CR Review: Utility Sketchbook



Creator: Anonymous
Publishing Information: PictureBox, Inc., soft cover, 64 page, 2007, $6.57
Ordering Numbers: 0978972244 (ISBN10), 9780978972240 (ISBN13)

Utility Sketchbook reprints a bunch of comics from a series of strips that many of you may have seen here and elsewhere referred to as simply "the dog cartoons." Episodes of these comics appeared in a few Fort Thunder-related publications during the mid-1990s and since then have shown up on random sheets of circulated paper and as jpegs. I myself have 10 or 12 on my hard drive, and I have no idea how they came into my possession. For some reason the book doesn't credit the cartoonist. He was known back then as Keith McCulloch, or at least that's the name I was given at the time. I was told he was a neighbor who lived in close proximity to the Fort Thunder art collective, and was only intermittently interested in comics. Of course, there's always the chance that Keith McCulloch doesn't exist, and this is an otherwise known artist from that group and time adopting a personality for the side project. I have no idea. So anonymous it is.

I don't like the presentation. PictureBox has packaged this as a small paperback, and I found some of the comics difficult to read as a result, a hassle that was not ameliorated by an equal, compensating virtue. The price point is lovely, to be sure, and it's certainly a dense, longish read, for those of you who care about those kinds of things. You do have to read these comics to get them: the drawing is humorous and the design work more solid than it may first appear, but the great joy in the individual strips is how they come together as comics into a state of pure, smirking nonsense. For that you have to dig in. There seems to be a trend in comics for publishers and artists to mistrust providing a context for works like this, and while I understand the impulse I'm not certain I agree with it. As most of these strips were creatively viable as Xeroxes passed along with a direct explanation one person to another, does making it into more of an art object add anything to our collective enjoyment of the work other than to keep some easily frustrated people away?

Despite these general caveats, and even with some of the obvious crudity in the art and writing and the fact that several of the strips are unrealized, I recommend Utility Sketchbook. Highly. If you see it at a show, or are brave enough to order it from this on-line store, I'd suggest picking it up immediately. How often does someone with this unique a sense of humor come along in comics? About once every three years? Five years? The comics in Utility Sketchbook aren't just odd and affecting; they're funny. They look funny, they use comics in a funny manner, and the written jokes are funny. No cartoonist is better at capturing characters in undeserved mid-strut than the author of Utility Sketchbook, and few are as skilled at portraying characters puffed up with nonsense and shooting off at the mouth. Reading this book is like having that friend whom you tell disbelieving friends and acquaintances is the funniest person you know suddenly gift you with proof.



*****

A Sample Strip

*****
 
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