Friday, March 28, 2025

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 by Derk Evernden

Bogart Creek may be yet another thing I discovered only after it ended; it looks like creator Derek Evernden stopped posting it on Instagram and Reddit a year or so ago. On the other hand, he's published three books, the website is still there, and there's a Patreon, so maybe he just managed to paywall it and actually make some money from his cartooning.

(As you know {Bob}, cartoonists used to be able to get publications to pay for their cartoons regularly - many of them making decent livings and a few making actual fortunes. Since techbros demolished print media and advertising, replacing them with outlets that only bring profit to them, cartoonists have found that making any income from drawing funny pictures has been much more complicated and difficult - much like everything else the techbros touch.)

Bogart Creek, Vol.2 is the middle of the three books to date, published in early 2021, a little more than a year after the first book. And, like I said the first time, it's a single-panel comic in the Far Side mold, with no recurring characters or themes. It is cheerfully gory, mostly dark humor with lots of severed limbs, murderous folks (both crazed killers and gangsters, as on facing pages as I'm poking through for examples as I write this), sharks, aliens, and media references.

Now, I don't want to oversell the darkness - it's probably only about a quarter of the strips that feature a murder or other violent death, and, in many of those cases, the violent death hasn't quite happened at the moment of the strip. But there's no fluffy bunnies frolicking happily in a field - the lighter jokes are the media references and amusing wordplay and funny juxtapositions. And Evernden draws a bloody splat, or those severed limbs, a lot more often than most cartoonists - even the supposedly "dark" ones.

I like this stuff, and I think people who enjoy dark single panels will agree with me. The cover shows his visual inventiveness pretty well - that's the caliber of his non-gory gags, and the gory ones are equally well constructed but substantially darker. If that sounds appealing, there's three books of his work available, plus a fair bit floating around online for free as a teaser.

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