When it comes to darkly funny misanthropy, few do it as distinctively as David Stromberg, whose BADDIES (Melville House) Aimee Bender aptly describes as “a little Thurber, a little Oulipo, some Eastern European gravitas and dread, and crates of good humor.” Each of Stromberg’s cartoons is a primitive drawing with an elliptical caption. “Frankie is paying now for three straight decades of handsomeness” goes the description of one bedraggled fellow with a Habsburg jaw. Actually, compared to the cockeyed, fish-lipped, smoosh-schnozzed faces of some of Stromberg’s other scribbled scraps of humanity, Frankie is rather dapper.
Finally, the limited-edition THE UPSIDE DOWN WORLD OF GUSTAVE VERBEEK: COMPLETE SUNDAY COMICS 1903-05, published by Sunday Press Books, is yet another home run for these devoted, sure-handed resurrectors of comics’ forgotten pioneers. Verbeek’s gorgeous pen work appeared in such publications such as Harper’s and the New York Herald, and his comic The Upside Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo was a minor masterpiece of mischievous storytelling. Everything is lovingly restored here. For all the proliferating wonder on tap in comics these days, it’s sometimes worth being reminded of what came first.
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, Media, Harvard University, Thierry Marx, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Graphic Novels and Comics, Jeffrey Brown, Don Martin, Frank Miller, David Edwards (Executive), Mark Hamilton, Less
