The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in…

A number of fun cartoons not fit for The New Yorker

- Some duds, though this is not unlike reading The New Yorker

An enjoyable collection of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. Often, this rejection appears to be based on sexual, religious, and scatalogical themes too risque for that august publication. Many feature these images: Small piles of feces, vomit, mutant sperm, gender-bending or cross-dressing males, couples in bed, puppets. If that sounds like a good time, you'll want to take a closer look at this volume. The collection is presented as short folios of each cartoonist's rejecta following a questionnaire filled in by each that is generally more entertaining as a blank form than as a completed document.

A good companion piece to Playboy's Kliban, sadly out of print but available here and there on teh intarweb. ( )

What I liked best about this book was the questionnaire that each cartoonist filled out. There were a few funny ones but really, most of the cartoons just weren't that good. I won't be keeping this or its sequel. ( )

My sense of humor is actually not particularly twisted, so these had about as much of a hit/miss rate as the accepted versions. But that's still a pretty high hit rate. As a subscriber, I actually enjoyed the cartoonist profiles just as much as the cartoons. Funniest : "34-C?" ( )

Too clever by half. ( )

Definitely funny! And while admittedly edgier than The New Yorker (language, bodily functions, gore), not offensive. Even better were the accompanying photos of featured cartoonists and their clever responses to a (probably intentionally lame) questionnaire. ( )