#the bunch

[grrl-beetle]

Klättermusen

[lil-doodles]

I decided to do do an Inktober challenge. I'm doing a list created for the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel back in 2023. The first prompt is Underground Comix All Star(s). I wasn't sure if that meant the characters or the creators but I felt like drawing the late Aline Kominsky-Crumb as I'm a huge fan of her work. Hopefully I can keep up with this but this is a pretty good start I think. All of these drawings will be from my Moleskine sketchbook.

[foxy--stoat]

apologies in advance to Caleb+Adam

so Mark+Oliver may have taken the lead in my list of fave ships... sorry caleb+adam and frankie+caitlin. You’re still amazing and perfect. but here are all of my hc’s for Mark+Oliver. there are a lot. 

on movie night oliver picks old sci-fi movies and talks through the whole thing about how everything is scientifically incorrect and Mark chooses old musicals and sings through them and Oliver shuts him up but he inevitably jokingly covers his head with a pillow

(this is before they start dating) they go roller/ice skating with the BUnch (side note: why not call the attendees of BU that star in tct the BUnch? It’s the best, change my mind) and also the Yale Squad (I need to call them something besides Adam and Caitlin) and the whole time Oliver+mark hold hands to “keep each other from falling” and Adam notices but doesn’t say anything. then later at the bar mark gets tipsy and starts flirting with oliver, much to Frankie’s delight

Oliver sometimes tries to make dinner for them but always ends up burning things and making stuff really weird and complaining very loudly about how he can do alchemy but he can’t do something as mundane and necessary as cooking?!?!

they eat a lot of breakfast for dinner as a result of that last one

they watch bad game shows and mark yells the answers at the tv and Oliver corrects him, and when he’s wrong he says “I was just trying to trick you anyway”

Mark and Caleb get lunch and the entire time Caleb teases mark about oliver

they host a housewarming party and mark has to keep an eye on oliver the whole time to make sure he doesn’t go off on some poor unsuspecting party guest about some obscure alchemy thing

they play trivial pursuit and oliver gets all the science questions and mark gets all the pop culture ones but mark can’t stand to see someone struggle at a game so he loudly whispers the answers to oliver, which he refuses to use because he takes his trivial pursuit very seriously and always picks an answer that mark didn’t say

every saturday night mark has karaoke night for anyone who can make it and Oliver always complains but mark convinces him to do a duet which he says in a monotone voice and mark makes up for it by trying (and failing) to harmonize, which leads to much teasing from Joan afterwards

Oliver is constantly losing his reading glasses and spends a lot of time grumbling about it

mark is obsessed with yard sales and always buys way too much stuff which oliver later sorts through and gets rid of most of it but some stuff mark gets for him and he can’t bring himself to give them away so he keeps them on a shelf in the living room

mark found an old record player at a yard sale and is constantly playing music quietly in the background (or should I say the bachground? I’ll see myself out)

once mark got a huge star wars lego set from a yard sale and they spent the whole day sitting on the living room floor building it together

mark leaves little doodles on scraps of paper and gives them to oliver, who tries to recreate them and is actually decent at it, and they both keep the papers in their pockets without telling one another and once mark and caleb got lunch and they all fell out of mark’s pocket and caleb was overly excited at how cute it was

when they announce they’re getting married oliver hides his grin by talking about how one in two couples get divorced in the us but is muffled by everybody hugging him and mark

mark gets obsessed with hamilton and so for his birthday oliver gets them tickets and begrudgingly goes and mumbles under his breath the whole time about how kids these days can’t just learn from a textbook like everybody else had to

I told you there were a lot. sometimes when you let something stew in your mind it fizzles out, but sometimes it explodes. guess which one it did here.

[jewish-privilege]

...And yet, I worry that Kominsky-Crumb will be considered too forthright for this moment. By which I mean too Jewish. A caption in one panel in “My Very Own Dream House,” announcing “no matter what remote corner of the world you go to—you’ll always find a crazy Jewish woman there. Probably true and I’m proud to be one!” may be familiar to (as well as discomfiting to) women who came of age in the second half of the 20th century but I’m not sure it resonates in the tepid, politically correct, 21st.

...In “Of What Use is a Bunch?”, one panel after another lists reasons the Bunch should hate herself, (she’s a bad artist, she’s nasty…) until finally settling on two things she likes. But this, like many redemptive moments, is a trick designed to show how her efforts to transform her past could only partially succeed. Of the two positive qualities, one is shopping. The other is “her deep-seated masochism make her the perfect sex object for some boys!” The penultimate panel shows The Bunch in her underwear, ridden by a man pulling her hair. “Punish me good!” the caption reads. Other comics address her female Jewish self-loathing more directly. In the final panel of “Why The Bunch Can’t Draw,” the Bunch announces, “I’m the Bunch and I’ll never be any good.” She is wearing a star of David around her neck and one caption reads “SO!! NU??” as if she were blaming American Jewish anxiety for her condition.

...Kominsky-Crumb’s best comics are less verité accounts of family unhappiness than phantasmagoric collages describing her Jewish story. The first page of “Nose Job” (not in the original Love That Bunch), an unsentimental investigation of the intersection between the Jewish female body and Jewish female identity, contains a song, a drawing of a nose, and some medical journal jargon (atypical for Kominsky-Crumb, typed) describing the surgery. Next comes a Jewish fairy tale: All Kominsky-Crumb’s high school friends get rhinoplasties and she has to run away to prevent her parents from dragging her to the plastic surgeon (is this autobiography?). In the last panel, beatniks come into vogue, transforming Kominsky-Crumb from pariah to exotic Jewess. “She looks like Joan Baez,” the caption reads. “Moo Goo Gai Pan” starts years later, in the California desert town she lives in with R. Crumb, and moves to a Proustian trip to the table of her vulgar female relatives, who are greedily devouring take out. The food is not as good as she remembers, and when she returns to California, she finds a rare, momentary sense of peace.

Many other great comics reflect Second Wave feminism’s interest in stories about women’s lives and the search for Jewish roots. But they also reflect Kominsky-Crumb’s flight, around 1976, from the movement’s militancy, puritanism, and triumphalism and her ambivalence about her Jewish past. Her first comics, published only a few years after Our Bodies, Ourselves (whose founders were mostly Jewish), portray Kominsky-Crumb’s Jewish body as grotesque (a word she likes), devouring, and devoured, reshaped by men’s desires, goyische norms of beauty, and herself. ...

Read Rachel Shteir’s full review of Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s reissued and updated collection, ‘Love That Bunch’.

[grrl-beetle]

Klättermusen

[musiconspotify]

The Bunch - Rock On (1972) … real UK folk-rock oddity …

[tae-kwon-doit]

The existence of the Grinch implies the existence of a second creature called the Bunch