MQP Is Back with Another Crumb Memoir

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on September 26, 2006 Sign up now!

by Calvin Reid, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 9/26/2006

Looking to repeat the commercial success and critical acclaim of last year's R. Crumb Handbook, MQ Publications is publishing another comics-oriented memoir, this time by R. Crumb's closest and most intimate collaborator—his wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb. On February 14, MQP will publish Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir by A.K. Crumb, who is among the earliest female underground cartoonists; she's worked in the underground comics movement since the 1960s and is an influential and critically acclaimed comics artist in her own right.

Much like last year, MQP plans to launch the book with a high-profile public interview at the New York Public Library—but this time Robert Crumb will interview Aline on Valentine's Day. Need More Love will include more than 40 years of Aline Crumb's funny and seminal autobiographical comics (in black and white and in color), many featuring Bunch, the nickname she often used for herself in her comics, as well as the collaborative comics (Dirty Laundry Comics) she has created over the years with R. Crumb. The book is likely to bring media attention, new readers and more public interest to Aline and her pioneering work in both underground comics and the genre of comics memoir long before the autobio comics movement of the 1980s.

The 400-plus-page book includes her recollections of growing up in a dysfunctional 1950s middle-class Jewish community on Long Island; her first visits to New York's Greenwich Village, and the art, drugs and sexual escapades of the 1960s. It chronicles the early days of the underground comics movement and, of course, meeting and falling love with R. Crumb. She discusses motherhood (daughter Sophie is now a notable young comics artist) and their move to France, where the Crumbs have lived since 1990. And there's even a chapter at the end called "The Kominsky Code," offering Aline's beauty, exercise and fashion tips—not to mention some smart photos of the svelte A.K. Crumb today. And the book is full of photographs and memorabilia from every period in her (and Bob's and Sophie's) life, all supplemented by her ever-candid commentary and reflection.

Stacey Ashton, MQP v-p of North American sales and marketing, called the book "a combination memoir, comics collection and art book that includes sharp vignettes of the movers and shakers—and the jerks—of the art and music scenes since the 1960s. But the highlight of the book is of course Aline's clear and very personal and funny voice."

MQP is working to mount a gallery show of Aline's art that will open in New York City in February and a book tour that will take her to Miami, San Francisco (an R. Crumb exhibition is slated for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), Seattle and Toronto. Ashton said to look for a national print, TV and radio campaign for the book, focusing on the art and comics media as well as women's, fashion and Jewish media outlets.

There will also be a Web marketing campaign and promotion at Needmorelove.com. And Aline will even do a 10-week videoblog viral campaign through YouTube and BlipTV, in which she will offer weekly tips on everything from love and fashion to comics, motherhood and, of course, sex.

Ashton said MQP is working on a wholesaler promotion with Diamond Comics and a special promotion for independent general bookstores. "Borders and B&N are very interested, and the Indigo Books chain in Canada loves the book," Ashton said.

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