Strip Joint

by Carol Lay

Book by Lay, Carol

106 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

Reviews

[StrictlySequential · Rating 5 out of 5]

If* I had the $$ or went half-tilt on graphic novels I would have EVERYTHING she's ever done. And some originals.

There's something about her...

I had the pleasure of her weirdest (I assume) work first which is not her trademarked "Story Minute" material -it ("Goodnight Irene") even includes chins and "lip plates" on people- and was IMMEDIATELY HOOKED.

I love you Carol- can we make out passionately sometime?

Lines like this...
-"When handicaps were in vogue she used hysterical blindness to her advantage."
-"... and the dolphins decided to keep it that way."
- Mother Nature is examining over-population... while sitting (not uncomfortably) on the very top of a sharp and snow-capped mountain (they only come up to her knees).
- Any strip involving "The Gods" with their thumbs up or down coming out of the clouds is heavenly.

PLUS: postulating the pertinence to her personal life gives her fables/parables added value.

Check out Evanier's intro too- he's always funny with his self-deprecation bit.

*My selection is strictly price alert based- the book has to be SHOCKINGLY below the "going rate" for me to afford this mad-cap sequential stampede. Her "... Fattitude" should become $1.57 BWBbarginbin at any time.

[Rex Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of great comic strips from the 90s, mostly dealing with absurdist subjects. There aren't many reoccurring characters, apart from a fortune teller and the Devil, but each strip is a fine tuned short story creating a compelling and wonderfully fun experience from page to page. The art is top notch, complementing the story perfectly. For this who like this style of art, I would say this is must reading.

[Dominick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Story Minute is Carol Lay's weekly comic strip, published in independent papers. There have been a few collections of it, but this is the first I've read, and it's dandy stuff. The strips are generally rigidly laid out in a twelve panel grid (if there's ever an exception, I don't recall it) and rendered in black and white in a stark, simple, generally angular style that nevertheless can accommodate the rubber-boned aspects of humour cartoonists like Bagge. There's something vaguely--and only vaguely--Watterson-like in some of Lay's character designs, but her tone is all her own. Each strip is pretty much a self-contained story. In a few instances, there's an ongoing story line for three or four strips (e.g one sequence where the Devil decides to good rather than evil, with predictable results), but always, any individual strip can be read on its own without reference to the others in the sequence. The only recurring characters--and they appear rarely--are the Devil (Old Nick) and the fortune teller Miss Asgar, whose conflict between good/evil is an amusing motif. Most of the stories are little parables, usually with a sardonic wit and often with blackly/bleakly comic conclusions--one of the later strips is a bit of a meta-strip about a female cartoonist who, the government fears, does too many bleak cartoons in which too many people (and at times the entire world) die. Very rarely, one of the parables has a happy ending, and one way of looking at these might be to see them as a bit of optimism to leaven the more pervasive pessimism of the strip overall. Does it say something bad about me, then, that as a rule, I find the happy ones the least interesting in the book? Anyway, I'm glad I finally got around to reading some Carol Lay, as this is great cartooning. Recommended.