The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories

Even the most benevolent impulse is sure to lead to a planet in ruins in this debut collection of Gurewitch’s popular Web comic, The Perry Bible Fellowship. The dark, surreal humor is often compared to The Far Side but has an even more brutal and fatalistic sense of humor. Lavishly colored, the art switches among detailed depictions of comedy staples like sloths and dinosaurs to an empty-faced cast of doomed stick figure dreamers. Gurewitch’s true strength is in expertly using the four-panel comic strip structure to suggest entire storylines and their bleak payoffs. In one, a man and woman stand in a field full of dead bodies, and the woman reacts angrily when she discovers the secret revealed in the final panel: the touching message “Will you marry me?” written on a hillside with the bodies. Similar themes of pop culture tropes played out to the point of disaster abound: aliens decide to kill the Earth instead of a planet of cute puppies, heaven is found to be not so cool when God forbids billiards, and so on. But as usual, attempting to analyze the humor defeats the purpose—Gurewitch’s strips are destined to be refrigerator door classics in the very near future. (Nov.)