So as you may have noticed, I’ve been running some short gag strips here at Comics212.net. While I introduced this concept alllllll the way back in August of 2009, a couple of hiatuses in my posting these fine strips may have led to all kinds of folks new to the website who don’t know about Mr. Dorkin, or his FUN strips, or even the classic alt-humour comic strip DORK.
First up, check out Evan online:
Evan Dorkin & Sarah Dyer’s House Of Fun
Evan’s Livejournal: Big Mouth Types Again
Evan Dorkin’s Original Art For Sale!
That last page is great btw, a huge collection of awesome originals art for sale. I’m lucky enough to own a couple myself, I recommend owning original art whenever possible.
So, Evan Dorkin. He’s a cartoonist–a writer as well as and artist–who is probably currently best known for his writing on the YALSA-nominated, Best-of-2010 contending series/graphic novel BEASTS OF BURDEN, published by the fine folks at Dark Horse Comics and illustrated by Jill Thompson. Evan’s taken on a lot of writing over the past few years, working on The Simpsons, MAD, and various DC projects. Evan’s also the creator of MILK & CHEESE, the dairy products gone bad in usually ultra-violent ways. MILK & CHEESE is part of a larger body of thinly-veiled social commentary dressed up as vicious satire, vicious puns, or sometimes plain old vicious violence. And that work is reprinted in DORK, an 11 issue comic series (reprinted in two trade paperbacks), and that brings us to today.
FUN. A repository for short jokes that didn’t fit anywhere else. For running gags. For Evan to address the reader directly, talking about whatever happens to be on his mind at the time. As you can see if you go back through the archives, Evan’s mind wanders and wanders and wanders, and whenever he manages to get his pen and pencil writing those thoughts down, the comedy’s very good indeed.
As you can see up top, FUN runs 7 strips a page, 4 panels (including the title card) at a time. Some issues are heavy with FUN gags, some issues FUN doesn’t make any appearance at all… and all in all, the FUN material that I’m reprinting here makes up about 10% of each of the two DORK trade paperbacks, which means if you like a strip, there’s hundreds of pages of similar, hilarious comics out there for you to buy.
You can do so at the SLG Publishing Webstore. I highly recommend it.
Evan was gracious enough to let me reprint the FUN strips here in more-or-less chronological order. If you enjoy them, please, let him know or support him by buying a book, some art, or hitting one of his eBay auctions.
My thanks again to Evan for this, I greatly appreciate it and I hope all of you readers do too.
– Christopher