The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury by John McPherson

Most cartoonists try to make their characters look attractive. Oh, sure, you get a Basil Wolverton now and then, but they're rare.

John McPherson is another one of those exceptions: his characters are lumpy, malformed, with underslung jaws and bulbous noses, frizzy tufts of unruly hair, spindly limbs, and round little coke-bottle glasses a lot of the time. He's not trying to make them look pretty and falling short; he's making a world of funny-looking people doing funny things. (The scenery and props in that world are amusingly malformed a lot of the time, as well.)

McPherson's been drawing like that for a while. His syndicated strip Close To Home has been running since 1992.

Actually, looking at this book, his characters have gotten slightly less lumpy and rumpled over the years - they have eyeballs a lot of the time now, and look more like Muppets than like the products of a particularly demented clay-molding class most days. His newer style is more supple, but I have a fondness for the crazy goofballs of his early work. 

The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury is a new book this year, and does exactly what it says it does: collect 750 or so Close to Home strips from the entire life of the strip. Nothing is dated, but it seems to be mostly in chronological order. (Close to Home is a single panel, one of the many followers of The Far Side that launched in the late '80s and early '90s when Gary Larson rejuvenated that form and showed there was room for "weird" or "sick" humor on the comics page. So there are no continuing characters or stories to date it.)

McPherson has an introduction where he notes that the strips were chosen by mostly him, with input from friends, family members, and his Andrews McMeel editors. I do wonder if any of those people read the book all the way through, since there's a couple times where McPherson reused a gag and they chose to include both versions in the book. (Everyone who does this many cartoons reuses gags - or does variations - but when you're assembling a book, you want to avoid pointing that out to the paying customers.)

There's not a lot to say about a very miscellaneous collections of comics from thirty years of a strip. McPherson's strip was always in the Far Side mold, which gave it latitude to be closer to the line of sick or offensive than a continuity strip. He has a lot more jokes about illness than most newspaper cartoonists, and the Grim Reaper shows up quite a bit as well. He's not quite as edgy as a modern online cartoonist, but it's closer to that end of the comics spectrum than to Garfield, for example. (This is a good thing. The Garfield end is dull and bland and tedious.)

This is a big book with lots of random strips, full of lumpy people being tormented by the terrors of everyday life. I liked the lumpiness, I liked the randomness, I liked the torments McPherson puts his characters through, and I think he's pretty funny the vast majority of the time. And I do really like seeing a cartoonist unafraid to draw like this for so long so prominently.