Once a year, the comics industry is gifted with an issue full of cynical humor and mad genius, and this year, that time is now, as Evan Dorkin releases another hilarious issue of Dork! Dorkin's work has a dark point-of-view at time, but it is laugh-out-loud funny more often than not, whether he's using recurring characters like the vicious fanboy parody The Eltingville Club or new features like "How to get your ass kicked" classes based on the Charles Atlas ads. The pages are packed with detail and plenty of jokes, and though a year is a long time to wait between issues, this is inevitably one of my favorite books of the year every time I pick it up.
Like many humor comics, Dork! has its share of pop culture references, but it doesn't rely on those references. Though one of the funniest strips for me in this issue was the two-page look at the outrageously terrible endings that beloved advertising spokescharacters had suffered, Dorkin does not rest easily on the backs of pop culture jokes. For one thing, the spokescharacters aren't over-used references, being characters from obscure products or older times. For another, most of the strips actually rely on strange ideas from Dorkin's head.
Case in point, the one-panel strips that open the book, which manage to be setup and punchline all in one. There isn't a miss in the bunch of ten on that page, whether it's the "World's Worst Sex Therapist" or a simple joke that is made riotously funny with the addition of a caption poking fun at it. Similar detail and panel-to-joke ratios abound in the introductory page, full of gags in a mocked-up version of Dorkin's drawing room and throughout the issue. Dorkin also brings a sense of intelligence to the work, with a King Kong parody based on Carl Jung, and a self-effacing style as he admits to a bit of obnoxiousness in his past with "How to Get Your Ass Kicked in 3 E-Z Lessons."
This issue also sees the return of The Eltingville Club, which made a brief appearance on Cartoon Network this year. This time, Dorkin turns the Club loose on the world, setting them like nerdy Rottweilers on the juicy defenseless ribeye of culture that is the Shopping Channel's comic-book memorabilia sales show. That whole thing, from production to its audience, always had the smell of a target for a good parody, and Dorkin goes in and just mercilessly mocks it for all its worth. Also returning was the Devil Puppet, with tales of odd, little-known mysteries that could make for a fun History Channel show, if it weren't for them being entirely made up (or are they?)
My one rule for a humor book is that it must be able to make me laugh out loud. Plenty of books struggle with this. Dork! had me from page one using that rule, and continued to provide some of the most unusual and original humor to be found in comic-book pages (or elsewhere, for that matter) throughout.
