Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings

by Glen Baxter

Over four decades and a multitude of books, “Colonel” Glen Baxter has built a world and a language all his own—slightly familiar, decidedly abnormal, irresistibly funny. Have you felt the terror of a failed Szechuan dinner? Have you seen what happens at precisely 6:15? Do you know where the beards are stored? Either way, this is the book for you.

Baxter’s drawings are a delicious stew of pulp adventure novels, highbrow hjinks, and outright lonesome cowboys confront the latest in modern art, brave men tremble before moussaka, schoolgirls hoard hashish, and the world’s fruits are in constant peril. Wimples abound.

This new selection of Baxter’s work brings together highlights from the full sweep of his long career, and is sure to enchant both confirmed Baxterians and those in dire need of an introduction.

This NYRC edition is a hardcover with printed endpapers, debossed cover design, and extra-thick paper.

Genres: Humor, Comics, Graphic Novels, Art, Fiction, Comedy, Graphic Novels Comics

160 pages, Hardcover

First published March 22, 2016

About the author

Glen Baxter (born 4 March 1944), nicknamed Colonel Baxter, is an English cartoonist, noted for his absurdist drawings and an overall effect often resembling literary nonsense.
Born in Leeds, Baxter was trained at the Leeds College of Art. His images and their corresponding captions employ art and language inspired by pulp fiction and adventure comics with intellectual jokes and references. His simple line-drawings often feature cowboys, gangsters, explorers and schoolchildren, who utter incongruous intellectual statements regarding art and philosophy.
Baxter's artwork has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Independent on Sunday.

Reviews

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

The cartoons in this collection look like part of one of those "found art" sort of books where the artist copies panels from old comics or illustrations from old magazines and then slaps on new dialogue or captions. In this case, the captions are all absurdities or non sequiturs or ironic juxtapositions, none of which did a thing for me. Blurg.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Janet set aside an hour each day to work on her threatening letters"

This book is beautiful. Not every comic is a banger but I can't remember laughing this much at a comic in a very long time.

[Aleka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maravilla. En español editado por Anagrama.

[BooksRgood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I'll thank you to stop juggling my gherkins!", snorted the anguished throgue.

This sentence and accompanying drawing made me giggle - as did many of the pages in this wacky book...

I have no idea what a throgue is...

[Abby Monhollen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this was absolutely hilarious. Good for a laugh! -A

[StrictlySequential · Rating 3 out of 5]

His humour is too random and vague/unfocused- I prefer a discernable method behind madness.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glen Baxter combines some of my favorite things: cartoons, absurd humor and, well, that’s about it. I’m not feeling very generous today. ALMOST COMPLETELY BAXTER: NEW AND SELECTED BLURTINGS is published by the New York Review of Books newest cartoon imprint, which has already won me over by launching with a reissue of AGONY by Mark Beyer — oh, yeah, another one of my favorite things. But I knew Beyer, Baxter is new to me. He’s been working since the 1970s, published in the New Yorker and by one of my favorite lunchtime haunts when I worked in midtown Manhattan, the sorely missed Gotham Book Mart. He works within the classic format of the single-panel gag cartoon and his style has a last century children’s book illustration look, with recurring cowboys, gladiators and other iconic characters. It’s the punch lines that veer off into nonsense, but not mere silliness. His is an acute and refined sense of the peculiar. Of course I’m not doing justice to Baxter’s work, in fact these words are an injustice to it, so get yourself a copy of his book right now!

[Jonathan Bogart · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you know Glen Baxter's cartoons, you don't need me to tell you how great they are. If you don't, I'm not sure I could communicate their greatness to you. Line drawings (and, more recently, pastels) capturing a fragment of surrealist narrative, with a caption below that often reads more like the slice of text underneath an illustration in old-fashioned children's or pulp novels than like a traditional cartoon caption, inviting you to fill in the highly implausible story around it -- that's all, but the richness of his invention, the deadpan quality of his art (which intentionally looks like poorly-reproduced amateur technical illustration) and caption alike, and the wide range of his cultural, historical, literary, and artistic reference makes it a pleasure to spent half an hour or so browsing through any compendium of his work. I can pay him no higher compliment than to wish my family had had some of his books when I was growing up.

[Maggie Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Almost Completely Baxter is a serious of single panel cartoons drawn in an old style (think papers in the early 20th century). My partner came home with it one day last year because he was amused by a periods of comics about fruit in peril. The rest of the volume is as ridiculous. The comics are all absurdists, and while I don't have much to say about them, they made me laugh and I will keep the strange, ugly orange book on my shelves :)

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The twins introduced the impostor."

"Eric was now beginning to wish he'd returned his overdue library books."

"Are you ready to embrace vegetarianism?" snapped the regulator.

"Janet set aside an hour each day to work on her threatening letters."

[AJ Tessner Risser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious. "Permission to Moisturize, Sir?"

[Relyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mostly Glen Baxter's sense of humor and mine DO NOT match. However, I did enjoy a few of his cartoons.

[Onur Yz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Müthiş yaratılık ve mizahsal bakış içeren bir çalışma.
Bu eski çizimler bende tarif etmesi olanaksız bazı hisler oluşturuyor, çok tuhaf ve dipsiz bir dejavu hissi ile çizimleri incelerken altlarına uydurulmuş absürd diyaloglarla durum hepten çok sıradışı bir hal alıyor. Bu elbette çoğu kişiye hiçbir şey ifade etmeyecektir, ama benim gibi tüm çocukluğu çizim tutkusuyla yoğrulmuş (hem anadolunun unutulmuş bir yerinde çok kısıtlı imkanlarla bir şeylere ulaşmak hem de kendi hayal gücü ile sürekli bir şeyler çizmek) birisi için çok fazla anlam ifade ediyor. Ben şahsen bunu geçmiş (past) bir şey olarak görmüyorum ki bunun ne olduğunu anlatmam için apayrı bir yazı yazmam gerek, o nedenle bunu es geçiyorum.
Glen Baxter bu eseri ile beni hem okurken eğlendirdi hem de zamandan bağımsız bir tutkumu fazlasıyla kaşıdı, kabuk bağlamış yaraları canlandırdı/kanlandırdı, eser ile geçirdiğim zamanın her anını fazlasıyla değerli kıldı.

[Steve Lawson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reads somewhat like if Edward Gorey filled in for Gary Larson on "The Far Side" from time to time, except with cowboys replacing cows and Edwardian ladies and gentlemen.

There are many individual comics for someone in my position to print out and hang at work, including "Eric was now beginning to wish he'd returned his overdue library books," "We made our way up through contemporary fiction and on to the cappuccino machine," and "I deftly sketched in the finer points of my thesis."

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, I didn't get it.

[Viktor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny as hell, and I don't even get half the jokes.

[Shelley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautiful illustrations/liked the text. Didn't get most of it but I liked how it looked. Liked the feel.

[mimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Precisely the kind of offbeat humour that appeals to me. I hadn’t heard of him before, somehow; came across this collection of comics at a library roadshow-type thing. Serendipity, meet surreal fun.

[Sundry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great fun. Offbeat humor of the highest quality and terrific drawings. I am a brand new fan of Glen Baxter.

[Charu Balaji · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pp

[Shaun Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Might be the funniest thing I've ever read

[kirsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes! a book of non-sequiturs? oh yeah.

[Michael Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moldy British humor. Drawings appropriate for early 20th century adventure tales with surrealistic captions. I read the hardboudd edition. It takes very little time.

[Ronald Koltnow · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best way to read a Glen Baxter book is to savor it as slowly as possibly. Like a work of philosophy, you should read a page, put the book down, and meditate. The hidden message of Baxter's cartoons comes through after the pondering of detail. I am physically unable to do this. I rushed through ALMOST COMPLETELY BAXTER as quickly as I could, laughing hysterically and wanting more. Some would say that Baxter is a surrealist, others may say he's a dadaist like Viv Stanshall, Robyn Hitchcock, or, to a certain extent, Bill Griffith. (there are a couple of prose pieces in the book that read like on of Hitchcock's eccentric monologues) Baxter's cartoons look like illustrations from an Edwardian era Boy's Own Adventure magazine, full of cowboys, adventurers, and upper middle class twits, many sporting wimples or dog tails. His dry humor and oblique view of life shimmer with wit and incisiveness. He is quite simply the best cartoonist since the passing of Edward Gorey (a Baxter fan, by the way). This collection of new and old cartoons is a gem, a real coffee table book for the warped.

[Bookforum Magazine]

"Baxter's comic realm–the space between image and text, between perplexity and the mundane–is a locale where uncertainty emerges as weird and weirdness recedes into uncertainty. The funny arrives as a slow-motion detonation that seems to dissipate as quickly as it boomed.

This is humor that is both knowing and nonsensical–laughter that depends on a savvy apprehension of details even as its mainspring is improbable, gruesome, and downright goofy.

Between dying in the dust and cursing the copy machine, glen Baxter finds his mark."

–Albert Mobilio on Glen Baxter's Almost Completely Baxter: New and Selected Blurtings in the April/May 2016 issue of Bookforum

To read the rest of this review, go to Bookforum:
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/023_01

[Sara Ghotb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is wonderfully absurd and completely unpredictable. Baxter has a world and language all his own, slightly familiar, delightfully weird, and often hilarious. From terrified schoolgirls hoarding hashish to cowboys confronting modern art, every page is a quirky surprise.

The drawings are charmingly strange, a mix of pulp adventure, highbrow humor, and outright nonsense that somehow works perfectly. It’s a book to get lost in if you love the joy of the unexpected and a good laugh at life’s absurdities.

[Elderberrywine · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book of cartoons, very much The New Yorker style, and I'm sure they were.

It had me cackling like an idiot, though, so mission accomplished.

One cowboy glaring at another, who is reeling back. Jedson was noted for his withering sidelong glances. Indeed.

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hold onto your wimple because here comes Glen Baxter with more unbridled whimsy. Baxter once again shares his unparalleled vision of the world with us, thereby expanding our worlds. Lighten your day and marvel at his inventive absurdities.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's a genius.