You know, people always talk about how wild comics seem to have been created by someone "on acid." In my experience, people on acid aren't that funny -- it's being on acid that's funny.
Jonathan Rosenberg's webcomic Goats (recently collected into a handsome volume called Goats: Infinite Typewriters) makes me feel like I'm on acid.
That's because every goddamned thing that happens it is incredibly weird -- two wise-asses meet God, trick him into turning into a porkchop, eat him, then their various pets get in the act, cybernetically enhancing themselves, communing with pansexual alien Greys with 13 bladders, animating decapitated bikers by riding their neck-stumps and tugging on their spinal cords, defeating the demons of the Mayan underworld, seeing action movies about Good Space Hitler versus Evil Earth Hitler and so on -- it is never just silly. It's always infrasilly, plumbing depths of silliness that skate on the edge of incomprehensible obscenity and weird-for-the-sake-over without ever slipping over.
That's a good trick. Author Jonathan Rosenberg never seems to be trying to hard to be the class clown. This all has the refreshing spontaneous unforced high weirdness of the weirder Monty Python sketches, and it will reset your freakiness thermometer to a higher threshold than you thought possible.
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I've been reading Goats for years and while always funny, Mr. Rosenberg really shifted into high gear with the weird sci-fi craziness that Mr. Doctorow is describing above--which is also what is contained in the new book.
Highly recommended.
I have to agree, quite possibly the best use of beer, inter-dimensional bovine computers, and Reese Witherspoon ever...
Goats is one of the two webcomics (besides Questionable Content) that I don't need to remind myself to read. It's what Sluggy Freelance would be if Pete Abrams were as talented and clever as people seem to think he is.
Jon Rosenberg is asking people to buy this because it's sort of a make-and-break point for the comic, in terms of continuing to publish books and maybe even become a cartoon. You should buy this.
Holy crap, a Goats cartoon? That would be amazing!
Nifty. I have some of the previous Goats books but got out of the habit of reading it. Got me a copy of Typewriters on order now.
holy crap thanks Cory. I lost track of some bookmarks a while back and so forgot Goats existed.
I think I first read it by going back in the archives, and what was awesome (to my recollection) was that the descent into far out insanity seemed rather gradual.
Cory, you got your Hitlers backwards.