Tales Designed to Thrizzle volume two


By Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-615-7

Sometimes words mean nothing, pictures tell every story and stuff is funny just because it is. That pretty much sums up the work of absurdist Pop Culture Pirate comedy legend Michael Kupperman, whose graphic samplings of old comics, strips and magazines fill the pages of the too-infrequent comicbook Tales Designed to Thrizzle.

Kupperman is a cartoonist who clearly loves to draw and has no difficulty isolating the innate insanity of modern living as well as the way we regard our own past – especially the not-so-important bits – which he delivers in a surreal graphic deadpan style that would turn Buster Keaton grey with envy.

He created the strips Found in the Street and Up all Night, has worked for The New Yorker, Heavy Metal, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent on Sunday, LA Weekly, The New York Times, Libération, Fortune, Screw, Saturday Night Live and many similar reputable venues as well as in such comics as Hodags and Hodaddies, Hotwire, Snake Eyes, Zero Zero, Blood Orange and Legal Action Comics.

Kupperman’s first book Snake ‘n’ Bacon’s Cartoon Cabaret (2000) led to his breaking into the heady world of adult animation and he has been a much in-demand illustrator for other people’s book.

In 2011 he released the astoundingly madcap Mark Twain’s Autobiography: 1910-2010, but Tales Designed to Thrizzle has always been his most personal vehicle of expression, allowing him to play his abstractedly stylish mind-games against a dizzying cultural backdrop of Men’s “sweat mags”, True Confessions pulps, cheesy old comics, B-movies, cheap advertising, and a million other bastions of low-class Americana, all given a unique twist and spin by a man whose skull is clearly too small for his brain…

After far too long an interval, this second classy hardcover collects issues #5-8 in scintillating high-energy colour and opens with ‘Mandate the Magician’ learning a lesson in karmic humility, after which the hilarious cautionary tale of ‘Fart Boobs’ teaches us all why it’s unwise to mock an alien’s name, and a swift succession of short pithy strips introduce ‘Journey into Adventure’, ‘The Librarian in the Tuna Casserole’, ‘The Hoardy Boys’ and superstar team-in-waiting Twain & Einstein who realise ‘Good Grief! Still More Wuthering Heights’…

Many of the pages here are gloriously outré and absurdist graphic sight-gags: sham small ads and faux covers for comics and magazine which really shouldn’t be allowed: utterly daft delights such as ‘Remember the Past?’, ‘Ever-Approaching Grandpa’, ‘Sherlock Holmes versus Jungle Boy’, ‘Tales of the Intestinal Submarine’, ‘Johnny Exposition’ and ‘Show Me Your Weiner!’ but Kupperman is also a dab hand with words and typography as seen in his hilarious biography feature ‘Remember Them?’, the anti-melodic ‘Hum Along With your Grandkids’ and the Twain & Einstein prose vignettes ‘Albert Einstein’s Flashback Scheme’ and ‘Chasin’ the Dream’…

The pairing of the separated twins – at least as he draws them – clearly inspired Kupperman. After a succession of covers for Twain & Einstein comicbooks, the tale of ‘Mark Twain, Hollywood Detective’ pits the venerable satirist author and his pal the Father of Modern Physics against the seamy underworld of Tinseltown as both gumshoes and superheroes in a manic melange of genres and loving pastiche of the long-forgotten 1960s Archie superhero revival of Jerry Siegel & Paul Reinman…

Following an inappropriate letters page and ‘The Twain Files: 1975’, ‘Buzz Aldrin’s Strange Missions’ leads inevitably into ‘Real Old-Timey Horror’, with ‘Birth of the Monkees’ and EC homage ‘Legs to Die For!’ before exposing ‘Ben Franklin: Inventor of the Bar Code’.

‘The Odd Couple of Draculas’ holds some ‘Astonishing Heroes’, the saga of ‘Gladiator & Snivolus’ and ads for ‘Weird Sandwich Magazine’ whilst the astonishing extended epic of ‘Jungle Princess’ reveals how one could balance being a White Goddess with editing a high class fashion mag, and ‘Willie Wealth – the Rich Little Rich Boy’ learns to his cost that money isn’t everything – like proteinaceous for example – before ‘All About Drainage’ takes the lid off the ultra-sexy and glamorous sewage biz…

After discovering ‘Books are Stupid’ and that ‘Women Love Men in an Apiary Hat’ the Twain & Einstein movie ‘So Boldly We Dare’ is adapted into wholesome picture form, after which ‘Cowboy Oscar Wilde’ and some important supernatural commercial messages lead to the public service announcement ‘Old People! You need Insurance!’

Cute ‘Mr. Flopears’ and his little hostage situation segues seamlessly into ‘The Ghost’ and ‘Wonder Book Junior’s “Ride of a Lifetime”’, before ‘Scary Bathtub Stories’ discloses the horrific tale of the ‘Bath of Death’ and the wondrous wares of ‘Hubert’s Shower World’, but the real thrills only arrive with the “Bell Comics” reprint of ‘Quincy, M.E.’ – including the martial arts secrets of ‘Catare’ – which crosses over (literally) into two-fisted ‘Saint Peter Comics’…

Kupperman even dabbles in fumetti strips such as his photo ad for ‘Quincy’s Box of Things You Can Shout’, nicely breaking up the surrealist flow before the coroner and the first Pope slip into movie madness with ‘Quinception’ and ‘Reservoir Dogs 2 – featuring Snake ‘n’ Bacon’ and another fumetti interlude ‘A Voyage to Narnia’…

‘The Hamanimal’ almost brought low a prominent citizen even as crime dog ‘McArf’ stood resolute against all scum and Twain & Einstein faced shocking revelations in ‘Family Affairs’ before more Quincy, old Saint Peter, Air War Stories and Hunchback & the Hydrant covers give way to ‘Gordon Ramsay’s Fairy Tale Toilet Kitchen Nightmares’, even more outrageous covers and the tales of ‘Buddy Baker in the 25th Century’, ‘Billy & the Giant Gangster’ and ‘McGritte, the Surrealist Crime Dog’.

Just for fun you can enjoy a capacious section of ‘Red Warren’s Train & Bus Coloring Book’ (not recommended for the faint-hearted, weak-stomached or rationality-challenged) whilst ‘Murder, She Goat’ deals with the quite understandable concerns of stock characters when crime novelist Jessica Fetcher comes to town, after which a concerned stylist asks ‘Do You Have Thin, Wispy Pubic Hair?’ and we learn all about ‘Great Men of History: Bertrand Copillon, AKA “The Scythe”’.

As our inevitable climax nears, we learn more secret history in ‘Moon 69: The True Story of the 1969 Moon Launch’ – with crucial testimony from President Nixon, Aldrin & Armstrong, reporters Woodward & Bernstein, Quincy and Lieutenant Columbo – before more unseemly ads and one final appearance of Twain & Einstein in ‘Homework? No Work’ brings everything to an irresponsible close.

Also containing loads more stuff I’m too nice to spoil for you and too nervous to mention in even digital print, this implausible challenging and deliciously demented box of screwy surprises is an absolute panacea for all real life’s sundry woes and downers: brash, challenging, brilliantly imaginative and always funny.

This is a book for every grown-up, occasionally immature, couch-based life-form in need of a hearty guffaw every now and then – but much more now than then…
All characters, stories and artwork © 2012 Michael Kupperman. All rights reserved.