When I last saw her, last winter in a Paris gallery, Aline Kominsky-Crumb was, as always, the good spirit of the family.

Her husband, the world-famous comic artist Robert Crumb, shyly slipped into the background as usual, their daughter Sophie Crumb, also an artist, only found her way out of her introverted attitude when she looked after her own two children or with her mother just walked past the long rows of images that testified to the family's incredible creative potential.

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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All three Crumbs drew, and not infrequently they did so together.

Then they talked about themselves. But only Aline Kominsky-Crumb could do that outside of a comic page.

One might think that she was the only one who enabled the other two to develop as storytellers.

That's why the news of Aline Kominsky-Crumb's death on November 30 came as a shock.

She was so much more than the wife of comic artist Robert Crumb, namely his indispensable muse and at the same time an artist in her own right in the same profession.

When Aline Goldsmith, born in Long Island, New York, in 1948 and married to Kominsky in her first marriage, met her future second husband in San Francisco in 1972, she was one of the few women who was already part of the local underground scene.

Together with Robert Crumb, she then caused a sensation thanks to the often jointly drawn autobiographical stories in which neither sexual obsessions, politics or publishing nor the everyday life of the family of three since 1981 are left out - above you can see them in a discussion about Covid vaccinations (Robert and Sophie refuse, the dynamic Aline, on the left in the picture, has already beaten her three times).

The family had lived in southern France since the early 1990s.

And here in Europe, Aline Kominsky was no less idolized than her husband (or her).

It was hard to imagine the Crumbs being separated in recent years.

With her, the stronger half of this duo – as we know only too well from Robert Crumb's comics – has now died.