Class Photo

When Triptow (Gay Comics) was in college he and a friend found an old school photo from 1937 Brooklyn in a pile of garbage. The two kept the picture and built an entire comedy routine around it, attaching outlandish stories to the kids posing in the photo. The result is a collection of absurd comics built from the biographies of the imagined class members, with a slew of politically incorrect characters, including multilingual Czxyzsk Sraaska, who has Tourette’s syndrome; ugliest girl in school Greasy Joan Semilar, who becomes a Zionist guerilla; and Ricky Renfield, a vampire-obsessed special-needs student. Moving beyond an array of one-off gag strips, Triptow does some solid worldbuilding by having various students appear in one another’s biographies. It’s all delivered with an infectious, gleeful crassness that doesn’t apologize for how it goes for laughs, nor smooth out the rough heritage of his cartooning, which loudly proclaims its cutting-edge cred. (Nov.)