The Doofus Omnibus
By Rick Altergott
Published by Fantagraphics Books
I like Doofus, although I'll be damned if I can tell you why.
It's not funny, although it is comical. You don't laugh out loud, but you chuckle in your mind. Doofus doesn't elevate the artform or change my life or make me see the true potential of comics. It's just fucking odd, is what it is.
Doofus and his pal Henry Hotchkiss are like some sort of idealized, panty-huffing village idiots. This volume contains Doofus's "Greatest Adventures," as it says on the cover, but they never do very much. The most elaborate story here sees the pair stage a panty-huffing party at the home of Miss Juniper, a buxom, Wally Wood-esque brunette who leaves town for a while with a handsome, impotent clod. And again, not a whole lot happens.
The joy of Doofus is in the art, which looks so much like Wood (right down to the lettering) that it's scary. The joy is in the nearly David Lynch-like pointlessness to the stories, which surprise not out of clever plot developments, but out of their sheer readability. There's no reason to read Doofus, and yet once you've started you really can't stop.
It never occurred to me to wonder before, but now I am questioning whether "Rick Altergott" is even a real person. Why is there an interview with Dan Clowes at the beginning of this volume? And why do some of the backgrounds look so much like Clowes's penwork? Is Clowes a huge influence on Altergott, or is this some sort of elaborate gag? Am I even now making a fool of myself for wondering if the name "Altergott" is a clever hint -- alter ego? Alter God? What the fuck is this book's power?
Doofus is stupid, but Altergott -- whoever he is -- is brilliant. The cartooning recalls the very best Mad comics under the guidance of Harvey Kurtzman as drawn by Wally Wood, perhaps after both of them had suffered severe injuries to their pre-frontal lobes. The Doofus Omnibus is well worth reading, filled with irony and satire and as easy to grasp as a wisp of smoke -- or the scent of yesterday's panties pulled from the bottom of Miss Juniper's hamper when she's not looking. Grade: 4.5/5
The House at Maakies Corner
By Tony Millionaire
Published by Fantagraphics Books
One of the things -- the only thing I hate about James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries is the format, which places multiple daily strips on a single page. The House at Maakies Corner is perhaps the best presentation of a daily strip that I've ever seen, a long, horizontally-formatted hardcover presenting each strip on a single page. Artistically, you could not ask for a better presentation. I understand that, in the case of Kochalka, economics play a role, and certainly The House at Maakies Corner is a more expensive book, but...this is exactly how it should be done.
There's a bit of irony, then, that the book suffered some production problems. As you might have heard, the entire run of books suffers from minor scuffing of the covers, and there was apparently a problem with the glue that binds the pages to the covers. My copy had slightly glued-together endpages that I was able to pry away from the following pages without tearing the book. The overall effect of this minor damage lends an antiquated feel, which plays perfectly into Millionaire's mannered style -- so much so that he is reportedly amused enough by this printing snafu to have designed special stickers highlighting the "antiquating" the print run suffers from.
As for the content, if you're familiar with Millionaire's unique and devastatingly brilliant strip, then you know what to expect. Alcoholism, self-amputation and suicide are fodder for some of the most twisted and hilarious gags ever set to paper. The clever cover design, if studied for a moment, cleverly suggests the strange parallel realities Millionaire has created between the worlds of Sock Monkey and Maakies -- but I always find Maakies the more vital, entertaining and frankly fascinating read.
I've had some unpleasant online encounters with Tony Millionaire, to the point that I honestly believe he's an obnoxious asshole (and I'm sure he'd say the same about me -- certainly his e-mails testify to that), but there's absolutely no denying the appeal of his cheerily misogynistic, gin-soaked parables. Ultimately, I have to consign Millionaire to that rarefied region of the creative world occupied by folks like Hunter S. Thompson, about whom my friend Marshall points out it must be much more fun reading about than actually spending time with. Reading Maakies is fun. It's a twisted, perverse work by an unpleasant man, but somehow it all works to create staggeringly good comics. Grade: 5/5