This book combines two thing for which I'm a sucker. First, it's an old paperback comic collection, those poorly-bound proto-graphic novels that also link back to the old editorial cartoons, the world from whence emerges Gahan Wilson.
And this Wilson guy is weird. Really weird.
Unsurprisingly, he's the other thing for which I'm a sucker. Mr. Wilson sees a world that's banal in its nightmarishness, normal in its abnormality, and I often feel that this is truly the state of the world, that everything is just weird, but we accept that this is normal because what else is there? And if art isn't meant to make us think about our place in the world somehow, I don't know what it's for.
I picked this book up on a recent sojourn to Invermere, a small town near Radium Hot Springs in British Columbia. We have friends who invite us up to the family cabin a couple of times a year for a weekend of good company, good food, lots of alcohol, and a traditional stop at the candy store in Canmore. In Invermere, I always stop at the local used book place, a creaky, musty basement called The Book Cellar, filled to the ceiling with some of the weirdest tomes I've laid eyes on. I always try to pick something up there, as I've come across the all to common occurrence of visiting small towns over the course of a few years and watching as used book stores disappear. To me, this is one of the most tragic effects of contemporary culture. There is a sacredness to books, to their material presences, and all of the labour that they represent, intellectual and industrial. If used book stores are dying, that means interest in books is also dying.
That got dark quickly.
Onward!
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