Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: absurdist

August 6, 2015

Doc Rat Vol. 13 and 14, by Jenner – Book Reviews by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Doc Rat. Vol. 13, Lucky for Some, Doc, by Jenner.
Melbourne, Vic., Australia, Platinum Rat Productions, June 2014, trade paperback A$16.00 (unpaged [76 pages]).

Doc Rat. Vol. 14, Prey Tell, Doc: Son of Fortenflanck, by Jenner.
Melbourne, Vic., Australia, Platinum Rat Productions, December 2014, trade paperback A$16.00 (unpaged [88 pages]).

Vol-13-cover-front-proof-Small-450x316These are the latest two pocket-sized volumes of Jenner’s Doc Rat online daily comic strip. They are especially desirable right now when the Doc Rat website is having electronic problems, so you couldn’t read these strips for free on its archive if you wanted to. But even when the archive comes back online, these thin booklets are extremely handy for carrying around with you. They are only available in one bookshop in Melbourne, and by mail order over the strip’s website for A$16.00 or US$12.95 each. They are highly recommended.

It’s no secret today that Jenner is Dr. Craig Hilton, a general practitioner in a suburb of Melbourne. Dr. Benjamin Rat M.B., many etc.’s, is also a GP in a suburb of the Australian animal city of Fornor. Jenner began Doc Rat in June 2006, and like any long-running comic strip, it has a wealth of backstory and supporting characters by now. It helps if you are familiar with them, but it’s not essential; just as it isn’t essential to be familiar with the medical profession to appreciate all the technical references that Doc Rat and his staff plus others (Gizelle Thomson, his Thomson’s gazelle office receptionist; Mary Scamper, his motherly rabbit nurse; and numerous pharmaceutical high-pressure salesmen) casually throw around. Doc Rat has his own GP practice, and most of the situations that he faces are shared by any small business: billing, paperwork, keeping up with the latest developments in your specialty, and so on.

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July 8, 2015

The Stray Lamb, by Thorne Smith – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Stray Lamb, by Thorne Smith.
NYC, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, November 1929, hardcover $2.00 (vi + 303 pages).

stray lamb 1stYarst! I referred in a recent comment here (June 15) to “Thorne Smith-ian comedy magical mayhem”, and I was asked, “Who’s Thorne Smith?” (“You don’t know how old you just made me feel …”)

Thorne Smith (1892-1934) was the author of several mega-popular humorous fantasies during the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Most of them involved statues of Greek gods coming to life in modern NYC (The Night Life of the Gods), or their characters getting drunk and mixed up with magic. Many became comedy movies, such as the 1940 Hal Roach Turnabout with John Hubbard and Carole Landis as a husband-&-wife whose minds switch bodies, and the three 1930s Topper movies about Cosmo Topper, a stuffy banker who is plagued by usually-drunken husband-&-wife ghosts who are determined to make him enjoy life, whether Topper wants to or not. A young Cary Grant played the husband ghost in the first movie. Topper was cleaned up for one of the first TV sitcoms in 1953. (The drinking was given to a ghostly St. Bernard dog.)

Smith’s one anthro classic was The Stray Lamb. This bawdy fantasy was published in November 1929, probably less than a month after the “Black Thursday” stock market crash that set off the Great Depression. This makes The Stray Lamb the only anthropomorphic novel written during and set in the Roaring Twenties, the era of wild Prohibition parties, of sheiks and flappers and bootleggers and bathtub gin. How would anthropomorphized animals fit into this? Very comedically, as Smith tells it.

Lawrence Lamb, a forty-year-old investment banker, is bored with life. It has become a monotonous routine of daily commutes from his large mansion in the NYC suburbs to Wall Street to make more money, then back at the end of the day to spend the evening getting mildly drunk alone in his study. He and his wife have grown to despise each other. She has social pretensions (she likes to be called Sapho), which she indulges by encouraging her artistic hangers-on to attend literary soirees at their home, financed by his money while ridiculing him for making it:

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June 27, 2015

The Wild Piano, by Fred – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Wild Piano, by Fred. [Translated by Richard Kutner.]61QEi8btoPL
NYC, Candlewick Press/TOON Books, May 2015, hardcover $16.95 (45 [+ 1] pages).

The Wild Piano (Le Piano Sauvage) is Book 2 in the Philémon series by Fred (Frédéric Othon Théodore Aristidès, 1931-2013), serialized in the classic French comics magazine Pilote. The weekly strip was collected into 15 books between 1972 and 1987. Fred retired leaving Philémon’s adventures uncompleted, until he wrote/drew a 16th volume to finish the series just before his death.

Book 1, Cast Away on the Letter A, was reviewed here in January. I won’t repeat the gushing praise that I lavished upon it, but briefly: Philémon was/is a surrealistic cartoon strip in the tradition of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Philémon is a teenage farmboy in the French countryside of the 1960s-‘70s who falls down a well and has psychedelic adventures on the literal letters ATLANTIC of the Atlantic Ocean of a parallel world. Philémon, and Fred’s other works, were instant hits in France, reprinted so often that Fred was able to retire and live off his royalties. It is a sad commentary on the lack of interest in non-American cartoon art in America that the Philémon books are only now being published here after 40+ years. A Philémon live-action movie full of VFX, French-produced but in English, was announced as in pre-production in 2013.

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