Nicholas Gurewitch

This collection of Gurewitch's award winning comic, The Perry Bible Fellowship, is hilarious, absurd, dark, and somewhat demented. Highly imaginative, and wonderfully illustrated, each 3 or 4 paneled strip contains a clever and usually shocking punch line that is perfectly complimented by artwork that varies from very simple to detailed and polished. Readers with an appreciation for dark comedy will likely enjoy Gurewitch’s sharp wit and twisted sense of humour.

I love these twisted little comic strips. Often the jokes are phenomenally wrong, but always fantastic. And you can tell Gurewitch spends a lot of time on his artwork. This'll take you half an hour to read, and you'll feel like a better person for it, because even though you laughed at it, at least you didn't create it.

I hadn't really thought about Nicholas Gurewitch's venerable comic The Perry Bible Fellowship for years until I was doing some weeding of excess books on my comics shelf and pulled this one out I'd picked up at some point from some library book sale. While first appearing in various print publications, I think Gurewitch's work is best known for being some of the earlier and more influential viral webcomics, shared around from Gurewitch's website to become prototypical examples of this era of show more internet humor. Here we have the origin of the term "weeaboo," for example. How did these comics hold up the better part of two decades later?

They are definitely exemplative of the times, I think, reminding me of a Gary Larson freed from all editorial constraints and working in wild absurdities and lush colors while characters often remain blank simplistic blobs. Gurewitch works mostly in irony, juxtaposing cutesy childish whimsy with darkly comic subversions of expectation, which I feel was the dominant mode of humor online for a decade or so, not unlike the kind of stuff you could get printed on a black shirt with white text. Jokes based on comedic voyeurism are a common theme, as are the humorous demise of small animals Much of the staying power of the comics is Gurewitch’s art, I feel, with its depth and detail adding interest to even a joke based on a simple pun or idiom taken literally or just the idea of a hammer getting cheated on by a screwdriver.

I muse about how such "web original" books and our relationship to the internet has changed at Harris' Tome Corner here. show less

It's hard not to love The Perry Bible Fellowship. At it's best, Nicholas Gurewitch's comic strip is inventive, thought-provoking, and so tightly paced that it's hard to think of another newspaper-style strip that is quite as engaging (Herriman's Krazy Kat comes immediately to mind). To be sure, not all of these strips are brilliant, but when Gurewitch is really on his game, he takes the familiar territory of the comic strip to a level where genuine art begins to creep into the proceedings. show more This is top-notch stuff, and the collected Almanack allows for considering the accomplishment as a whole - and a truly significant accomplishment it is. show less