Love That Bunch

Kominsky-Crumb's comics present a poignant and amusing look at her own remarkable development. The road to becoming an underground-comics legend begins with Kominsky-Crumb as a nice Jewish girl from Long Island, carries her to Greenwich Village in the 1960s, and to California, land of hippy cartoonists, and on to a more or less sedate life with hubby (the equally legendary R. Crumb) and daughter Sophie. Her funny/sad tales show a woman bewildered by her place in society and determined to find her own way. In ``Blabette 'n' Arnie'' Kominsky-Crumb portrays her parents and their bleak, demanding personalities. In Other stories recount her adolescence and depict her garish relatives with a mixture of casual honesty and a survivor's bemused sense of triumph. These stories touch on every phase of her existence from childhood, to sexual obsessions, food, motherhood and, of course, her art. These are comics with an edge. Kominsky-Crumb's drawing is as raw and untidy as her life, but certainly very few comics artists can take such painful introspection to such a delightful end. (May)