This week’s comic strip expresses the beauty of artful gore more than anything else. I was thinking of Steven Soderbergh’s new film Contagion — but the fast spreading virus that inflicts Creep Rat and Snuff here is more like that hemorrhagic pathogen with the 90% fatality rate known as Ebola (which first scared the crap out of us in Richard Preston’s 1992 bestseller THE HOT ZONE). For a while I wrestled with some sort of dialogue and an ironic zinger of a punch line in the last panel. But after drawing and inking, the sheer carnage of the panels stood on their own.
Humor strip by Kaz, about sordid doings in a surreal city.
About Kaz
Kaz grew up a working class brat who loved cartoons, monsters, punk rock and fine arts. He studied cartooning at NYC’s School of Visual Arts under art spiegelman and Harvey Kurtzman. In 1991 he created the Harvey-nominated strip Underworld which continues to be published in alternative weekly papers across the United States. Since 2001 he has written for Spongebob Squarepants, Cartoon Network’s Camp Lazlo and Disney’s Phineas & Ferb.
The scariest “horrible deadly contagious disease” movie ever was Andromeda Strain.
I agree.
Dude, check out this blog post with some TAD Dorgan strips and analysis. The blogger speculates that Dorgan may have invented the “flip take” gag that you used in your recent “Bat Rat” and “Creep Rat” strips.
http://sparklepony.blogspot.com/2011/09/art-collection-three-prohibition-era.html
Thanks, Comrade. You may be right. TAD Dorgan has some very early flip takes in his comics. I saw some in the Google image search I just did. One take has a cop not only fall on his head feet up — but somehow he twisted around before he did it. I think I’ll try that one.