I'd heard of Bob the Angry Flower before and had seen a previous volume or two in a local big-box bookstore, but I'd never perused the pages or visited angryflower.com to read the webcomics. So I really didn't know what to expect when I opened up a review copy of this latest volume, Dog Killer. On the surface, Bob looks like an over-the-top journey into crude, low-brow humor. But there's much more to this angry flower and his oddball group of friends. Notley's frenzied cartooning and rants against inanimate objects that aren't so inanimate hide powerful and angry criticisms of the political landscape of the Western world, the sorry state of what passes for our culture and even the ease with which the average joe embraces the lowest common denominator.
Bob is a flower. Bob is angry. He's an angry flower. But he's not alone. His friends and roommates are as weird and surreal as he is. Lovebot. A talking piece of wood. Other weird shit. Bob is angry because the world doesn't work as it should. bob is angry because people don't do what he says. Bob is angry because people are stupid.
Oh, and he's a flower.
Notley's approach to the line art reminds me a bit of the style Judd Winick employed on his The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius comics, albeit not as polished or structured. One could even see Notley's art as being somewhat amateurish, but he has transformed weakness into strength. The loose, harsh qualities of the art are in keeping with the character and the social outrage he represents. I think where Notley falters is that his art doesn't give the reader a strong view and sense of the other bizarre characters that populate this world.
The bulk of this is made up of one-page gags and rants, and it brings something of a traditional, old-school quality to the storytelling, which serves as a nice balance to the surreal, nonsensical characters and circumstances. It's like Archie on LSD. And 'roids. The one-page format of the strips, combined with the baser nature of the art, makes for a quick read, and Bob is so in your face, it really ends up reading better in shorter spurts.
If you watch the news and shake your head, if you see stupidity around you and wished social expectations didn't restrict self-expression, if you see the world as a fucked-up mess from time to time, you've got some angry flower in you as well. Notley doesn't come outright and blast Bush's war in Iraq or the media's obsession with violence and social dysfunction. Instead, Bob infests a home with ants and then announces he'll not leave until he fixes the problem... with methods that cause more chaos and damage than he's already inflicted. Notley doesn't rail against a nation that's too quick to put addicts in jail for life. Instead, we see Bob tear apart a city as he overreacts to a minor inconvenience. Notley disguises his cleverness with crudity, and it's surprisingly effective and entertaining. 7/10
Note: This book was not among this week's new releases.
