The best part of last night’s Aline Kominsky Crumb/R. Crumb talk at the NYPL might have been seeing R. piggyback hump Aline, but the starf*cker in me was equally impressed to find herself sitting in an audience of the great comics artists I rarely see. Kim Dietsch, Rick Altergott (and his massively adorable wife Ariel Bordeaux), Diane Newman… and in a fluke of ticket purchases, my friend Elizabeth had extra tickets for me to apportion. I advertised at the last minute, and was stunned to receive a call from none other than Lauren Weinstein looking to take one of those tickets off my hands. That’s how big this event felt – even rockstars like Lauren were stuck sans billets the day of.

Anyway, the Crumbs’ conversation was as much about their bizarre lifestyle as it was about their mobius strip of paper that is the art they create. Really fascinating stuff…until almost two hours into the night’s event when peoples’ questions started to get really lame and mis-guided.

“This next question is for Robert…”
“Robert, how are your brothers?”
“How’s your band, Robert?”

I’m sorry, did no one see the ginormous screen announcing Aline’s book?

Well, it’s only fair I guess, to want to ask him all the questions, as I’m sure Aline knew would happen. But most people seemed to need to validate their sense of normative lifestyles by asking super-contrived questions with inevitable answers.  Whereas the reality of the Crumbs’ lifestyles really isn’t one that lends itself to any “normative” and pat description.

I think the best attempt at meeting the Crumbs halfway (halfway being somewhere between sex machines, polyandry and one husband in kakhis with 2.5 kids) was this question and this response:

“What kind of pets do you have?”

On the face of things, this might be the lamest question ever. You ask Vanessa Davis or Aaron Renier about their pets. Not Robert and Aline Crumb. Jesus.

Anyway, they have two cats, but more importantly, when they said this, a woman behind me went:

yesssss! (as in, hissing her approval.)
Oh, they might lead perverse lifestyles but at least they are cat people.