| Perry Bible Fellowship |
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| Posted by Mladen Luketin |
09:11 AM Wednesday, 02 January 2008 |
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 With a look at web comics, the unusually named Perry Bible Fellowship (found at pbfcomics.com ) is the creation of talented writer/artist Nicholas Gurewitch and takes the form of the one-off three to four panel gag-strip with no (or very few) repeating characters. Often likened to Gary Larson's The Far Side for its somewhat cynical and absurd humour, Gurewitch takes the concept a step further by using different illustrations styles and rendering technique for each strip to best suit its content, while the artwork itself is much more sophisticated than most of its internet and print contemporaries. The content is often a strange combination of children's cartoon with cynical absurdist adult humour, covering a range of topics between strips including love, life, death, white-lies, miscommunication, childhood, delusion, murder, adultery, sex, war, violence, and a heavy dose of irony and wit. And its actually funny. Originally a newspaper strip, the comic is now a weekly updated webcomic. Besides winning numerous awards, the Perry Bible Fellowship is currently published in some twenty one newspapers (including the Chicago Reader, New York Press, Metro Times, the Guardian, the Portland Mercury and the Philadelphia City Paper), five magazines (Maxim and ION among them) and five school papers. The comic's recent print edition "The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories" published through Dark Horse became one of the fastest selling pre-order books through Amazon.com, and broke records for demand in the UK for Dark Horse books.
The Perry Bible Fellowship is a unique joy for the weekly web comic aficionado and newspaper comics-page reader because of its entirely unpredictable content. There is literally no way to guess what the next week's comic will be about or how it will be illustrated (whether in pen and ink, coloured crayon, digitally illustrated, watercolour, coloured or grey pencil), adding a surprise element to each strip. The humour is almost exclusively visual and non-linear which makes a nice change from most web and newspaper comics which are predominantly dialogue based, adding a universal humanist appeal to the strip since the jokes can be understood by very nearly anybody without any prior expected knowledge or even a strong grasp of the English language. You won't find any obscure video-game jokes or superhero gags here. The jokes themselves are usually ironic and witty with a heavily absurdist aspect and element of dark and potentially offensive content (though rarely crude, usually utilising clever metaphor rather than a literal depiction).
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One of the best factors in the Perry Bible Fellowship is its appeal to adults. There is nothing childish about the comic except in its twisted nostalgia value and occasionally the deceptively child-friendly artwork. The humour (some call it twisted, others call it realist) straddles the line of being offensive while never straying into the ‘shock value' territory. When I say the comic is for adults, I mean the humour is probably too sharp or worldly for children to understand, rather than the comic being overly adult in content (you'd have to be somewhat of a prude to be truly offended by the Perry Bible Fellowship, but be warned, the title of the comic should be taken ironically rather than literally). | < Prev | Next > |
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