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Bob the Angry Flower: Coffee With Sinistar
Bob the Angry Flower offends God and man in his second demented cartoon collection as he face threats and alliances from bears, robots and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Both brilliant and stupid, it's the book about which Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon said "It's hysterically funny. I've been laughing like a supervillain for days." Or at least, that's what it says on the back of the book.
Paperback
Published December 1, 1999
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June 29, 2019
Ah, I envy you who have yet to read these cartoons for the first time! This is written in what I think is the strongest period for "Bob the Angry Flower", where the characters meld and there starts to be a form, but while new ideas keep blazing in and before that form is questioned and turned to uglier ideas. You, the new reader, will be surprised and astonished. You will perhaps experience some of these cartoons as the funniest things you've ever read, instead of remembering them as at one time being the funniest things you had read to that point.
It may help if you read it while you are younger, in the late teens and early twenties when you might better enjoy a cleverness that lacks kindness. Looking back now, there's a lot of bad feeling in with the good.
Let's dig in a little bit to explore some of my favorites. "Magnetic South" is perhaps the funniest cartoon I've ever read, with a conclusion both unexpected and following perfectly from the premise, which also pays off in strips like "I've decided it's time I got a grip on my total fixation on robots" and "Nobody wants to be lectured by an invisible cow". Others great cartoons turn on defeating expectations by revealing turns that work against the premise, such as "Gornar!", "The Will", "The Man Behind the Curtain", "Who is Fastest?", "The Seduction", and "Copy Wrong". "A.I." is combines these two lines of handling a premise to deliver a withering critique of the concept of artificial intelligence as true today as when it was written. On the other hand, "The Path of Most Resistance" relentlessly follows its premise for no surprises but instead a very pure distillation of how we get in our own way.
This collection is also very interesting for how it looks at the geopolitical stage, in particular it's odd sympathy for pre-9/11 Osama bin Laden and the relentless but apparently affectionate abuse of Kofi Annan. "The Past -and Beyond" is fascinating for how we used to see how the past would see the future.
Overall, if you've never read these cartoons, it's worth going back in the BTAF archives and having a few laughs.
It may help if you read it while you are younger, in the late teens and early twenties when you might better enjoy a cleverness that lacks kindness. Looking back now, there's a lot of bad feeling in with the good.
Let's dig in a little bit to explore some of my favorites. "Magnetic South" is perhaps the funniest cartoon I've ever read, with a conclusion both unexpected and following perfectly from the premise, which also pays off in strips like "I've decided it's time I got a grip on my total fixation on robots" and "Nobody wants to be lectured by an invisible cow". Others great cartoons turn on defeating expectations by revealing turns that work against the premise, such as "Gornar!", "The Will", "The Man Behind the Curtain", "Who is Fastest?", "The Seduction", and "Copy Wrong". "A.I." is combines these two lines of handling a premise to deliver a withering critique of the concept of artificial intelligence as true today as when it was written. On the other hand, "The Path of Most Resistance" relentlessly follows its premise for no surprises but instead a very pure distillation of how we get in our own way.
This collection is also very interesting for how it looks at the geopolitical stage, in particular it's odd sympathy for pre-9/11 Osama bin Laden and the relentless but apparently affectionate abuse of Kofi Annan. "The Past -and Beyond" is fascinating for how we used to see how the past would see the future.
Overall, if you've never read these cartoons, it's worth going back in the BTAF archives and having a few laughs.
Displaying 1 of 1 review