Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. New York: Harper Collins/Kindle.Ĭouser, Thomas G. Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. This scene, where Sophie is drawn by Kominsky-Crumb, is meant to be read as melodramatic partly because of the suddenness and insignificance of the motivation behind Sophie’s outburst (she gets angry because her mother protests when Sophie interrupts her from a conversation with Robert to ask her to get a glass of water).Ĭampbell, Jessica. Later, in “Euro Dirty Laundry,” when Aline and Sophie have an argument, Sophie’s words reiterate her mother’s own fears: “You don’t like me…You probably wish you never had me…right?” (Crumb and Crumb, 2012, 142). For instance, in “Arline’n’Bob in Our Lovely Home,” when Sophie comes up to her parents and asks them to play “kootie Katcher” with her, Aline has an uncharacteristic outburst of affection rendered comical by the idolatrous expression on her face, as she thinks to herself: “She’s so uninhibited…I guess we’re great parents!/…She’s completely confident…fearless…she’s gonna give some man a real rollercoaster ride!” (Crumb 2000). Crumb, as well as include some of Jesse’s artwork in the Crumb family artbook titled Crumb Comics: The Whole Family is Crazy!, Jesse-who passed away in 2017-never became an important subject of his father’s work.Īpproach of the quality of their parenting skills oscillates. ![]() Even though in his later work Crumb did revisit some of his experiences, and even published two affectionate full-page portraits of Jesse and his first wife Dana in The Sweeter Side of R. In the tangled threads of Crumb’s autobiographical narratives, Jesse also makes a brief appearance in Terry Zwigoff’s documentary film Crumb ( 1994), where we see him drawing with his father and helping him pack before his move to France. He also appears even more briefly as a baby in the first installment of Crumb’s short story “My Troubles with Women,” where we only see him in one panel, as his mother is breastfeeding him and watching her husband leaving home “for a few weeks,” the father’s guilt materialized in the shape of a knife that protrudes from his chest, but still powerless to stop him from abandoning his wife and child in order to “pursue every opportunity to meet girls”. Jesse first appears in one of the earliest comics co-created by Crumb and Kominsky, from their first issue of Dirty Laundry Comics, titled “Aline’n’Bob’s Funtime Funnies,” where he is not a developed character as such, but merely functions as a narrative prop, possibly with the intention of creating a humorous effect: he walks in on Aline and Bob as they are having sex, and his main contribution to the plot is providing a cascade of angry expletives and unreasonable wishes before disappearing quite suddenly and never being mentioned again. In this chapter, I only focus on the Sophie comics because Jesse, Crumb’s son from his first marriage, only makes brief appearances in his work, and his father does not seem to have played as significant a role in his education as in Sophie’s. In this chapter, I examine the way fatherhood tests Crumb’s portrayal of a specific type of masculinity (constructed partly as a reaction to second-wave feminism) and the extent to which his new vulnerability as “a doting fool” revises his understanding of gender roles. While in previous comics he had portrayed himself as a sexually frustrated man with violent fantasies, preying on women’s vulnerabilities and their susceptibility to fame, in his Sophie stories Crumb is a gentle, loving, and bumbling father, unprepared for the unexpected toll fatherhood is taking on his body, and pleased that his daughter’s willfulness indicates that she will not be dominated by any man. ![]() Crumb has an autobiographical persona that appears to be significantly transformed by fatherhood. The towering figure of the underground comics movement, often criticized for some of his sexist and racist cartoons where he claimed he was attempting to reveal “the id of America,” R.
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