And because she lived in Tucson for awhile, my old home town, and has some cool drawings of saguaro cactus. 2 stars, which I will stretch to 2.4 for nostalgia. ![]() And - there were only FOUR PAGES of color art in the book! So, the book pretty much missed for me. I had a really hard time following the overlapping dialog-balloons in her cartoons (which appear to be reduced in size), and a fair bit of it seemed pretty dull. And AKC is certainly fearless in sharing (or oversharing) the salacious details of her hippie youth. The author (henceforth AKC) has led an "interesting" life, and her book amounts to an autobiography in comix. Well, I was expecting to like this a lot more than I did. Here's what we ate at club, including sushi and horseradish creme fraiche dip and ginger molasses cookies that I made my own self, recipe here: But the girls at book club generally felt the same way I did: really disappointed that this book, and this author, are so hard to love. My very smart friend Jil reviewed this for The Nation and is far more forgiving than I was. Also her style is physically chaotic which can make it feel even harder to drag your eyes down the page. This isn't a memoir, though its heft and chronology makes the reader (or, well, made this reader) want to read it as one, which makes the repetition of the same stories in slightly different formats and from slightly different angles grow tiring, and makes the author seem overly fixated on a few episodes from her life without challenge or growth. ![]() The anthologizing of these disparate works into an oversized tome doesn't help. Of her joy in owning her own sexuality and her reverence for nontraditional life, which is tanked by her pettiness and her devastating self-loathing. Of her brashness in the face of sexual assault which is overshadowed by her unexamined sexual masochism. The way she is never able to let go of her self-depreciation, of her limp victimhood, of her desperate keening to be thinner, prettier, worldlier. It's not just the heavy shit - all the rape and racism and overwhelming misogyny and abuse of all stripes - it's the "lesser" awfulness too, the way that she flees her prudish, superficial, neurotic, upwardly-clawing Long Island upbringing but seems not to have been able, all these years later, to remove its talons from her heart. But it is hard to love these stories, my god. I wanted to be so thrilled to finally get a glimpse at the overlooked oeuvre, the sublimated psyche of a woman so long in her husband's shadow, who nonetheless was doggedly making her own fairly groundbreaking work all along. Recommended for people wanting to read 70s alternative comics from a female creator. I'm sure I'll be encountering more of Aline's work in the future as I read through anthologies like Arcade and Weirdo, so I'll give her another shot soon enough! It's something I want to enjoy more but after a story or two at a time I found myself struggling. I just wish she let the drawings carry more of the story. ![]() I think this book is better than her collabs with her husband Robert Crumb. The newer one has more pages and is published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2018. The introduction by Harvey Pekar in this one is quite good. One older by Fantagraphics in 1990 (that's the one Goodreads shows). I like when she spends more time on the drawings with lots of details - especially the grotesque faces she enjoys drawing. I enjoyed a few of the comics about her younger years and dating. But for the most part each on treads along the same territory with flat drawings and tons of unnecessary dialogue and text making it a slog to get through. ![]() There are a few comics in here that are really good.
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