Reading Through 2021 95: Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume One, by Michael Kupperman

Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume One, by Michael Kupperman

2009

A little Michael Kupperman goes a long way.

I can't say I'm a life-long Kupperman fan. I watched the Robert Smigel's TV Playhouse when it was on, where Kupperman did animation. I first knew of his name though, when Tumblr was at its peak six or seven years ago. His work was perfect for a site like that: small doses of crazy, inventive humor. I was into it and got Volume Two of Thrizzle when it came out, and just recently decided I wanted some more and picked up the first volume.  

The sex hole v. sex blimp debate never ends

Kupperman makes short comedy pieces of the sort the Internet is sorely lacking. Humor strips these days tend to be four panel comics that are crudely drawn, with punchlines in the final panel, and not very inventive concepts of comedy. A quick pass through "comics" on Reddit this morning shows three dominant jokes: 1) a scary intimidating character does something cute in the final panel, 2) a cute character does something evil in the final panel, and 3) someone says something dumb and/or shocking while other characters stare in disbelief. That's 85% of the humor strips in my feed. Kupperman has themes he goes through, but I'd argue there is no formula, and jokes are laced throughout the strips, as opposed to a strip that builds to a single punchline. His art is retro, calling to mind work from the 30s to the 50s.

Meanwhile, the comics as literature debate has been settled

At times, it's barely a joke, simply a ridiculous concept that Kupperman has taken a great amount of effort to create. He also builds on his own strips, making callbacks to earlier strips and ideas. What might be a comic on one page becomes an fake advertisement on another. What is an advertisement on one page might face a rival advertisement on another. Like a lot of great comedians, he mines themes to get the humor out of them, and lets jokes evolve.

It's terrible when your Lyndon Johnson biography suffers because of having to perform foreplay

Kupperman was born in the 60's, and takes a lot of references from 70's culture, like buddy cop TV shows and the actors of the day, but he also works in a lot of Americana from old presidents to 1930's pulp stories. Most of the work in the book is familiar in some way, like it's been culled from the collective unconsciousness of America. He definitely is making more references than I can name check. This is dense work.

Remembering the Thirties

When he's on top of his game, it's absolutely delightful. It's novel in a way that humor comics rarely are. With the way the Internet has become, with endless scrolls asking for our attention, somehow it's rarely surprising. Kupperman manages to surprise over and over. Was I asking for for Einstein and Mark Twain as two beat cops solving crimes? No, and I wasn't asking their police chief to dress like Tarzan either.

If there's one issue I had with the book it's that it's that I couldn't just sit down and read it. This book collects four issues, and I had to read it about half an issue at a time. With books that collect a lot of short, unconnected pieces, there are some where I'm ready to burn through it, like Dakota McFadzean's excellent To Know You're Alive, but with this one, I found it hard to stay focused on it. I read it for fifteen minutes before or after reading something else.

From a piece on the pornographic coloring books of the 1970's

That's not really a criticism of the work, just recognizing that the form of one to four page strips without narratives don't lend themselves to concentrated readings.  I was delighted, then I was tired, then I was delighted again. It's good work.