The Unhinged World of Glen Baxter: Collected Works

by Glen Baxter

A strange kind of genius inhabits the mind of this artist who loves the surreal and uses it to full advantage to skew pretension. Drawing in the style of 1930s adventure story illustrations, Glen Baxter captures the quirks and foibles of everyday events and ordinary strange people. Only Baxter would concoct Mexican invert one sombrero, fill it with tofu, and let it stand for 38 minutes. (So perfect for those Super Bowl parties, since it serves 80). And when Eric hides in the jungle from his Nazi pursuers, we empathize with his remorse for not having returned overdue books to the library. From the gargantuan mound of salt on the main course (slightly oversalted) to the heap of ketchup slithering out of a keg (a dash for the eggs), to the twelve endangered fruits to the new ways to use vegetables, Baxter captures all the bizarre nuances of the alarmingly amusing. Mere words fail to describe the delights within this volume; Baxter scampers over a landscape filled with food, animals, fey cowboys, and the deranged denizens of Sherwood Forest. There's truly no end to the humor of Glen Baxter. The introduction to this second volume--a short story about Baxter--sheds more light on this artist and his humor. To read him is to love him . . . and to guffaw, snort, chuckle, howl, snicker, and cackle. One can only wonder about volume three.

Genres: Humor, Comics

224 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2004

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.