Review: The Fun Never Stops

The Fun Never Stops: An Anthology of Comic Art 1991-2006
By Drew Friedman
Published By Fantagraphics Books. $16.95 USD

I've been a fan of Friedman's work since the first collection with his brother Josh, Any Similarity To Persons Living Or Dead..., but the era before this collection is really his best work. This collection is the largest format and most pages, but feels like his least substantial, with lots of pin-ups that lack the poignance of his most recent book Old Jewish Comedians, and many of the comic strips lacking the bite of someone Comic Art Magazine calls, "one of the preeminent satirists of his generation." Perhaps at one time. Now, working often with his wife Kathy Bidus, we get strips like the opener, "The Rise and Fall of Motion Pictures," with lovely images from Potemkin, City Lights, Citizen Kane up to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the easy visual punchline of 2005's The Dukes of Hazzard film. Hey, he's right--they don't make good movies anymore, huh? At least not starring Jessica Simpson.

A pinup of a foppish, pensive Cary Grant apparently crammed into a closet is nicely done, but what do I do with it? Also, no offense, but his hat looks wrong. A bulbous Lou Costello giving a kid a quarter is just that--where's the satire? And the pieces of actual satire are often really easy, like a '90s piece on "The 10 Least Powerful People in L.A." with clay pigeons like Elizabeth Berkley, Renny Harlin, and former Madonna paramour Carlos Leon.

Perhaps expectations are tilted the wrong way by the blurbs and the grotesque oldsters on the cover so that the reader believes the book will have more of an edge to it. A lot of the art appears to be commissioned, and while very nicely illustrated, just doesn't have that special Friedman touch to it. However, in some cases, Friedman does run wild with objects of affection like Jerry Lewis, with good results. Pinups like the famous Stan Lee-as-carnival-barker piece for The Comics Journal, Harvey Pekar, and a Magic Johnson-engaging-in-phone-sex-while-in-Lakers-uniform, are brilliant no matter their context or satirical import.

Friedman is still pretty great at depicting '50s-'60s pop culture icons and the poor shlubs who survived that era. Highlights include various colorful retired NYC elevatormen speculating about the JFK assassination, and a strip recounting some famous rants from legendary jazz drummer, bandleader and prick, Buddy Rich.

In the color section, the humor is hit and miss, but at the very least one can admire Friedman's skill with washes. It's easy to make fun of Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, P. Diddy and Ann Coulter, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Oddly, though, Friedman ends this section with two pieces that aren't as well-drawn as usual, and garishly colored.

The penultimate section could ostensibly be the most personal, as it features Friedman's only fictional character, The Duke of Eltingville, a hyrdocephalic hipster loved and revered by many, across several strips. However, the point of pretty much every strip here is that the influential Duke, no matter his great accomplishments in showbiz, is always preoccupied with some obscure pop culture figure or program, like My Mother The Car, Zagnut bars and Durkee sauce.

Friedman concludes the book with probably the best section, with pinups of the physically and perhaps mentally feeble, and a strange strip where a man calls an old man on the phone to ruin his day with a horrible lie about the man's mother, then quietly goes about the rest of his day and evening.