Laundry
(also known as Aline & Bob's Dirty Laundry''), a comic about the Crumb family life. They both drew their own characters for the comic. Around this time, Kominsky-Crumb began calling her comics avatar "The Bunch," a reference to the similarly named Crumb character. From 1986 to 1993, Kominsky-Crumb was editor of
Weirdo, a leading
alternative comics anthology of the time, taking over the editorship from
Peter Bagge, who had previously taken over from original editor Robert Crumb. Her editorial reign was known as "
Twisted Sisters", reviving that title; Noomin was a frequent
Weirdo contributor during this period, which also featured Kominsky-Crumb's own comics. From 1991, Robert and Aline lived as
expatriates in a small French village in the
Languedoc-Roussillon region. Kominsky-Crumb and her husband had an
open marriage, and Kominsky-Crumb's "second husband", French printmaker Christian Coudurès, lived with the family (as did his daughter, Agathe McCamy, who assisted Kominsky-Crumb in coloring her comics). In addition to her comics work, Kominsky-Crumb was a painter. After moving to France, she focused more on painting and less on producing comics. In February 2007 she released a memoir entitled
Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, In 2018, Kominsky-Crumb's
Love That Bunch, which was originally published in 1990,
Death Kominsky-Crumb died from
pancreatic cancer at her home in France on November 29, 2022, at the age of 74. ==In popular culture==