Strip Search

Revealing Today’s Best College Cartoonists (Andrews McMeel $9.95 95 p.p.)
by Ryk McIntyre

One of the complaints of bottom-trawling as a fishing technique is that it scrapes up just about everything in its path, scarring the fragile environment, and leaving little that is vital behind. My guess is that the book before Strip Search must’ve been extra-rich in the comedy haul dept. Welcome to twice-raped sea bed humor. If you lay awake at night, unable to sleep for the terror of knowing that one day we’ll lose Gary Trudeau, Berke Breathed, Bill Waterson, Kliban, and Gary Larson… relax. There are enough weak-assed clones self-gestating and bringing carpet-bombing techniques to that precise dart-game that is humor. Not every cartoonist here steals from the big boys. You could pick up a copy of Editorial Humor knowing that so did several of the entries to this book. Still, obscure theft ain’t originality, but if you were to give, say, Lenny Kravitz some art supplies, you couldn’t be surprised by what you’d get. So our Grand Prize winner, Stephen Emond finds success splicing cells from Calvin & Hobbes and his own dating failures, while the entire single-panel category sustains itself on the bloated sea-changed remains of Far Side. That is, except for the entries where the line-work is unintelligible, which doesn’t make you optimistic about the chances of a joke having accidentally wandered in, get stuck, and died. There’s even a Mick (UnderGround Surrealists, Sqwauk) Cussimano swiper loose in this collection. An obscure theft, sure, but he still got caught. It’s not until the “Other cartoons” section that we finally, finally get something for the price of admission. p. cinnamon’s etching-print style is subtle and slightly off, and while Matthew Wiegle’s “The Decline and Fall of The House of Pelton” reaches all over the place, at least it’s reaching up. Some nice, subtle details, if you look for them. The most variety is in the “Runners Up” section, about which I believe Will Rogers already made all the good bon mots, especially given how many of them concern themselves with Christianity, Angels, Heaven, etc. Oh, there’s your new wave right there: “Touched By A Far Side.” Brrrr.