A semiparody of the noir sensibility, it is interesting mainly as an exercise in style—that ‘50s graphic thing Clowes has mastered to greater effect than any other cartoonist around. This material reveals little of the brilliance to come. JT
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Paperback: 96 pages
Illustrated
Before moving to Seattle to take part in the hugely popular slacker-comic HATE, Buddy Bradley was just another kid whiling away his adolescence in the suburban outback of the Garden State. In The Bradleys, Peter Bagge rehearses the first imperative of the comic book to its greatest effect: staging a series of spectacular collisions between elements of banality and all-out phantasmagoria. Life unfolds at a pretty regular clip—nothing too unusual happens contentwise—but formally, all hell breaks loose. Bagge deploys an ultragrotesque hot-rod aesthetic as an index to the psychopathological undercurrents which attend such teenage rites as hanging out at the record store, drinking and driving, and dealing weed to supplement one’s allowance. Heads take over bodies, mouths take over heads, and teeth take over mouths—pretty weird stuff, and how like life… JT
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Paperback: 152 pages
Illustrated
In his much-beloved comic book Eightball, Daniel Clowes takes on those twin maladies of contemporary American culture, irony and nostalgia, and does it better than anyone, anywhere, in any medium. First serialized in those pages, the protracted nightmare that is Velvet Glove seems even more relentlessly grim in collected form. As a claustrophobic excavation of the artist’s psyche, this work stands alone. JT
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Paperback: 144 pages
Illustrated
“Wolvertoons is a distillation of the finest work ever done by comic art’s greatest master of absurd exaggeration, and as such it may well be the most outrageous display of cartoon art ever assembled, as Basil Wolverton was to comic ugliness what Alberto Vargas was to female beauty in art.”
Publisher: Fantagraphics
Paperback: 134 pages
Illustrated