April 15 2008
Nemi by Lise Myhre and The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories by Nicholas Gurewitch
As a kid I found the Funny Pages to be the least interesting part of the Sunday newspaper. The punchlines from the humorous comic strips (Garfield, Family Circus, B.C.) always fell flat and nothing ever seemed to happen in the episodic comics (Prince Valiant, Mary Worth) that made them compelling enough to follow week after week. I always wanted to like comic strips, but they just weren’t for me.
The times, they are a changing. I first ran across Nemi, by Lise Myhre, when I was living in London. Nemi is translated from Norwegian and published in the free Metro newspaper; the strip was recently collected in book form for those of us who don’t live across the pond and who can’t read Norwegian. Nemi is a strip about a disaffected, yet imaginative goth girl who loves drinking, gigs, and everything from the darker side of life. Rather than a simple parody of goth, the comic follows a perennial outsider as she looks for romance and understanding in a world full of minor disappointments. Oh, and she grifts her friends and scares little children along the way, but that’s just good, clean fun, innit?
The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories, by Nicholas Gurewitch, is a collection of strips first ran under the name The Perry Bible Fellowship. Gurewitch’s comics are definitely not intended for children; they take the familiar comic strip format and warp them to a decidedly adult, postmodern sensibility. While the comics often feature jovial, candy-colored illustrations, the comedic impulse here veers toward the dark underbelly. Sometimes you’ll even be ashamed to admit that you laughed–though the humor is often cruel, it strikes a chord at the heart of modern absurdity. For a sampling of Gurewitch’s particular brand of comic mayhem clickhere. Then buy the book.
Nemi
The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories
