The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories (The Perry Bible Fellowship)

The award-winning Perry Bible Fellowship has a achieved a cult following both online and in its weekly appearances in newspapers and magazines around the world. Now, for the first time, the hilarious cartoons of Nicholas Gurewitch are being collected in this handsome hardcover edition.

Sweetness and light turn dark and grisly in this award-winning cult fave web strip having nothing to do with the Bible. The cover suggests a children's book: candy colors and candy people—who happen to be burning one of their number at the stake. The strips differ in art styles: some realistic, some cartoony; others evoking R. Crumb, Raggedy Ann, Chinese prints, Mother Goose, Bil Keane, Gundam manga, or Edward Gorey. Endings tend to the nastily downbeat. "Dad? There's someone at the door to see you," announces a smiling youngster to his head-in-a-book father. Enter an immense and very cool robot, basketball under an arm and cap on backwards. "You're under arrest for not being fun!" it sings out. Dad merely looks—and power rays zzzap from his eyes and blow the intruder to bits as the kid starts to cry. Or violently downbeat. "I love you," exclaims the Sun. "I love you, too!" says Earth. "Oh, kiss me." Trees, baby carriage, and people go up in flames. Quite a few gags relate to sex. Two guys ogle a horselike rear end. "Man, I'd like to get with that fine booty," says one. "That's disgusting," says the other. "She looks like she's 13"—and all three are revealed as centaurs. For sophisticated adult collections.—M.C.
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Starred Review. Even the most benevolent impulse is sure to lead to a planet in ruins in this debut collection of Gurewitch's popular Web comic, The Perry Bible Fellowship. The dark, surreal humor is often compared to The Far Side but has an even more brutal and fatalistic sense of humor. Lavishly colored, the art switches among detailed depictions of comedy staples like sloths and dinosaurs to an empty-faced cast of doomed stick figure dreamers. Gurewitch's true strength is in expertly using the four-panel comic strip structure to suggest entire storylines and their bleak payoffs. In one, a man and woman stand in a field full of dead bodies, and the woman reacts angrily when she discovers the secret revealed in the final panel: the touching message Will you marry me? written on a hillside with the bodies. Similar themes of pop culture tropes played out to the point of disaster abound: aliens decide to kill the Earth instead of a planet of cute puppies, heaven is found to be not so cool when God forbids billiards, and so on. But as usual, attempting to analyze the humor defeats the purpose—Gurewitch's strips are destined to be refrigerator door classics in the very near future.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.