Fluffy Humpy Poopy Puppy: A Ruff, Dog-Eared Look at Man's Best Friend

Part of the design-driven Pop Ink series of art/humor books, this sickeningly cute yet unpredictably irreverent gallery depicts man's best friend with both charm and contempt. The beautiful but lowbrow book goes cover to plastic cover in about fifteen minutes, propelled by the crude, catchy art of the Charles S. Anderson design company, and peppered with Nelson's laugh-out-loud text. Nelson, a former writer and star of TV's Mystery Science Theater 3000, retains his snide wit in the captions, which read like that show's out-loud, semi-ad-libbed commentary. When he occasionally misses, the art and construction-papery collages-culled from ""one of the most extensive and highly awarded stock image collections in the world""-more than make up for it visually. The book is not for the squeamish-there's quite a colorful mix of poop, blood and euthanasia included-but it is ultimately a love letter to our drooling, spewing, shoe-chewing companions. Self-conscious and occasionally convoluted, the topic derails and refocuses constantly: one page recommends pigs' ears as chew toys, the next gives a butcher's diagram delineating the cuts of meat on a Daschund. Another non-sequitur accompanies a sketch of a pugnacious Truman Capote out for a picnic with his ""rented family."" The scene goes awry when a puppy with a stolen hot dog ""gets his weiner dangerously close to Mr. Capote's kicky short-shorts."" Though it sounds strange enough with the text extracted, it's hard to overemphasize the way CSA's art dominates and completes the unusual package.