MY TROUBLES WITH WOMEN 433
Indeed, the title of the collection, from a story published in two parts in 1980 and
1986, could easily extend to most of Crumb’s life and career: the rather mild term
“troubles” only hints at a genuinely troubling aspect of his work (and many other under-
ground comics) as a whole. Despite the liberation of the imagination that underground
comics asserted, encouraging artists like Crumb to challenge cultural repression and
self-censorship by exposing their most personal fantasies, this cathartic artistic freedom
often led to shockingly misogynist images and narratives. In Crumb’s case, indulgence
in the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s was often expressed in his comics by
fantasies of physical domination, with women’s bodies twisted into positions that allow
Crumb’s cartoon surrogates to have their way with them, an understanding of “free love”
that appeared in direct confl ict with the simultaneous women’s liberation movement,
which Crumb frequently parodied. While the misogyny of many male comics artists
seems tacit or unconscious, Crumb perhaps deserves some credit for confronting his
obsessions with brutal honestly. (Th is collection judiciously omits most of Crumb’s
racialized sexual fantasies, often centered around self-consciously stereotypical charac-
ters like the naïve black woman Angelfood McSpade, who wears mock-native dress and
speaks in comic Negro dialect.)
Th e stories in My Troubles with Women depict Crumb as both unapologetically
nostalgic for past indulgences and transgressions and grateful (as the opening story,
“I’m Grateful! I’m Grateful!” from 1989 insists) for his settled married life and recent
fatherhood. Another story, “Memories Are Made of Th is” (1988) recalls an earlier,
awkward seduction before Crumb (as often, in direct address to the reader) swears
that he has learned his lesson. “Footsy” (1987) is a richly illustrated memory of the
origins of Crumb’s infamous fetish for women’s legs and feet, also explored in the more
elaborate history of Crumb’s psyche in “My Troubles with Women, Part II” (1986),
which suggests more fully than earlier material that Crumb’s diffi culties with norma-
tive masculine identity, dating back to adolescent humiliations, are deeply intertwined
with his ongoing views of women.
Four stories in the collection—“Arline ’n’ Bob and Th at Th ing in the Back
Bedroom” (1983), “Uncle Bob’s Mid-Life Crisis” (1982), “Our Lovely Home” (1988)
and “Dirty Laundry Comics” (1986)—were all originally published in We i r d o , and
depict Crumb’s current married life and devotion to his precocious daughter Sophie
(eventually a cartoonist herself ), indicating that Crumb’s gratitude for domestic life
and fatherhood are sincere even if sometimes viewed with characteristic irony. In
the three of these stories produced in collaboration with Aline Kominsky-Crumb,
her fl at and inconsistent drawings of herself contrast eff ectively with Crumb’s famil-
iar self-portraits in his cross-hatched, rounded style, visually representing the per-
sonality diff erences that defi ne their unusual partnership. However, Crumb chooses
to conclude the volume with “If I Were a King” (1987), another richly illustrated
story that revives Crumb’s most troubling fantasies (also on view in other stories in
the collection), including his physical domination of one of his pantheon of impos-
ing “beast-women.” Th e fantasy concludes with an all-too familiar image of Crumb on
