#sleepingupsidedown

real talk tho if you dont animate this completely i will totally do that for you aaaaaaaaa

Aline Kominsky Crumb Has One Regret

https://newrepublic.com/article/148398/aline-kominsky-crumb-one-regret

Livingstone, Josephine. “Aline Kominsky-Crumb Has One Regret.” The New Republic, 14 May 2018, newrepublic.com/article/148398/aline-kominsky-crumb-one-regret.

As Long as You Stay Alive There’s Hope: An Interview with Aline Kominsky-Crumb

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/as-long-as-you-stay-alive-theres-hope-an-interview-with-aline-kominsky-crumb/#!

Aline Kominsky Crumbs vibrant art style is a good inner showing of her mind. Her style is often seen as surreal, and has been called ugly by quite a few people (myself included) as the style is jarring and blunt. As a fellow artist it's easy to see that all of her art was drawn straight ahead with minimal planning, simply letting her pen go where she pleases. It can be argued that as some of the comics have been completely coloured and some are still completely black and white cross hatch, the ones in colour are the memories that are more literally are more vibrant in her mind. A trend with all her earlier comics I found while reading is the ones in colour are trying to be vivid but only comes in bursts and aren't streamline like the black and white ones are. While of course this can be scene as it being done for simplicity it can also be read that the longer ones are more prominent and fleshed out as if they are the ones that have more details and are grounded in reality rather than the bright surreal colours Aline uses.

In the final chapter of the memoir, which is really just a wrap up interview with Aline and her publisher and friend Zaro, we get to see a glimpse of how she was around the time of publishing (2007). She and her daughter have a much more copacetic relationship, and Sophia even acknowledges how her mother was the forefront of women's comics, even though she still sees her mother as a bit crazy. Her husband Robert also wrote about their life together and how he thought she was a going to be a tortured soul before he met her, only going off of her comics. The two are still married and living in France, and Aline has done some modelling work. From the interview, you can tell how content Aline is with her current life and how she wanted to keep making it a good life. She never wants to stop getting more love and is learning that she has quite a lot of it from her friends and family.

As Aline leaves home to enter art school, she goes down a path of a hippie, flower power and all, and we get to see the distance she puts not just from her family and audience, but from her self and her memories. All throughout the beginning of chapter 2 when she is still trying to discover herself, Aline writes in a way to truly show how lost and disconnected from life she was. Events were described vaguely and gave that's part of her life a kind of fog, just as she felt it. As we get into later events where she meets her future husband and joins Wimmens Comix there is more clarity but still a sense of floating as she goes through this stage of her life.

In chapter 3, we see her start to settle into a more domestic life with Robert and hone her skills in the comic publishing world. There are times she writes of simple pleasures, it's interesting she included something as slow as learning to play an instrument from a family in the town. Something so small and yet she write it with such a wonderful sense of nostalgia, the audience can get the sense that she was truly revealing in such little pleasures during that time of her life. It's interesting then, that she uses an even grander sense of wonder when Aline speaks of her first time in Europe and how she was never the same after that. The last major section of this chapter has to be the birth of her first child, and yet, from how she writes it, there wasn't a lot of attention given to Sophia even in the blurb written for her.

Once Aline realized that she was spiralling into the domestic wife life, she uprooted her life and took Robert and Sophia to live in the south of France. Aline writes this chapter with a kind of rejuvenated sense of self, as if life had been weighing so heavily on her and now she was free, even though it was at the expense of her daughters young life being completely uprooted. Sophia unsurprisingly was bullied and estranged and grew up estranged, just like her mother, and yet while eating this, I couldn't sense any kind of regret or remorse for this. It seemed that Aline was simply happy that she had a new sense of self.