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DON'T CALL ME STUPID!
Mildly Recommended (5/10)
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Fantagraphics Books
Writer/Artist: Steven Weissman
Editor: Gary Groth
Price: $12.95 US/$19.45 CAN |
One thing I didn't expect from Fantagraphics was an all-ages book, but that's really sort of what this is. It's a little like Jay Stephens's Jetcat Clubhouse, only considerably stranger and less
linear. It's not really my cup of tea, to be honest, as I was expecting
something quirky and funny and I got the former but not much of the latter. The
artwork on the book is also somewhat strange, colored in a pink and gray palette
and drawn in a style that distorts the characters for effect. I can respect the
talent behind the book, but rather than laughing at the contents or reading it
and thinking it was clever or intriguing, I mostly kept turning the pages
wondering if it could get any weirder. Too it's credit, with every passing page,
it did.
Don't Call Me Stupid! is a collection of comic strips
by Weissman, stories that center around a group of unusual and disturbed
children. These children have some of the same problems that many children do,
including bullies and chicken pox and the boredom that comes from having tons of
energy but not enough to do. However, they are also quite unusual children in
that they each have some strange quirk. L'il Bloody, arguably the lead, is a
vampire; Pull-Apart Boy comes apart at the slightest touch, making him something
of a leprous Frankenstein's monster; Dead Boy is a zombie who doesn't say much;
Spence has a pair of working X-Ray glasses; and so on and so on. The combination
of monster archetypes with childhood trauma makes for a very, very odd tone to
the book.
Although I'm not sure if its
psychologically the kind of thing kids would get, I was struck by how much of
the imagery was strange but oddly safe. There's no excessive blood, swearing,
violence, nudity or any of the other things I've come to attribute to the world
of small-press cartoonists. The violence inflicted is on objects, or in the form
of psychological torment by "Sweet" Chubby Cheeks, and quite honestly most kids
have probably dealt with worse in school every day.
While I wasn't really all
that entertained by a lot of the stories, I will admit that some of the thought
processes the kids had and some of their actions as a result were quite fun.
Their decision to blame a ghost for their acts of vandalism, and subsequent
failure to keep up the hoax, was cute, for example. And as someone who remembers
tossing all of his clothes out of a second-floor bedroom window for no memorable
reason when I was young, I found the thought processes and actions of the kids
to be pretty true to life.
In the end, your enjoyment of
this book will hinge on how much nostalgia you have for childhood and how much
of a tolerance you have for strangeness. I thought I had a healthy appetite for
both, but Weissman's piece didn't really connect with me. However, I can't bring
myself to blame the book for that, because on an intellectual level, I was
actually impressed by the storytelling and the interesting vision that Weissman
had of this odd little world.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
