Magic Whistle Volume 11: Body Armor For Your Dignity

Praised for finding new ways of being funny while simultaneously panned for lacking the draftsmanship skills of his peers, Henderson continues what he's been doing all along for nearly twenty years! Magic Whistle #11 features the return of Monroe Simmons, a re-coloring of a story previously published in the childrens' anthology Measles, tons of previously unpublished strips, and the high-low-brow humor audiences have come to expect from this cartoonist who has been nominated multiple times for a Harvey award and once for an Emmy.

More of Henderson’s crude but maximally energetic comics—hurray! They’re like no other artist’s, even if they do stand squarely in the traditions of big-nose gag cartooning (see Mark Newgarden’s We All Die Alone, 2005, to grok that) and bare-bones animation (Mister Magoo, Tom Terrific, Rocky and Bullwinkle). Their humor is sometimes innocently naughty, sometimes almost smart, always easy to identify with and oddly nostalgic. They look and “sound” like what you once drew and laughed at, even if, really, you never could draw or say anything funny; it helps that Henderson often recurs to childhood and adolescence for characters and situations. His single-panel cartoons and one-page strips are surefire joy-inducers (see “Patience Pays Off,” which may be hackneyed but still hits where you live), and his long stories are brilliant stuck-record routines that, like many a Monty Python sketch, trace the struggles of genial monomaniacs in a world that just won’t humor them. Come to think of it, if the Pythons had been Americans, they would have to have been Sam Henderson. --Ray Olson