Scrublands - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1560977442 ISBN 13: 9781560977445

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2006

Synopsis

A visionary collection of hallucinatory comics from South Africa.

Fantagraphics Books is proud to announce the debut collection of John Daly, the first book the company has published by a South African cartoonist.

Daly's earlier work has been described as "Tintin meets the Freak Brothers in the Cape of Good Dope." Indeed, Daly's cartoons, offbeat, hallucinatory, and often hilarious, seems descended fromand in some cases an amalgamation ofthe substance-induced work of Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Victor Moscoso, and S. Clay Wilson, filtered through the artist's own unique vision and sense of the absurd.

Daly's approach swings from introverted dreamlike stream-of-consciousness to over-the-top postmodern vaudevillian. "Prebaby," the centerpiece of this collection, delves into creation, survival, random occurrences and the micro/macrocosm. Told entirely without dialogue, it's almost musical in its execution. It unfolds like the storyboard to a wonky existential animated cartoon, and it's no surprise that Daly studied animation for two years at Cape Town's City Varsity College. In contrast, Daly's "Kobosh and Steve" stories come across as a series of routines by a demented Abbott and Costello. Kobosh even visits a down-on-his-luck Bruce Springsteen in one story, while another strip features a pair of micro-fauna questioning their existence as they feed off the rock legend's scalp.

Stories alternate between full-color and black-and-white and range from representational Jim Jarmusch-like scenarios to wild visual excursions, albeit linear ones. We are pleased to introduce a unique new voice to the world of cartooning and predict Daly's mix of deadpan absurdity and surreal imagery will be greeted with enthusiasm by readers and critics alike. Black-and-white comics throughout

About this title

About the Author

Joe Daly is a cartoonist from South Africa. Born in London, he studied animation for two years at Cape Town’s City Varsity College. His work has been described as “Tintin Meets the Freak Brothers in the Cape of Good Dope.” His books include Scrublands, The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, and Dungeon Quest.

Reviews

Funky, weird and wonderful, Daly's surprisingly compelling collection is a fever dream of a place, with landmarks reminiscent of both South Africa (Daly's homeland) and Haight-Ashbury circa 1968—possibly the author's spiritual home. In this robustly drawn world, drenched in shades of orange and yellow, Daly follow a troupe of Furry Freaks whose daily lives are a series of surreal episodes involving drugs, sex, art and the hypocrisy and cruelty of contemporary culture. In one vignette, a character becomes erotically obsessed with a friend's art class project, a sculpture of a giant pair of breasts; the climax of the tale comes when the artist receives an "A" for his work's "savage social commentary"—while the obsessed character attempts to copulate with it. Daly's characters engage in mundane tasks such as grocery shopping and then come home to watch the apartment wall give birth to a small child. The centerpiece is a lengthy, wordless piece entitled "Prebaby," which takes place in a red landscape of bumps and tubes and, at one point, the naked female form. It's beautiful, and quite opaque, in contrast to the rest of the work, which is anything but subtle. Overall, a strong, strange debut. (June)
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South African cartoonist Daly demonstrates the same slacker-cum-fan-boy mentality so prevalent in American and Western European alternative comics. His humor overdepends on secondary-sex-characteristic gags, and his signature characters are not-all-that-young guys losing their hair while still having impulse-control and work-habit problems. Named Steve, Kobosh (who always wears some kind of outfit; check out his marijuana togs), Hoagie, Dorfman (who's got a dog's head), and Glorious Redman (not a Native American stereotype--much), they have risibly inane and impossible adventures on the street, in the supermarket, at home, and in the scrublands ("the very edge of existence itself"; basically, a desert). They aren't Daly's only characters. One particularly satisfying story follows three thirtysomething fan boys "Trawling the Streets of Cape Town," in Harvey Pekar fashion, for records, books, and comics. The long, wordless "Prebaby" is a fantasia on the theme of birth whose style and development recall similar pieces by early underground hands Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin. Stories in both black and white and restrained color (never more than four hues) appear in this handsome, generous album. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1560977442
• ISBN 13: 9781560977445
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128