dirty laundry 01

dirty laundry #01

Cartoonists Co-Op/Last Gasp (Summer 1974)
Dirty Laundry Comics #1 was published by Keith Green and Cartoonists Co-op Press in the summer of 1974. It features a single, rambling story that mixes insights on their relationship with a spaceship fantasy featuring LSD guru Timothy Leary (a huge fan of underground comics). The comic is unpolished in places, particularly the places where Aline got lazy with her drawing, but she didn’t expect her work to get published, so what did it matter? After the comic was published, Robert and Aline continued collaborating on comics and they began to take it more seriously, which might be why it took three years to complete the second issue.

Aline Kominsky was 22 years old when she met the 28-year-old Robert Crumb in 1971 during a party at Terry Zwigoff and Kathy Goodell’s house in San Francisco. Kathy was actually Robert’s girlfriend at the time, but he was also still married to his first wife, Dana. But having a wife and a girlfriend didn’t stop Robert from flirting with Aline. “You have really cute knees,” was his opening line to Aline, and later that evening they were making out in Kathy’s upstairs bedroom. Their relationship couldn’t get serious until Robert straightened out the mess that was his personal life, but eventually he did (or at least began trying) and Robert and Aline launched their enduring romance.

By 1973, Robert’s home base (I say “base” because he still traveled quite a bit) was in an old cabin in Potter Valley, California, about 100 miles north of San Francisco, where his ex-wife Dana also lived in a house next door on the same lot. That same year, Aline moved up to Potter Valley to live next door to Robert’s cabin in an old trailer. Although Robert maintained relationships with other girlfriends and they didn’t live together, Robert and Aline were lovers and their relationship was destined to grow ever stronger.