The fifth treasury edition of Darby Conley's excellent Get Fuzzy newspaper strip mostly served to remind me that, somehow, I completely missed the fourth treasury (published under the title The Potporiffic Great Big Grab Bag of Get Fuzzy two years ago). This one collects strips originally published in newspapers at some time over the past three years -- some treasury editions, he said while looking balefully over his glasses, include original publication information, and some do not -- and secondarily published in the smaller collections Ignorance, Thy Name Is Bucky and Dumbheart.Get Fuzzy is a well-drawn strip with an excellent cast -- ten years in, and Conley is still finding new things to do with his main triumvirate of characters (Rob, the vegetarian, rugby-loving corporate drone/geek; Satchel, his sweetly dumb and lovable dog; and Bucky, everyone's favorite self-aggrandizing, borderline psychotic and clueless cat) and still has the knack of bringing in new secondary characters that seem like they'll be one-joke types but spark interesting storylines (the incomprehensibly Mancunian Mac Manc McManx, for example). And Conley isn't shy about letting his storylines run for three or four weeks (or even longer), mutating and extrapolating and proliferating as they go.
About the only way I could fault Get Fuzzy is by noting how occasionally claustrophobic it gets: this is a strip that takes place almost entirely within one small apartment, with only very rare excursions elsewhere. But maybe the second decade of Bucky, Satchel, and Rob will see them ranging further from their home base. For now, this is a regularly funny strip with great characters, and I can't ask for more than that. (Well, I could ask, but getting even that much from the ossified comics page is a miracle.)
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Tom Waits - Get Behind The Mule [Live]
via FoxyTunes
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