“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

line Kominsky Crumb has never disguised her Jewish identity on the page. From her earliest published works, she incorporates Yiddishisms into the language of her comics, often draws her alter egos displaying symbols of their Jewishness, such as wearing Stars of David around their necks, and does not shy away from continuous criticisms of and reflections on the Jewish middle-class community she was born into.¹ A close inspection of her comics also reveals a consistent awareness of the anxiety that accompanies representing the body as Jewish. As Derek Parker Royal points out in his introduction to a 2007 special issue of MELUS on ethnicity in graphic narratives, comics provides an especially fertile space for the examination of “those very assumptions that problematize ethnic representation” because the form has historically relied on visual stereotypes (9). By exaggerating Jewish bodily and behavioral “flaws,” especially in her female personae and characters, Kominsky Crumb confronts such stereotypical notions of Jewish identification by visualizing them.

This chapter will focus on the ways that Kominsky Crumb’s autobiographical comics play with long-held stereotypes about Jewish women and their bodies, about women and their bodies more generally, and about the representation of such bodies and subjectivities in the interface of various autobiographical styles and modes. Some have referred to her work as “sexist and anti-Semitic” (Crumb and Kominsky Crumb, “Introduction” 5) because she does not simply reject such bodily and behavioral codings in favor of more politically correct or antitypological portrayals of Jewish women. Instead, her comics reflect how, as Sander Gilman so aptly sums it up, “there is no hiding from the fact of a constructed difference” (The Jew’s Body 193). Kominsky Crumb confronts stereotypical representations by recognizing how ingrained they are in her subjectivity and portraying them as a constant and sometimes even productive influence in how she sees herself and others. In a 2007 interview published in Heeb Magazine, she discussed her Jewish identity in relation to her experiences growing up in an upwardly mobile, mostly Jewish, suburban community, and particularly in regard to her relationships with “Jewish boys [who] were real snotty” (“Drawn Together” 49). As she explained, “They were these short, skinny boys who wanted little blond girls. Those boys all grown up still make me feel like a Jewish monster. Whereas when I’m with a goy, I feel exotic and sexy and voluptuous.” With this statement, Kominsky Crumb reinscribes classifications of Jewish men as petite, feminized, and shiksa loving, while she reinforces her own feelings of marginality stemming from another gender stereotype: that of the Jewish woman as “monster.”² Additionally, what she enjoys about non-Jewish men is their fetishization of the Jewish woman as an exotic, or sexy, “other.”

In this response, and, as we shall see, in her comics, Kominsky Crumb suggests that long-standing categorizations of Jewish women, and, consequently, of Jewish and non-Jewish men as well, can become empowering based not only on who is creating the image, but also on how it is being made. In this interview as well as in her characteristically stylized comics, she reveals the contradictions inherent in depictions of Jewish women as both desirable and grotesque in their otherness. By favoring a seemingly unself-conscious portrayal of how conventional notions of the self and of communal identities continue to define the way she depicts herself and others, Kominsky Crumb risks being misread as an amateur artist confirming these stereotypes even as she distorts and dislodges them. Her postwar autobiographical comics present the potential of stereotype as a means of representation that, through dynamic reconstruction, can lead to new ways of seeing and understanding the self, although these new ways of seeing are also always connected to a limiting and destructive past.

Kominsky Crumb experiments with stereotypes to reveal their productive possibilities, as well as their limitations and degradations, not only in relation to her Jewish identity but also in relation to her identity as a woman and artist. Her Jewish body is always inevitably a gendered body, drawn in an often allegedly “crude and sloppy” manner (Kominsky Crumb, “Public Conversation” 124).³ In her 2007 graphic memoir, Need More Love, she illustrates the interdependence of these identity positions through serial depictions of various alter egos in the framework of one overarching narrative. As Nicole McDaniel points out in her 2010 essay “Self-Reflexive Graphic Narrative,” the definition of the word serial is currently undergoing a transition: “Now also linked with repetition, seriality can be either recursive and episodic or sequential and chronological” (199). For the purpose of this book, I understand the serial to be aligned with the recursive and episodic, that is, with a lack of any sense of closure—a definition that aligns with Stuart Charmé’s spiraling model of Jewish identity, as outlined in my introduction. While Kominsky Crumb previously published most of the comics included in her memoir, a reading of her representations of Jewish identity not separately but as part of this larger, serial, collage-like work reflects experimentation with notions of Jewishness as integrated into the scheme of a structured but nevertheless open-ended narrative. Teetering on the verge of the autobiographical and imaginary, her graphic memoir invokes and performs countless anxieties and fluctuations about genre classification and intent, much like the graphic narratives of all the cartoonists examined in this volume. The book comes to almost four hundred pages and collects an amalgam of everything from photographs and reproductions of paintings to reprints of previously published comics, both in full and as shorter excerpts, as well as typed journal entries. Her ambitious aesthetic project questions the constructions that form and inform self-identifications—of woman, Jew, or artist, for example. It also challenges and makes visible the artificial boundaries between how we define ourselves and how others define us. Finally, it reveals the ways that these various constructions can be informed, supplanted, or destabilized through a process of visually mapping them.

Kominsky Crumb’s comics have often been looked down upon as scratchy, “crude scrawls” (Crumb and Kominsky Crumb, “Introduction” 4). Instead of recognizing her works as intentionally stylized, some critics have dismissed them as narcissistic, amateur, and confessional. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out in Interfaces, women’s autobiographical projects are often viewed as transparent renderings of their life stories instead of carefully constructed interpretations and performances of their memories and experiences, which is what is more generally presumed about men’s autobiographies. Kominsky Crumb capitalizes on this misreading by frequently putting herself down in her comics, both verbally and visually. As critics and readers have frequently pointed out, she looks much more attractive in photographs and in person than she does in drawings of her personae. In public forums, too, she often plays along with the idea that she lacks a deliberate consciousness about her artistic style, as though the reason she draws herself as “ugly” and in such a “crude” manner is because she does not, in effect, have the skills it takes to draw in what would be considered a more realistic, and therefore ostensibly more skilled, style. In one interview, in response to a question about her artistic vision, she told the interviewer, “You seem to think I have a more sophisticated approach to the whole matter than I do” (Crumb and Kominsky Crumb, “A Joint Interview” 122). In this way she contributes to the false notion of herself as an untrained and amateur cartoonist, a conceit that allows her more freedom on the page, although it often reinforces misreadings of her comics.

Despite these projections, her works themselves draw attention to the performativity and deliberateness of her autobiographical depictions. In individual comics she often changes the style in which she draws herself from panel to panel. Sometimes the variation is as subtle as the shape of her nose or the cut of her hair; sometimes she brings attention to more radical fluctuations through textual commentary. For example, in many of the collaborative comics that Kominsky Crumb draws with her husband, some of which were included in Need More Love, she draws little starred notes, similar to footnotes, at the bottom of certain panels and pages.⁶ In one such note in the long comic “Krumb and Kominsky in Their Cute Little Life Together,” originally published in 1992 in The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics, she writes, “The Bunch changes her look a lot because she likes to draw herself in different cute outfits with new hairdos whenever she wants to!!” (186).⁷ Sure enough, The Bunch, one of Kominsky Crumb’s many personae, is drawn wearing different clothing and with several hairdos throughout the black-and-white, almost uniformly six-panels-per-page collaborative comic. Her hair is down and curly in all of the panels on one page, her feet bearing large and chunky platform shoes. On a previous page, she has her hair up in a ponytail, her unshaven legs sprout tiny black hairs, and her oversized feet are bare. Other physical details, from the width of her thighs and knees to the shape and size of her nose to the cut and cast of her mouth and eyes, are also continually modified over the course of the narrative. In these ways, flagrantly but also, at times, less obviously, Kominsky Crumb highlights the differing images she has of herself, each dependent on her mood and outlook at the time she is writing and drawing. Robert Crumb’s relatively uniform depictions of his alter ego throughout the comic—he dons the same plaid shirt and slacks for the first seventeen pages and often maintains nearly identical awkward postures and gestures over the course of numerous panels, if not whole pages—further serve to highlight Kominsky Crumb’s shifting compositions. In addition, although The Bunch’s outfits, accessories, body and face shapes, and hairstyles so frequently alter, the most obvious characteristics tend to remain generally uniform over the course of full pages, at which point they often change. Presumably, The Bunch does not significantly modify her appearance until the artist begins a new day of creating the comic, which starts on a fresh page. In this way the reader is reminded, particularly through Kominsky Crumb’s contributions to these joint ventures, of the process of drawing an autobiographical comic as something that happens over time, and that is therefore dependent on and bound to the very same shifts in subjectivity as the author herself. By continually refiguring the ways she draws herself, even or especially through subtle details, Kominsky Crumb’s work reveals the multiplicity of images that individuals have of themselves, which are reliant on context and undergo endless transformations, both considerable and slight.

Kominsky Crumb uses another powerful technique within her comics to relay the gap between life and its representation and to draw the reader’s attention to the constructedness of her self-depictions. Scott McCloud has outlined several different categories of word-image combinations often used in comics, although he admits the possibilities are endless (152).⁸ In a “word specific” combination, for instance, the text gives away the story line and the image on the page merely helps illustrate what is already written (153). In a “picture specific” combination, on the other hand, the opposite occurs, with the words on the page merely acting as a “soundtrack” to the image. McCloud determines that the most common combination, an “interdependent” one, involves “words and pictures [that] go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone” (155). Kominsky Crumb uses such interdependent combinations to reveal a disparity between what she is thinking and how she presents herself on the outside (often, at least in her earlier years, as amenable to others). For instance, in a comic reprinted only in part, and placed early on in the memoir, she depicts The Bunch talking to an art teacher who she later realizes was only interested in her because of her looks (Need More Love 110). In this vibrant and colorful piece, so typical of her individually created works, The Bunch, with curly black-and-red hair flowing and sporting a bright, flower-patterned dress, stands focused as she composes a cubist-inspired painting of the nude female model located at the front of the classroom. Each panel is cluttered with bright colors, lines, and shapes; imperfectly hand-drawn letters accented by exclamation points and inconsistent ellipses, and encased in word bubbles, thought bubbles, and narrative boxes, further crowd the scene. Hard at work, The Bunch is approached by an ogling instructor, whose directed gaze ironically neglects the naked woman standing in front of them as well as the one in The Bunch’s painting. She turns her back to her artwork in the following panel in order to hopefully, but unsuccessfully, engage as an artist with this male authority figure, who now stands with his back to the artwork and his arms folded. The dramatic difference between how The Bunch represents herself to him—with a smile and the words “Hm…Wow Great!”—and what she is thinking, which is that she has lost some of the pleasure in painting because of the “complicated” dynamics of the art classroom, comes across through this interdependent word/image combination. The reader has to work to assemble these often conflicting layers of consciousness and experience, in the same way that the reader has to accept The Bunch’s different body shapes and outfits as representative of the same person.

In these consecutive panels, the reader is additionally confronted with two differing versions of The Bunch’s painting of the nude model’s body, with the second image having acquired a tuft of curly orange pubic hair to match, in color and style, the art teacher’s own unruly head and beard. These small, transformative details reward the attentive reader, adding humor to the recollection of an otherwise humiliating and disempowering encounter. Carefully, but also often buoyantly, Kominsky Crumb employs the unique form of comics, specifically juxtapositions of words and images as well as images and images, to convey the inherently ambiguous and selective nature of self-projection and reflection. The visual self on the page, divided by and of itself, is differentiated from the verbal self on the page, which is further separated into overlapping internalized and externalized subjectivities.

Juxtaposing photographs beside paintings and drawings also allows Kominsky Crumb to play with and challenge the hierarchy of signification so often taken for granted in discussions of self-representation. The predigital photographic image, for instance, has sometimes been assumed to be a neutral object of communication—a nearly unmediated copy of the thing that has been photographed, surpassing writing in its truth-telling capabilities. As Susan Sontag argues in On Photography, “Photographed images do not seem to be statements of the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (4). Of course, as Sontag, Roland Barthes, and others have pointed out, photographs are never unbiased reflections of our “real” selves.⁹ For example, the body that has been photographed can never find what Barthes, in Camera Lucida, calls “zero degree” (12). In addition, as with all mediums, readings of photographs are dependent on the context surrounding their production and reception, like the mind-set of what Barthes identifies as three key figures: the photographer, the subject of the photograph, and the person viewing the photograph. Therefore, for example, someone looking at a photograph found in a family album is going to see something very different from someone looking at a photograph in a museum. A photographic representation, and the response it evokes, is never at a constant.

Images in comics have, in contrast, generally been presumed to be distant and vague renderings of whatever they are meant to represent. For this reason, cartoonists who draw autobiographical comics all too often find their works being referred to as “graphic novels” instead of “graphic memoirs.”¹⁰ Thus, for example, Art Spiegelman’s Maus II was originally placed in the fiction section of the New York Times best-seller list, much to the author’s confusion and annoyance. In a follow-up letter to the editor published December 29, 1991, Spiegelman admonished: “I know that by delineating people with animal heads I’ve raised problems of taxonomy for you. Could you consider adding a special ‘nonfiction/mice’ category to your list?” (quoted in MetaMaus 150). Terminology aside, comics is often presupposed to be less realistic, and therefore less sophisticated, than other kinds of art and writing. As Douglas Wolk argues in his 2007 cultural history, Reading Comics, only in the last few decades, with the publications, especially, of Art Spiegelman’s Maus I in 1986 and Maus II in 1991 and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Night Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, both in 1986, has comics begun to be perceived as a literary form capable of addressing “serious” and real world concerns (8). In general, in North America, before the Maus series, and, though to a slightly lesser degree, even after, comics has often been presumed to be childish and lacking in artistic and literary merit. Wolk calls the last few decades a “moment of crisis” for the comics world, as the field of what he terms “mainstream” comics battles the field of “art comics” (11). The hierarchy established by many critics, and especially those unfamiliar with the medium, is of “art comics” as highbrow, and “mainstream” comics (such as adventure, superhero, and newspaper strips) as lowbrow. Indeed, many use the term graphic novels rather than comics to describe what they deem to be more “serious” works. As Wolk and others, like McCloud, point out, this issue reflects a misperception of comics as a genre rather than a medium that can accommodate many genres. Indeed, the reason I use the terms comics, graphic memoirs, and graphic narratives interchangeably throughout this book is to stress the importance of breaking down—instead of reinforcing—such superficial hierarchical classifications, as certain terms, and especially graphic novel, have frequently been used to rhetorically affirm the legitimacy of the medium as a form of “high” literature.

Both comics and photography are therefore mediums that have been misunderstood, with one, comics, often presumed to be an overly constructed and the other, photography, to be a nearly unconstructed representation of the subjects they are meant to convey. Kominsky Crumb utilizes these common misperceptions to her advantage when she includes both photographs and comics in her memoir. For her, playing with the repetition of images, and especially of her own image, in these different forms allows her to recognize and draw attention to difference within a general sense of sameness; it offers her the opportunity to trace the expressions and postures that never allow her body to find “zero degree” and, therefore, that gesture to other possible points of rupture hidden within images of the self. For example, throughout the memoir she includes photographs taken of herself at various stages of life, and these images are presented alongside, and sometimes on pages adjacent to, comics that she draws of herself in these same stages. Kominsky Crumb has admitted that the way she draws her personae, a style she calls “very expressionistic” (Need More Love 135), does not at all align with how she appears to other people. As she explains of her earlier comics, “I was actually pretty cute at that time, but I portrayed myself as a hideous monster” (151). The reader of Need More Love experiences this contrast firsthand in sorting through the various images that make up the memoir. Consider, for instance, the photograph of Kominsky Crumb posing with a guitar at age eighteen (101, figure 1.1). In the photo, with her head titled downward and her eyes half-closed, she looks shy and demure. She sits at the edge of a soft, cushioned chair covered in a flowery, antique pattern, her bare feet poised on dark, drab carpeting. The tone of the image, with its muted colors, faded furniture, and reclusive subject, is morose. A pair of dark sneakers is somewhat haphazardly strewn in the corner, adding to the general atmosphere of posed intimacy. The photograph manages to simultaneously evoke a sense of closeness and distance from its subject: she looks caught in a moment, but there is something careful and expectant in her pose, in the way a few long chunks of hair solicitously fall into the frame of her face, in the careful curve of her knees as they chastely fall together, in the sculpted neatness of her fingers pressed lightly into the guitar strings.

Turning the page of the memoir, the reader encounters a markedly distinct, drawn and brightly colored image of Kominsky Crumb’s persona at around the same time period (102, figure 1.2). In this oversized square cartoon, set against a beaming, bubble-gum pink background, The Bunch stands outdoors with bulging eyes and oversized teeth, her hands splayed out in an awkwardly cartoonish gesture. Her orange hair is wild and frizzy, her nose oversized and hooked, and her bright dress looks short enough to suggest a tantalizing exposure, advanced in the form of dark, shadowed lines. The contrast between the two pictures is not limited to her bodily features; it extends to her behavior, as her drawn self contrasts dramatically not only with her photographed self but also with the relatively unsuspecting, tame male passersby occupying the same Lower East Side city street in the cartoon. She shouts out, to the discomfort of another customer, “I’m free at last!” and her exclamation, drawn in large, capital letters, mirrors the noisy, protopunk lyrics, originally composed and sung by the rock group The Fugs (“Slum goddess of the Lower East Side…”), that crowd a large part of the page. Above the scene a series of cracked, glassy windows and a crumbling rooftop hint at the sharply divergent, subdued indoor setting left behind with this sudden turn of the page. As this image suggests, Kominsky Crumb’s comics personae, which are exaggerated or distorted versions of the “real” thing, are paradoxically the depictions that allow her to reveal her deepest secrets and expose herself, again and again, in ways she cannot with photographs or other, more “realistic” modes. With the comics versions of herself, Kominsky Crumb can feel “free at last,” even if subject to a potentially judgmental audience. In the cartoon she is not, as with the photograph, “caught” in a private setting—she is, instead, clearly in charge, open and unmasked, and willing to let it all hang out. Because of this dramatic difference in self-representation, readers are motivated to look twice at the snapshots and family photographs that are supposedly traces of her actual self. In this way the juxtaposition of photographs and comics in the text brings to the surface the gap between self-perception and perception by others and the question of what any image can convey all on its own.

By incorporating different mediums into her memoir, Kominsky Crumb also takes advantage of the uncertain status of both comics and photography in the arts world. In 1965 Pierre Bourdieu published his influential sociological study, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, which argued that photographs were somewhere in between what are considered “noble” and “vulgar” arts. If music, painting, and sculpture were thought of as legitimate arts, for instance, and potentially mass-produced items like clothing and furniture were considered nonlegitimate arts, then photography, along with film, was, for Bourdieu, located in the middle of this spectrum. As Jane Gallop points out in her hybrid academic autobiography, Living with His Camera, Bourdieu’s survey was published just as family photography started to become integrated into the world of art photography (132). Nevertheless, his book calls attention to the false oppositions that continue to divide what are considered serious and unserious forms—like so-called literary versus genre fiction, for instance, or popular versus high culture—and the ways that an (arguably) enduringly “middlebrow” medium like photography, with its utilitarian as well as nonutilitarian functions, can prompt us to question such problematic classifications. Comics is similarly valued, even if its status is changing: although they have historically been tied to popular and consumerist culture, for instance, print comic books bear the traces of the hand or hands that draw and write them and are therefore also often coveted as collectible art objects. Both mediums, then, frequently activate questionings of these problematic constructions between lowbrow and highbrow art, and each has consequently been traversed by many as an exciting avenue for autobiographical exploration—a storytelling mode that similarly calls into question definitions of art and literature.

By including both photographs and comics in her memoir to create a hybrid text, Kominsky Crumb runs the risk of marginalizing herself even more than she would as a cartoonist exclusively. Unlike the acclaimed works of cartoonists Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel, for example, which include actual photographs or drawings of photographs as bookends or singularly central images within their texts, Kominsky Crumb’s memoir is so replete with photographs of herself and others that her work cannot be said to fit into any easily defined category. This marginalization works in much the same way as her self-deprecation regarding her artistic skills. In both cases, although she potentially restricts her audience, she allows herself the freedom to experiment with form in a way that might not otherwise be possible.¹¹ While she subtitles her book a “graphic memoir,” many readers might initially be turned off by the lack of a clear categorization of the text based on the differing mediums gathered, in a seemingly disorganized fashion, in its pages. In addition, the overwrought and glittery appearance of the book itself, as well as its title, Need More Love, presupposes a certain flattened and solipsistic leitmotif, thereby possibly alienating potential readers even further. A cartoon drawing of Kominsky Crumb’s persona is centered on the purple cover in a gilded and studded pink, purple, and blue frame. Four small speech bubbles emanate from her brightly dressed character’s thick, lipstick-covered mouth, which is busy chewing on a large red valentine heart. “More shoes,” “More beauty,” “More spiritual enlightenment,” “More pleasure and fun,” the word bubbles read. An oversized, technical drawing of a realistic human heart hovers inexplicably behind the wide-eyed caricature. This visual and textual language of heated, sentimental excess signals the diverse catalog of confessional materials bound within the book’s pages even as it mocks the autobiographical practice in itself as garish and narcissistic. In this way Kominsky Crumb’s cover image responds to and satirizes a tradition of autobiography in which authors frequently begin by apologizing for their self-interest and qualifying the content of the material to come.

Most famously in comics autobiography, for example, Justin Green’s introduction to his 1972 classic, “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,” pictures the cartoonist with bound arms and legs, hanging upside down and writing with a pen in his mouth that has been dipped in “dad’s blood” (10).¹² The hero apologizes for the “indulgent, morbid, and obscene” content of the following pages, beseeching the reader, “Please don’t think I’m an asshole.” The subsequent text makes good on the narrator’s promise, for instance picturing rays shooting out of Binky Brown’s penis as he divulges his personal history of going to Catholic school, coming to terms with his sexual needs and desires, and dealing with his obsessive compulsive disorder. For Kominsky Crumb, the excess of her memoir project is also built out of the explicit and personal journey she takes us on—one that includes, for example, a humorous and disturbing exploration of her parents’ sex life and drawn images of them engaged in the act. But the excess of Need More Love is unapologetically presented, and it extends even beyond the graphic material contained in its pages, in both senses of the term graphic. The book is also excessive in its sheer size—the roughly 7-by-10-inch book is almost 2 inches wide—and the expanse of personal materials it brings together. In a sense Need More Love is a fully fleshed out, if whimsical, archive of the self, one that takes into account the many verbal and visual materials that the autobiographical artist has collected over time and internalized, which have then helped her form a distinctive but ever changing projection of herself in her comics and other artworks.¹³ In this way the memoir stands not just as an independent entity but also as a supplement to the many individual works Kominsky Crumb has produced in various contexts. The photographs in Need More Love reinforce the atmosphere of abundant cataloging that is ingrained not only in this particular memoir but also in Kominsky Crumb’s lifelong project of self-inquiry and self-representation.

In drawing on the art of collage in her memoir, Kominsky Crumb reveals the possibilities available to the artist creating “in excess,” the artist willing to purposefully and creatively straddle the line between fantasy and reality. Toward the end of Need More Love, she includes a sketch of herself standing beside her friend (290, figure 1.3). The black-and-white image is much closer to her likeness in photographs and real life. In it she stands with her arms crossed, her mouth closed, and a pair of sunglasses covering her eyes. There are a few details captured in the sketch—several photos sitting on a bookshelf in the background, flowers carefully drawn onto her friend’s blouse, a train of chunky bracelets decorating one of her own wrists. The sleeves of her top are covered in painstakingly applied dotted marks, and there is light shadowing cast behind the women. This placid, careful image suggests that the persona presented here is holding something back from the spectator, and it is as much her stance as it is the more realistic depiction of this likeness that enables her to maintain this boundary. If drawing herself cartoonishly allows Kominsky Crumb to explore and expose the most secretive and hidden parts of herself and her experiences, then this sketch suggests that the closer she moves toward a realistic or photographic depiction, the more she hides herself from the viewer. Her inclusion of a photographic album within the memoir therefore allows her to submit an entire spectrum of self-revelation as accessible within its pages. But it is through the comics form alone that she comes closest to conveying her “real” self on the page, through her vibrantly curated personae. The force of Kominsky Crumb’s work emerges from the creation of characters on the page who reveal themselves as somehow a part of, or attached to, the real-life author, but who are also distanced, exaggerated, and made-up versions of the “original”—characters who represent “me but…not completely me.”

Kominsky Crumb’s comic, “Goldie: A Neurotic Woman,” was first published on the opening pages of the 1972 premier issue of Wimmin’s Comix, the first ongoing comic drawn exclusively by women.¹⁴ This five-page black-and-white text, which is often considered the first published autobiographical comic by a woman, traces her initial twenty-two years through various images of herself, as her alter ego Goldie, that dramatically diverge. While Kominsky Crumb’s signature scratchy style and crammed design is recognizable in this, her first, piece, republished in full almost halfway through Need More Love, it is decidedly more muted in sensibility than her later work. This is not only because of the lack of colorful backgrounds and jagged shapes making up the individual images but also because of the comic’s more generally polished look, molded in large part by her careful use of black-and-white contrasts throughout. In the panel following the title panel, we see a smiling, curly-haired little girl with a doll protected in her arms and a tiny, almost indecipherable Jewish star around her neck (140, figure 1.4). The caption reads, “In the beginning I felt loved…” In this image Goldie, her face bordered in tight curls and a small, neat hair bow, is framed by a rectangular box and surrounded by lumpy-looking relatives ogling and admiring her from the sidelines. The two older women crowding around her are drawn as stretched-out figures dressed in distracting and unflattering patterns, with breasts sagging and eyes rolling as their more composed male counterparts hide in the background. The box-within-a-box arrangement suggests that such unadulterated love and attention, framed most powerfully through female presences, requires stringent boundaries; Goldie’s sense of unconditional love is related to an understanding of herself as divided from, but still maintaining proximity to, others. It is a sense of self that, as we soon witness, is unsustainable, as it inevitably and theatrically breaks down. In the final panel on the bottom of the same page, in contrast to the happier images portrayed of a much-loved and sought after Goldie, surrounded by others, puberty finally hits. A grotesque figure, with protruding legs and a sharp grimace marking her face, fills a bubble of white light. Her hair has lost its bounce, her body has ballooned, and large round blemishes cover her cheeks and chin. “With puberty came uglyness and guilt,” the narrator writes, and this lonely panel, framed by an uncertain layer of crosshatched, shadowy darkness, accentuates her new, unwieldy frame. In this drawing, the young Goldie is pictured completely alone for the first time since her debut, and this isolation seems to accentuate and cement her warped self-image.

The dramatic metamorphosis occurs abruptly, emphasizing how Goldie’s changing and aging body makes her feel increasingly out of control and isolated from others. On the following two pages, as she goes through puberty and attends high school, she is increasingly portrayed alone or, when connected to others, in humiliating and degrading situations. Her experiences at school and at home overrun one another, as she juxtaposes her first sexual encounters and hungers with her father’s verbal abuses (“Ya can’t shine shit,” he says to her one day as she applies makeup in front of the bathroom mirror) and her desire to “attract a boy” (141). These episodes culminate in a panel pictured halfway down the third page that reads, “I was a giant slug living in a fantasy of future happiness” (142). Here, building on the grotesque self-image first developed with the onset of puberty, her body indeed comes to resemble a giant, molluscan mass, with formless pillars for legs, an odd, oval-shaped head, and an exaggeratedly rounded nose. In the background we see two happy, good-looking, skinny couples cavorting and looking off into the sidelines. The framework of this panel, however, contrasts with both the isolated, puberty-struck Goldie and the framed and admired golden child, suggesting once again that happiness and self-image are connected to the status of her boundaries in relation to others. As a slug, her body overtakes the frame and, although she is spatially a part of this school crowd (there is no dividing frame here), the borderlessness of her protruding body actually highlights her otherness, the sense that her experience is taking place in another dimension. She looks off to the side just like the other teenagers, but the dramatic distinction between what she is thinking—“When I’m 18 I’ll be beautiful”—and how she looks suggests that she is not seeing whatever it is that the others are seeing. Ironically, this teenaged Goldie is in a sense no longer subject to the gaze of the other, even in her heightened, self-conscious state, because she cannot recognize where she ends and others begin. She cannot orient herself because she is so overwhelmed by the scale of her own self-delusions, the distended and grotesque image of herself that isolates her from the very frameworks that first helped shape her self-imaginings.

If the first half of “Goldie” traces the narrator’s transformation from a smiling, protected little girl, literally boxed in on the page, to a wretched, borderless adolescent—one who cannot distinguish how she sees herself from how others might be seeing her—the second half expands on the traumas of this early narrative, opening up the potential for reorientation. As an adult, Goldie acts out different roles that nevertheless continue to tie her to her early life. On one page she is first pictured as a Jewish wife, her sagging bosom now mirroring those earlier pictured ones belonging to her mother and grandmother, and then, after rebellion, as a sex object, her body appealingly on display in a tight negligee, as she had earlier fantasized of her eighteen-year-old future self. In each case she does not last long in her new roles because of the contrast between how she feels and how she wants to be seen, a gap often demonstrated in the text through a pronounced disparity between what she is thinking (as depicted verbally in thought bubbles or narrative text) and how she presents herself (as depicted usually visually in facial and bodily expressions). The divergence between her inner and outer selves impels her to keep trying out new roles in the hopes of finding some sense of relief, of repossessing the sense of wholeness she felt as a child surrounded by clear and closed boundaries separating her from others. In one panel, which shows her lying naked on a bed with men lined up at her front door and one leaving the house with a satisfied grin on his face, she passively explains, “The more I was ostracized the more I degenerated” (144). Like Goldie-the-child, the adult Goldie depicts her actions, as well as her self-image, as out of her control. Only in the last three panels, when she actively returns to isolated images of herself, does she begin to “analyze the past events of [her] life” and gain some sense of command over these fragmented snapshots.

Most crucially, in the third-to-last panel of the entire comic, the narrative shifts suddenly, as Goldie maps out her internal life onto a close-up sketch of her head (144, figure 1.5). This close-up dramatically differs from the storytelling panels that make up the rest of the comic, and here she pictures just the profile of her face, with little lines dotting the skin beneath her eyes and tiny dots and circles suggesting scaly imperfections on her skin’s surface. Half of her bulbous nose bleeds into the previous panel, though skipping over a small white gutter space, suggesting that this moment of retrospective analysis has merged fragments of the past and present into a more unsettling, inconclusive time frame. Above this profile of the lower half of her face, using arrows and words, she sketches links between the different influences in her life. “Parents” and “husband” occupy two-thirds of this hemispheric diagram, while the final section is left relatively bare, but for a question mark and the words “void of fear” and “uncertainty” traced across it. As she diagrams the forces and experiences that have shaped her until now, she distinguishes herself clearly from others and finds herself, finally, “indignant at everyone else” (144). For the first time, she comes to possess, of her own agency, those boundaries that were forced on her as a child. This mapping powerfully exposes the previous lack of active self-imagining on her part, as a question mark, a “void,” fills the space where her subjectivity has, until now, been filled with visualizations largely stemming from or determined by others.

Tellingly, the Star of David appears twice in “Goldie.” It first appears in the opening panel when Goldie is still the “golden child,” her image framed by loved ones. The star disappears as Goldie’s childhood story unravels, signifying that her conception of herself as Jewish and her subsequent omission of that identification is intimately tied to her relationship with her changing, increasingly sexual, and sexualized, female body. The second Star of David appears in a panel depicting the beginning of Goldie’s first and unhappy marriage (143). The star looms large behind the bodies of the newlyweds, suggesting a point of union or connection between them. However, the couple’s body language, the thought and speech bubbles next to each character, and the captions accompanying the image tell a different story. “It happened so fast,” her new husband thinks, as Goldie declares, “You’re all mine.” Goldie’s neediness, in comparison to her husband’s sense of shock and inevitable suffocation, presages the unfolding of a marriage characterized by miscommunication and emotional isolation. The Star of David, so prominent in this mismatched union, comes to symbolize the life and home that this couple will build together, as the chuppah, the ceremonial Jewish wedding canopy, is meant to symbolize in Jewish weddings. Unfortunately, as the larger context of the panel shows, it is a home premised on misunderstandings and the pressure of familial expectations—expectations that are closely linked with that symbol of Jewish identity. “Thank God he’s Jewish,” Goldie’s mother’s thought bubble reads. In both cases, the Star of David represents an identity symbol forced onto Goldie by her family, and the narratives that unfold after the star is depicted and then omitted suggest this enforced and isolated version of an inherited identity as ominous and, inevitably for Goldie, unsustainable. Kominsky Crumb’s inclusion of Jewish symbols and concerns in “Goldie,” which will become even more central in the next few comics I explore in this chapter, reveal her desire to grapple, through what I have been calling dis-affiliation, with the complexities and contradictions of what it means to be a contemporary secular Jew in America. In place of these prescribed symbols of affiliation, the question mark in the third to last panel of the comic stands for a designation as yet undiscovered, a self-selected, undetermined, and therefore potentially freeing representation.

As the insider-outsider artist, Goldie’s position at the end of this comic demonstrates a potentially empowering way for her to locate her Jewish identity, one that Kominsky Crumb’s personae enact in many of her works. For her alter egos, as for many contemporary Jews, the questions surrounding Jewishness and the representation of that Jewishness begin with the paradox of Jewish identity as both inherited and chosen. In his foundational 1987 book Beyond Ethnicity, Werner Sollors refers to “the conflict between contractual and hereditary, self-made and ancestral, definitions of American identity—between consent and descent—as the central drama in American culture” (5–6). With this “Goldie” comic, Kominsky Crumb shows how certain elements of one’s Jewish identity—adopting various cultural and religious practices or identifying as a Jew in a certain community, for example—can be accepted or rejected, whereas other aspects of that identity—familial ties, how others see you—are without choice. Her representation, at the end of “Goldie,” of being an artist as a primarily consent-based identity allows her a safe vantage point from which to explore the elements of her senses of self that have been thrust onto her. And it is, oddly enough, through an exploration of and experimentation with those inherited aspects of her identities, particularly as a woman and Jew, that she can establish choice both from within and alongside these identities.

Early on in Need More Love’s “Post-War Jerks” chapter, in one of the brief diarylike pages interspersed throughout the memoir, she describes her family’s “upwardly mobile” move to Woodmere, New York, a community in Long Island, when she was still a young child. Her description of the community presumes everyone in it to be Jewish; along with socioeconomic status, Jewish identity is what ties the community together and forms the backdrop of her childhood:

“Nose Job,” a comic whose full title reads “Just Think…I could’ve ended up looking like Marlo Thomas instead of Danny! If only I’d had a Nose Job,” stars The Bunch.¹⁵ In an interview in the Comics Journal, Kominsky Crumb described the origin of her character’s name in a narrative that echoes the story of how she came up with her alter ego Goldie: “I saw Honeybunch [Kaminski, a Robert Crumb character] as a cute, cuddly little victim, dumb and passive and compliant. I wanted to make the thing the exact opposite, a strong, obnoxious, repulsive, offensive character, but with a name that related to Honeybunch, so I shortened it to The Bunch which sounded disgusting” (66). Honeybunch Kaminski was the character drawn by Robert Crumb before he had ever met or seen her; for years Crumb had been drawing this character, which coincidentally resembled Kominsky Crumb both visually and by name. In the context of the naming of both Goldie and The Bunch, Kominsky Crumb took names that had been “passed on” to her (retroactively, in the case of Honeybunch) by the men in her life and revised them, thereby claiming some agency over the naming process. In both cases the characters she created came to be associated with this newfound self-empowerment—the ability to rename and reimagine herself—but also with the inevitable ties she shared with the negative, or “disgusting” and “repulsive,” aspects of these past selves. In addition, by including a definite article, the, as part of The Bunch’s name, she continues, in a sense, to objectify herself, but it is a depersonalization that takes place on her terms.¹⁶ The names of these characters therefore encapsulate the impossibility of ever fully detaching from the senses of self that others, mostly men, projected onto her in the past—the inherited aspects of her identities—despite having reoriented herself in relation to these prescribed roles in large part through her art.

Even within her chosen personae, as we have already seen, Kominsky Crumb frequently hints at the split she inevitably experiences in having to draw just one version of herself on the page. The title panel of “Nose Job,” for example, reveals the rupture she feels in drawing a single account of her history at the expense of dispensing with other fantastical accounts of the roads not taken (86, figure 1.6). The oversized opening panel, which takes up two-thirds of the page, is framed at its top by two images of The Bunch in the present day: on the left side she is depicted as she is usually represented, with a somewhat oversized, hooked nose, unruly red hair, large eyes and lips, and a shapely set of breasts; on the right side The Bunch is drawn as she would ostensibly look had she chosen cosmetic surgeries, with a ski-slope nose, dark and straightened hair, and wearing a red blouse with a bow tie that hides the shape of her body. The peace sign necklace she is wearing on the left is gone on the right, signifying, like the change to more conservative dress, that the bodily alterations would inevitably lead to differences in her personality or at the very least in the other ways she might choose to represent that personality had her life taken a different turn. The inclusion of these two self-representational possibilities at the opening of the comic serve to level The Bunch’s imaginary and “real” selves. As Jared Gardner writes of autobiographical comics, “The split between autographer and subject is etched on every page, and the hand-crafted nature of the images and the ‘autobifictional’ nature of the narrative are undeniable” (“Autobiography’s Biography” 12). These two images—the “real” and “imaginary” The Bunch placed side by side—acquire equal status in this comics world; they reinforce the fictionality intrinsic in any hand-drawn image. Further, they reveal Kominsky Crumb’s continual reassessment of the events of her past in relation to the present, her speculations about what might have been had she made different decisions in her life.

The comic continues in the following panel with the “real” The Bunch musing about plastic surgery. Standing in front of a mirror with her face tipped sideways, her back to the reader but her nose, face, and behind still visible, the narrative box reads: “Growing up with cosmetic surgery all around me…At 40 I can’t help dreaming about surgical possibilities.” The opening images of this comic, published over fifteen years after “Goldie,” reflect a persona used to grappling more consciously with her self-image, a character not moving toward, but already mired in self-analysis and speculation. Nevertheless, this character, too, makes sense of her present sense of self by connecting to her past and reorienting her present deliberations—of standing in front of a mirror and inspecting body parts—in relation to her history. On the following page she connects her present reluctance to have plastic surgery with her experience of growing up on Long Island, where, as she explains, “a disturbing epidemic” took place in 1962, as her Jewish classmates all began to show up in school with “pug noses + lots of eye make-up + cover up under the eyes” (87).¹⁷ The move from the present to the past occurs abruptly in the comic; while the page is split into four rows of three hand-drawn square panels each, this shift from current contemplation to memories from the past occurs in the sixth panel, with the general framework, architecture, and coloring of all the panels nevertheless remaining relatively even over the course of the entire page.

As Kominsky Crumb remembers her past self, she moves from images of an isolated character to five panels that all include other characters from the past (87, figure 1.7). First she pictures a group of three young women, including herself, and the framing of their faces in the center of the image as well as the narrative box describing the young women (“me ‘n my pals in Jr. hi”) reflects a sense of collective identity, a starting-off point from which the character will eventually dis-affiliate. In the following panel these three women maintain this collective self-image, but their visages are gathered more tightly together on the page as this increasingly claustrophobic collective is contrasted with a slender young woman pictured in profile with long blond hair, a somber smile, and a tiny nose. As Kominsky Crumb references elsewhere, this image is of Peggy Lipton, the Jewish actress and model who attended her high school and went on to star in the popular television program The Mod Squad. Eventually, the original group comes to be replaced by women whose faces resemble those three, but who have clearly undergone physical changes in terms of their makeup, hairstyles, and the shapes of their noses. The following, fourth panel from the past cements the splintering of the original group as The Bunch is depicted alongside her childhood friend, Stephanie Karasick, facing two young women with noses that have clearly been altered, though each new nose is slightly distinct from the other (one is long and straight, the other a tiny “button”). Although there is meant to be a strong contrast between the two sets of women in this panel—those, like The Bunch and Stephanie, with “big nose pride” and those without it—the drawing nevertheless portrays four women with similar hairstyles, including bangs, shoulder-length hair tied up in bows, and slightly parted, thick lips. What distinguishes them at all, besides the detail of their noses, is, instead, the way they are positioned on the page. Stephanie and The Bunch face the front of the page, standing together as a pair, while we see only close-up profiles of the other two women, who almost block our view of the others. The symmetrical positioning of these two pairs of women reflects their interchangeability; the two could just as easily have become the “other” two. The entire series of images of these young Jewish women from the past suggests that, whatever details of appearance they choose to transform, their senses of self are nevertheless integrally rooted in the collective identity that bound them to each other early on.

In the following panel, whatever comfort The Bunch managed to derive from being part of a pair—from being defined not individually but as two, and in relation to another two—is taken away when Stephanie shows up to school looking like a different person. Unlike the previously pictured makeovers, Stephanie’s metamorphosis, which results in The Bunch’s final break from the group, is the most startling. The Bunch wonders, “Who is that button-nosed beast? Sounds like my friend Stephanie Karasick, but it doesn’t look like ’er!!” In this image the contrast between the women is not only in how changed Stephanie looks from her previous self, with a new face that does not correspond at all with her old face, but also in how the two are situated in relation to each other. Large white speech and thought balloons fill up most of the panel, and the faces of the women are nestled at opposite edges, casting sidelong glances at one another. Although they are having a conversation, only The Bunch’s lips are parted, while Stephanie’s remain closed. As with the previous panel, the opposition between the women is a matter of positioning—of where they stand in relation to each other, of who gets to speak (or, really, who gets to draw the comic). But here the women also look markedly distinct from one another, a difference that extends beyond details. The Bunch is no longer wholeheartedly part of any group; her refusal to change her looks, to disguise herself, paradoxically marks her isolation from those around her. This sense of solitude peaks in a last panel from the past, the only one in which she is pictured alone. Word and thought bubbles frame her face, the background behind her a deep black, signifying how her final, full isolation from others is tied to the stubbornly independent mind-set that prevented her assimilation.

Interestingly, a collaborative New Yorker comic by Crumb and Kominsky Crumb from November, 28, 2005, “Saving Face,” returns to the question of plastic surgery. In this comic, published sixteen years after “Nose Job” was initially published, Kominsky Crumb decides to have plastic surgery (a facelift) and returns home to justify and explain her decision to a somewhat horrified Crumb and, presumably, to herself as well. Kominsky Crumb’s decision to record and publish this experience in her comics reflects her dedication to a notion of self as always changing and even outgrowing or contradicting its previously narrated private and public iterations. Her dis-affiliations unfold not only in relation to past conceptions of Jewish identity as prompted and enforced by others but also in relation to her former decisions to rebel against those conceptions. In other words, identity as invention is a recursive, open-ended process that precludes the possibility of closure and elicits continual reinvestigation.

In “Nose Job,” then, Kominsky Crumb portrays herself as both an insider and outsider Jew. She is the product of her upbringing, tempted by many of the same desires and values that she criticizes. But she is also one who has moved away from and often actively works against this way of life, and particularly the memories that remain tantalizingly manifest, even as she gazes at herself, in the present day, in the mirror. This insider/outsider status crystallizes later in life in her identity as an artist (as we have seen at the end of “Goldie”), an identity that allows her a sense of choice and freedom from within the framework of the inherited aspects of all her identities. At one point in “Nose Job” The Bunch muses, “How come boys get to keep their noses?” (87). For Kominsky Crumb, the question of Jewish identity and how to represent that identity is always inevitably related to her identity as a woman. Karen Brodkin has argued that Jews in America have experienced “a kind of double vision that comes from racial middleness: of an experience of marginality vis-à vis whiteness, and an experience of whiteness vis-à-vis blackness” (1–2); in other words, it is a double vision that stems from existing simultaneously inside and outside the realm of normative ethnoracial boundaries (distinct, Brodkin crucially notes, from the “classic portrait” of African American double vision as depicted by W. E. B. Du Bois). In “Nose Job” The Bunch experiences her identities as a woman and Jew as similarly granting her such a double vision, the ability to define herself through an ambivalent and dis-affiliatory relationship to an assigned identity. If, as a woman, The Bunch has to deal with the problem of the assimilation of her body, of whether or not to keep her nose, she can frame and draw that story as one of both personal agency and group dis/identity. She is forced to confront her nose because she is a woman, and her body is therefore most valued for its conformity to a certain aesthetic norm. But it is also as a woman that she is able to claim her own independent Jewish identity, to stand as a Jew outside the Jewish community. The inherited aspects of her identity positions, which include the stereotypes associated with being a Jew and woman, ironically allow her a starting point from which to explore choice or individual agency in the face of what is forced or passed on by others.

In “Euro Dirty Laundry,” which is featured in its complete republished version at the beginning of chapter 4 and was originally created in 1992, Crumb’s and Kominsky Crumb’s self-identifications in terms of individual artistic styles literally bump up against one another on the page, revealing how much these identifications are dependent on the delineations and articulations of boundaries between self and other.¹⁸ Although they have very different drawing styles, their collaborations partially mask these differences by offering no obvious boundaries between the works of each individual artist on the page. While it may be clear that Crumb, with a more classical and realistic-looking drawing style heavy on details and cross-hatching, has drawn his own figure and thought or speech bubbles, and it is also clear that Kominsky Crumb has drawn hers, it is often less apparent who has filled in the backgrounds, drawn the headings, or started the comic to begin with. In this way their comics question the boundaries between self and other, artist and muse, creator and collaborator. By inserting such collaborative comics into her graphic memoir, Kominsky Crumb’s work also questions the rigid definitions of life writing as by and about a single, representable subject.¹⁹

The content of these comics further expands on the question of boundaries. At the beginning of “Euro Dirty Laundry,” Kominsky Crumb’s alter ego declares, “But I don’t want to seem Jewish anymore…. It’s too yucky and unpopular…. Everyone hates the Jews!” (249, figure 1.8). Here, she draws herself to look like Frida Kahlo, with thick eyebrows and a cross around her neck, though her characteristic hair, nose, eyes, and lips remain. In this panel her visual self-depiction emphasizes the possibility, in autobiography, of representing the self by using whatever image suits one’s particular needs and desires at any moment in time (as well as the desires of the public, of what sells). But her alter ego’s words, in addition to her enduring “Jewish” features, quickly complicate that possibility by declaring her Jewishness on the page. This opportunity for self-fashioning is additionally undercut by the reader’s potential knowledge of Kahlo’s own rumored Jewish patrilineal background.²⁰ This word-image collaboration thus asserts the agency of the artist to reclaim or reject certain facets of her identity, all while demonstrating the impossibility of ever truly hiding or passing. In other words, the artist is never free, in creating depictions of herself (and others), of inherited notions of what this self looks and sounds like. Kominsky Crumb’s choice of Frida Kahlo also emphasizes how much an author or artist’s power is related to her status in the real world, and especially to the other identifications that are both chosen by her and imposed on her by others. Like Kominsky Crumb, Kahlo was married to a famous artist, the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. During her lifetime, Kahlo’s artistic merit likewise took a backseat to her husband’s, and she only became famous for her own talent after her death. By choosing Kahlo’s visage as her “self-portrait” on the page, Kominsky Crumb inserts herself into an interethnic narrative and creates a lineage of female autobiographical artists whose works are always inevitably influenced by the ways they are perceived by others off the page, particularly on the basis of gender.²¹

The panel is complicated even more by Crumb’s “side” of the page. Crumb, who is not Jewish, draws his persona waving his hand in a Nazi salute, as he says, “I’m not anti-Semitic! Some of my best wives have been Jewish…. Ha ha Seig heil!” In the context of Jewish American women’s literature, the representation of interfaith marriages has often been a place to air out the anxieties and fantasies of assimilation. As a third-generation American, Kominsky Crumb, with her husband, inserts herself into that conversation, but reconfigures the boundaries of this fantasy/anxiety as a space that can and should be talked about from the point of view of both the Jew and non-Jew. The anxiety of the Jew to assimilate and, consequently, to presumably and potentially lose her heritage is in this way understood as connected to the anxiety of the non-Jew not to be seen as anti-Semitic or as part of a history of anti-Semitism.

In the next panel Crumb draws his alter ego in traditional Hasidic garb, asserting, “Why I’m practically a Jew myself, I’ve been hanging around with Jews so long.” As the two are facing each other in this panel, this visual stereotype can be seen as an image dependent on the mirrored face of the other. Crumb’s caricature brings to the forefront the question of how much one can reinvent or play with one’s identity in autobiography without in some way reducing the self or other to stereotype, without preying on the other or on notions of the other. Ironically, though, it is Kominsky Crumb’s alter ego who is here drawn to resemble what is described in a narrative box to be a “blood sucking parasite,” as her eyes and nose come to bear a resemblance to elongated tentacles and her character admits to loving “only very financially successful ahtists that we can mooch off of!” The gendered stereotype about Jewish women (the “we” in this declaration) as parasites seems to trump Crumb’s Hasidic caricature, as the textual labels of “parasite” and “host,” stamped onto the image, indicate. As with the choice of Frida Kahlo as self-image, Kominsky Crumb continually brings up questions about the relationship between gender and perception in her investigations of inherited identities and stereotypes. Her sense of self, particularly in relation to her non-Jewish husband, is always influenced by the often problematic ways others have represented such relationships.

In terms of the self-identifications of the artist more generally, this comic illustrates the impossibility of ever claiming an artistic style as completely free of outside influences, even and especially those the artist wants to reject or escape. In these collaborative works Kominsky Crumb can question the boundaries between self-creation and collaboration and play with visual and verbal stereotypes as one way of examining the pervasive outside influences that inevitably shape any autobiographical project. Such explorations also take place in her comics about motherhood, though in a different, generally noncollaborative format. As an identity that has been chosen by her, like becoming a wife and artist, motherhood has the potential to signify a role that allows Kominsky Crumb to feel free and further indulge in her “own style.” Yet, as her comics reveal, motherhood is also always inevitably associated with inheritance—that is, the inherited relationship she shares with her own mother, as well as the stereotypes about Jewish mothers, not to mention mothers more generally, that characterize much of popular North American art and literature. In her comics about motherhood, Kominsky Crumb links these personal and collective inheritances through the Jewish mother stereotype, thereby demonstrating the inevitable struggles and interactions between her own perceptions of her mother, her perceptions of herself as a mother, and the perceptions passed on to her by others about Jewish mothers and mothers more generally.

When Kominsky Crumb depicts Jewish women, and especially the women of her family, she pictures them lacking in self-control. These portrayals in many ways connect these women with Kominsky Crumb’s own personae. For example, as mentioned, she frequently represents herself, in real life and in her comics, as a limited and undisciplined female artist who lacks control in the very way her hand shapes figures on the page. Similarly, she often depicts her personae as giving in to their carnal, basic desires, whether they are sexual, sensual, gustatory, affective, or verbal. In the case of both her own personae and her drawings of other Jewish women, she presents this lack of self-control as a component of her Jewish identity, especially her gendered Jewish identity. In the comic “Moo Goo Gaipan,” republished about halfway through Need More Love, for instance, she pictures her character in the opening panel sloppily eating noodles with chopsticks, her curly hair having taken on the same shape as the food, as her speech bubble reads, “Us Jews love Chinese food” (191). The next row of the comic depicts two panels that directly refer to the stereotype of the Jewish woman as one who consumes but does not produce (figure 1.9). In the first panel, she narrates, “The women in my family really know how to eat.” Here she takes the subject of her comic, a generalization about all of “us Jews,” and narrows it down to make it a gendered classification, one that can be traced down the matrilineal line of her own particular family. The women depicted in the panel have exaggeratedly thick lips, emphasizing not only the excessiveness of their hungers for the many plates of food crowding the table but also their propensity to focus on looking “done up,” even if their overly applied makeup only adds to the grotesqueness of the scene. Jewish women, as portrayed in Kominsky Crumb’s comics, are narcissistic and obsessed only with their own desires and needs, which are boundless. In the next panel the narrator adds another sweeping statement about the women in her family: “But they hate to cook…” The woman pictured in the panel, presumably Kominsky Crumb’s mother or some other female relative, is revealed to be helpless, excessive, and wasteful, shouting into a crammed refrigerator, the door cast wide open, as her husband sits comfortably reading the paper in the next room. Without looking up, he suggests that she “call Vinnie’s” and affirms her overdone suggestions for what they should order with a brief, “Yeah shure tahrifac.” The black line drawn between the two characters further distinguishes and isolates them from each other; if the Jewish woman has her head stuck in the refrigerator, ruminating over her many cravings in the face of mountains of food, the Jewish man is left untouched by the scene. Jewish women’s excesses and feeble-mindedness are well-documented and serve to make Jewish men appear, in contrast, more analytical and balanced. The stereotypes are relational; they are dependent on each group’s perception of the other.

Riv-Ellen Prell has written about portrayals of Jewish women and men in America over the last half century or so and how these portrayals often “mirror” the relationship between Jews and dominant American culture. To Prell, for instance, stereotypes of Jewish women’s bodies reflect the anxiety many American Jews felt as they came to assimilate into mainstream American culture. In one essay about postwar representations of Jewish women, entitled “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat,” she writes about popular depictions of the Jewish woman’s body as passive. As she explains, although this body “is one of consuming desire…[it has] no object of desire other than the self” (80). According to Prell, stereotypes about Jewish women’s bodies can be said to mirror “power struggles over the control of economic and emotional resources” (Fighting 12) experienced by a generation of people who were new to the middle class. Stereotypes of Jewish women more generally then reflect the fear that, for people who are not raised with it, access to money and other cultural capital can lead to greed, self-absorption, and bad taste. Kominsky Crumb’s Jewish women embody more particularly the postwar anxieties of a group of people that has moved up in the world, often at the expense of, or at the very least in the shadow of, earlier generations of Jews, including especially their parents and grandparents, as well as other minority groups. That this excess is reflected more plainly on women’s bodies in many of the comics merely affirms the notion that stereotypes are dependent on and built out of power structures that must, by definition, paint one group of people as monstrous in relation to another, more powerful group, which is then legitimized. The title of the comic, “Moo Goo Gaipan,” written on an exaggeratedly large Chinese take-out box, also points to this phenomenon. Moo goo gai pan is a dish that is an Americanized version of what is already an American invention, what many Americans believe to be authentic Chinese food. The title of the comic therefore alludes to an interethnic stereotype that gets written into an essentialized, intraethnic narrative. In this way, Kominsky Crumb establishes a kind of network between various ethnic and gendered representations; self-depiction, her comic shows, is always a collaborative and often contradictory mixture of what Brodkin terms ethnoracial assignment and ethnoracial identity: how one is viewed by dominant society and how one views one’s self.

If to be seen as a Jew and/or a woman is, in some ways, to be misread, then part of Kominsky Crumb’s project is figuring out how, as an artist, she can seek out ways of somehow controlling or manipulating these misreadings, particularly by, in turn, assuming and rejecting them for herself and others. As the one in control, creating and arranging these various images on the page, she defies the classification of Jewish women as unproductive and lacking in self-control, although her specific depictions also ironically reinforce these old stereotypes. Additionally, her categorically based illustrations of women and Jews highlight a continued uneasiness about inheritance and descent. For Kominsky Crumb, there is always a tension between perceptions that have been passed on and internalized and perceptions that are still being questioned, rejected, and then refigured on the page. In her autobiographical comics she often confronts that friction using explorations of the women in her own family. By this means she grapples with what happens to old ways of seeing as they get written into the scripts of subsequent generations as well as how certain iconographies function intergenerationally.

Blabette’s comments and facial expressions drive the narrative, and they contrast starkly with depictions of The Bunch as reserved. She does not say very much, and her outfit, hairstyle, expressions, and speech bubbles are similarly tame, particularly when compared with more typical depictions of this persona. Indeed, what is especially interesting about this comic is the lack of thought bubbles throughout, as though the force of Blabette’s character on the page prevents The Bunch from expressing her usual layers of self-consciousness and subjectivity. Further, all three characters, including the baby, are for the most part consistently drawn throughout the short comic, an uncommon characteristic of Kominsky Crumb’s comics more generally, reinforcing, again, how the force of Blabette’s character stifles the usual means of expression in her artist-daughter’s self-depictions.

The title and architecture of the comic, which is composed mostly of panels depicting these three characters interacting together, suggests that Kominsky Crumb is interested here in relationality and interdependence as it is mirrored between mothers and daughters, and particularly how depictions of Blabette influence and refigure the way The Bunch is constituted on the page in relation to her own daughter. In one panel, for instance, mother and daughter are drawn with their profiles facing each other, the baby in the middle, as Blabette’s words spread and take up most of the space between them, eventually devolving into repetitive yammering and long strings of words, letters, and ellipses (215, figure 1.10). The Bunch’s head, and especially her trademark hair, are cut off in the corner, and we see only one eye, frozen in what looks to be angst and frustration. Both she and the baby make the same incomprehensible noise as they stare into Blabette’s oversized mouth, lined with sharp, fanglike teeth and attended by a short, thick, quivering pink tongue. Beside her caricatured mother, The Bunch finds herself reverting to an infantlike state, reminiscent of a childhood in which, as Kominsky Crumb shows elsewhere, she did not have a voice. The inclusion of the baby as one of the central figures of this comic also reflects a fear of the inevitable repetition of personal histories: if The Bunch draws her mother in this way, is this what will someday happen between baby and The Bunch? Is the only way for a daughter to gain subjectivity in relation to her mother to draw her as a monster, so that she can be the human one in relation to her?

In the end this depiction of Blabette as monster can be read more generally as a commentary on Kominsky Crumb’s process of self-creation on the page. The final panel of the comic emphasizes the potential for caricature, both of the self and other, as a catalyst for reorientation. Concluding the two-page narrative is a large close-up of Blabette’s grotesque face. A bright yellow emanating light surrounds her head, encasing it and freezing her in time. Here Kominsky Crumb is clearly depicting what she sees as her mother’s excessive and suffocating personality—“So relax…Don’t get upset…Don’t get nervous!” Blabette implores in thick and large black lettering, as her body language explodes on the page. This image can be seen as a concentrated and ultimate reflection of all the negativity displaced onto The Bunch by this mother figure as well as by stereotypes representing Jewish mothers more generally. But it is a force that, once captured on the page, can also potentially and consequently be cast off, as its very figuration affirms a rejection of its power over the artist. A recent interview with Kominsky Crumb corroborates a reading of this and other caricatured depictions of her mother as a vehicle for refiguring, through visualization, her relationship to a damaging past. As she explained, “The only thing I can say is that getting those images out there, those mean images about my mother…our relationship has improved. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to have a decent relationship with her now if I hadn’t gotten it out” (“Public Conversation” 123). While elsewhere in the memoir her mother is pictured in photographs and illustrations that portray her as ranging from a passive to an active, damaging presence, this mother-monster image serves as a decisive, irrefutable portrait; transformed into an ultimate other, she can never be reintegrated into the narrative without this likeness somehow affecting all other readings of her character. Even so, such an extreme caricature, oddly enough, makes it easier to then isolate that mother-monster, to sequester this version of her to the realm of fantasy in order to free up new readings of the past.

This disproportionate portrait thus simultaneously disorients and reorients Kominsky Crumb’s persona in relation to images from her past, specifically those depicting her relationship with her mother. But, by virtue of its arrangement in a story line about two sets of mothers and daughters, it also serves as a self-portrait that reframes The Bunch’s relationship to her own daughter as well as to the vision she has of herself as a Jewish mother. In this way the monster represents yet another, though perhaps a quintessential, dis-affiliatory persona in her vast repertoire of personae. By maintaining a close proximity between this mother-monster and her own self-image, Kominsky Crumb confirms the inevitability of always somehow mirroring, in her self-depictions, the very images she continually works to reject. In The Female Grotesque Mary Russo writes about the grotesque female body as a depiction that exceeds the very norm defining it and therefore “leaves room for chance” (11). For Russo, in much the same way as Kominsky Crumb’s ever changing personae, the grotesque body “is open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing” (8). In a sense, by assuming the role of the ultimate grotesque monster, for herself and for those who are closest to her, Kominsky Crumb refuses normative, constrained categories of “womanhood” or “Jewishness,” even as she actively claims the very possibility of difference written into these identity labels. Her reenactment of prescribed symbols and stereotypes of Jewish women’s inherited identities ironically offers her a space for reimagining an indeterminate, continually transforming, and potentially liberated relationship to those identities.

In an interview published before her memoir, she linked herself to a “tradition of complaining Jewish comedy,” which, she explained, “is deeply imprinted in me” (Crumb and Kominsky Crumb, “A Joint Interview” 128). Then, in a move typical of her insider/outsider self-fashioning, she added, “what I think is funny is quite often sick to most folks.” To claim any status as an insider, to put herself in line with a group of inherited traditions or characteristics, Kominsky Crumb always also needs to set herself at a distance. As she makes clear, her temperament is what sets her apart, a state of being and a style that is both within and beyond her control. This emotional climate sets the tone throughout her work; her comics, like her identities, stem from a world of experiences mostly outside of her control that, as an artist and writer, she then shapes.