When Bad Things Happen to Stupid People – A Close to Home Collection


By John McPherson (Andrews McMeel Publishing)
ISBN: 978-0-7407-5365-7

One of the best and most consistently amusing gagsters around these days is John McPherson who created Close to Home in 1992, after spending many years as a mechanical design engineer. For years prior to the career jump, he had kept hold of his particularly skewed interpretation of sanity by working as a part-time cartoonist: spending the time regular folks use for sleeping in moonlighting by selling cartoons to periodicals as prestigious and varied as The Saturday Evening Post, Campus Life, Yankee, Christianity Today and others.

Delivered in the manner and style of Gary Larson’s The Far Side, McPherson’s daily cartoon panel was originally released through Universal Press Syndicate to 50 client papers, which has grown to 700 since the syndicate merged with online provider Uclick in 2009. The new entity – Universal Uclick – consequently absorbed United Feature Syndicate to become America’s largest Press Syndicate; marketing original print, online and mobile device material including lifestyle/opinion columns, strips, cartoons, puzzles and other content.

McPherson’s signature feature derives its name and content from a broad band of themes and subject matter, casting a barbed and wickedly humorous eye on those perennial travails which perennially hit “Close to Home”: evergreen topics like marriage, kids, employment, domestic duties, school life, sports and health.

Because he’s been around for a while now, McPherson’s also perfectly familiar with how often life devolves into the bizarre, absurd and macabre…

In this particular volume – one of dozens including Dangerously Close To Home, The Silence of the Lamberts and The Scourge of Vinyl Car Seats – the portmanteau pictorial delights are augmented by behind-the-scenes essays offering an insight into the creator’s world.

In ‘Ideas’ McPherson focusses on the old “where do you get your ideas” question, giving his spin on the issue with plenty of outrageous examples ranging from zoo japes to the religious fervour engendered by golf…

‘Angry Letters’ are just that: a candid peek at actual correspondence from the public in regard to specific cartoons, what the artist did in response, and often how he would have preferred to have acted…

Best of all for people like me, however, is ‘Killed by the Editor’ with tales and many examples of gags and cartoons which could never pass muster for a daily family feature…

Chockful of chuckles about relationships, cars, food, surgery, travel, gardening, pets, recreational sports and hobbies, insurance, husbands and wives, geriatric friskiness, cops and robbers and everything else, When Bad Things Happen to Stupid People is another splendidly gripping, impressively grotesque, irrepressible sly selection of laugh-out-loud jests and quips: a solid and rewarding example of an art form that we must not lose and one guaranteed to deliver delight over and over again.
© 2005 by John McPherson. All rights reserved.