Mr. Colostomy
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Are we not all criminals—eating our take-out, foraging for mushrooms, lapping at puddles?
What happens when sleep becomes commodified? What if all the people at your local café were piloting drone strikes? What is the hidden cost and darkness of the society we must all engage with? Mr. Colostomy opens up cans of worms faster than they can restock the Goya on your bodega shelves. Who is Mr. Colostomy? Why, he’s a manifestation of a searching consciousness, a marginally employable horse detective who sleeps outside, standing up. As he attempts to unravel a ridiculous plot that follows the disappearance of a couple of brats who turn into atomic particles after sundown, Mr. Colostomy remains always alien, a mutant mustang, an eccentric equus who might just be trying to make a buck in Babytown, the Babylon built by babes—or, is a more sinister plot a-hoof?
The surreal comedy of Mr. Colostomy is enhanced by Thurber’s process of creating the comic through parapraxis, meaning with no forethought or pencilling. This comic honours the mistake as the desired or hidden expression of the unconscious. All that matters is that the comic is funny or real or neither! All comics were created in a public space in order to “swim in” or “feel” the audience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thurber (Art Comic) is at his hilariously surreal best in this collection of his loosely connected daily strips, each page of which was constructed spontaneously. Thurber revisits old characters like talking horse Mr. Colostomy, a detective who investigates, among other things, art crimes. He's hired to find two children who disappeared, as "when the sun sets become particles." Thurber alternates between picking up threads of a sort-of plot, but more often this is abandoned to all-out silliness, with flights of fancy that include puns, cultural critiques, and visual gags—sometimes all at the same time, as when longtime Thurber character Groomfiend the mouse detective gets confused why they're showing old Jem cartoons at an "outrageous" Whitney biennial show, where a reference to Aunt Jemima completes the jokey cultural critique. He turns absurd concepts into bits that are built on their own internal logic, like a bat devoted to science spinning a ludicrous story about partying physicists. Thurber's art ranges from carefully inked cross-hatching to full-color weekend strips to smudged pencils. While he may defy convention, that's rather the point of this relentless, wickedly smart comedic assault.
