Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted by Kris, Rob & Dave

I'm sure there have been other Cyanide & Happiness books. It would be really unlikely that a fairly popular strip would run for fifteen years without any kind of a collection being printed on dead trees. But I haven't seen or noticed a C&H collection since the one-two punch of Cyanide & Happiness and Ice Cream & Sadness back in 2010.

On the other hand, I've been reading the web mostly via RSS feeds since at least that far back, and, as we all know, feeds can die quietly and mysteriously, while the underlying content keeps going, so we think something is gone - or, more often, don't notice or think about it - when it definitely isn't. And I'm pretty sure that I had C&H in my feeds, maybe multiple times, but I can't remember seeing it recently. So I think there was yet another case of linkrot, either deliberate (they want to drive people to their website, where other items can be purchased) or random (which can never been discounted).

But I noticed this book - Cyanide & Happiness: Twenty Years Wasted, a big anniversary collection of the strip published in mid-December, just too late for Xmas shipping. It's credited to "Kris, Rob & Dave" - Wilson, DenBleyker, and McElfatrick, respectively, the "Matt" who was part of C&H back in the early days seems to have dropped out long ago and gets one vague reference in this book but no explanation - and is the traditional "annotated collection of the best stuff" that strips often bring out for a big round anniversary.

And that's great, since that kind of book works better for webcomics than a traditional reprint anthology does, anyway. Remember: the point of a webcomic is that it's always accessible, online, 24/7/265. You can always just go there and read the entire archives, without buying a book. This book has fewer strips than if they were just packed in like cordwood, and getting the three creators to annotate them and laying that all out was clearly more work, but it makes a better, more distinctive, useful package. I don't want to say all webcomic collections should be in this style, but maybe all of the gag-a-day strips should seriously consider it.

Cyanide & Happiness has one of the weirder and odder origin stories, even for a webcomic. The four guys were all teens in 2005, hanging out on a webforum but hugely physically separated in real life - McElfratrick is Irish, for one example - and one of them did a quick crude comic in this style, and it snowballed from there. (They've also created a lot of animation over the years, and at least one card game - all with the same art style and deliberately offensive humor.) It looks like they spent some years in the same place: Dallas, as a suitable random American city. But that ended, for either pandemic or getting-older and lives-getting-more-complicated reasons, and they're once again physically separated, making comics and animation randomly in basements and back rooms wherever they happen to live now.

So each C&H strip is credited to one of the guys, because that guy did that strip. And their styles are somewhat discernable - or maybe were more so in the early days. But it's all the same kind of thing, and they riff off each other, with random theme weeks - usually either specifically Depressing comics or something tasteless - thrown in willy-nilly to pull them together.

These are jokes about farts and drinks and violence and sex and dicks and so on - the subject matter was mostly formed when they were teen boys, so C&H is still largely about the things that make teen boys laugh. (There were a lot of shitposts in the early days. Maybe still a few even now.) I thought it was mostly successful back in 2010, when I saw the early strips, and this big collection still seems mostly successful now - it's crude, it's tasteless, it's dumb, but there's always been a strong current of that kind of humor in America. (Think Truly Tasteless Jokes or 101 Uses for a Dead Cat or the one about how to fit five elephants into a Volkswagen.)

If you like that style of humor, you've probably seen Cyanide & Happiness sometime in the past twenty years. (Maybe not. Maybe you are a teen boy right now, and this is all new.) This is probably the best single book to experience the strip: it's got examples from all of the eras of the strip (such as they are), lots of annotations and added jokes, photos of the C&H guys doing various things at comics conventions over the past two decades, and similar stuff. Or, you know, you could just hit the website and read the archives, as I referenced way back at the beginning of this post. That's always an option for a webcomic; don't forget it.

The Fifth Beatle by Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson

This was kinda a big deal about ten years ago; you may have heard about it then. The edition I read was a tenth anniversary thingy - that's the technical term - from 2023, with additional essays and material in the back to justify a new hardcover price. (But I read it digitally, which mean pinching to blow up double-page spreads quite a lot; much of this is in Eye-Strain-O-Vision on a normal-sized consumer tablet.)

So it was a New York Times bestseller, won Eisners and Harveys and a Reuben - as I said, a big deal. The Beatles, you might have heard, were somewhat popular - more so than Jesus, one guy noted in the late '60s - and this was not just well-done, but hit at a good cultural moment.

The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story is a graphic novel, about a hundred and thirty pages (plus, in the current edition, the additional material I mentioned, mostly essays by the author on various aspects of the book's and Epstein's history), written by Vivek J. Tiwary and painted by Andrew C. Robinson, with lettering by Steve Dutro and one section with art by Kyle Baker.

It covers the rise of the Beatles in the 1960s, as seen by their manager, Epstein - he's the viewpoint character and our central protagonist. The Beatles themselves are mostly in puckish-goofball mode here, occasionally getting individual moments (just John and Paul) but clearly backgrounded: the premise is that they are a world-changing creative force, and are out there doing that, while Epstein supports and facilitates and manages that work. More important to the narrative is Moxie, a young woman who first works for Epstein in his family store NEMS and comes to be his personal assistant in his wider-ranging Beatles businesses. (From Tiwary's note at the end, I think she's completely fictional, and exists both to indicate the support he got from the family business and a semi-love relationship for Epstein - though utterly unrequited on his side - that's somewhat positive and happy.) We also see other business contacts, a few of them multiple times, but the focus is on Epstein and, mostly just offstage, the continuing creative engine that is the Beatles.

Epstein was Jewish in an era where prejudice was still pretty open in the UK. And he was gay in an era when that was actively outlawed, and being arrested could lead to ruin and jail. His Jewishness isn't particularly important to Fifth Beatle, other than making Epstein a bit more of an outsider, but Tiwary uses his homosexuality - other than one, possibly fictionalized, off-and-on relationship with an American man that turns into blackmail, entirely as a background longing or note - as a central motif, core to his outsiderness. 

Tiwary implies that Epstein sublimated his sex-drive into business, that he poured all of himself that he could into working as hard as possible to make the Beatles the world-famous band he was sure they would be. And he also implies that's what eventually killed Epstein, of what he doesn't actually say in this book was an accidental overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol.

(I suspect those both are plausible simplifications, which work in a creative story, but that Epstein both had a much more active sex life than Tiwary shows here and that his death was basically a random accident. Thematically, though, it all works within The Fifth Beatle.)

I appreciated The Fifth Beatle - especially Robinson's magnificent pages; the new edition's cover by Christopher Brunner and Rico Renzi is, I'm sorry to say, vastly lesser than the original sweeping wraparound and the atmospheric, electric interior art - but I found Epstein mostly a one-note character. He's a sublimated homosexual, a workaholic devoted entirely to making the Beatles as huge as possible - really? All of the other acts that he quickly started representing; what about them? What was his sex life really like - purely cruising and cottaging, or anything longer and more meaningful?

The Fifth Beatle wraps things up too neatly to touch on questions like that; it's too much the story of The Man Who Died Making the Beatles Famous. That's what the audience wants, clearly - see how successful the book has been - but it's only about as true as any similar simplification for a mass audience.

A Prefect's Uncle by P.G. Wodehouse

Second novels are not necessarily disappointing. But they regularly are the same sort of thing as the first novel, executed more quickly or with less inspiration, and suffer a bit from comparison.

A Prefect's Uncle was P.G. Wodehouse's second novel, published way back in 1903 when he was in his very early twenties. It followed The Pothunters, which hit shelves the year before. I can't find any indication that it was originally serialized, as Pothunters was, but it feels like a serialization, and it looks like all of Wodehouse's early school stories were originally published in magazines such as the obviously named Public School Magazine.

Pothunters was a small thing, a book clearly assembled from parts, but it was fun and amusing, full of characters who sounded real and inhabited a real world, and it had a plot that meandered but did, more or less, circle the missing trophy alluded to in the title. I don't want to claim a lot for it, but it was a solid genre exercise - in a genre that's been dead for a hundred years now, admittedly, and never was popular on my side of the Atlantic to begin with - and it showed that this Wodehouse fellow was someone to keep an eye on, who could do good things and probably would.

Prefect's Uncle is the same sort of thing, but down a notch or two in most areas. The central plot is not really about the uncle of the central prefect; it's more a sequence of mostly cricket matches, told in very detailed language that I have to imagine would be smashing fun for someone who actually understands how cricket works. From my seat, I can say it all sounds impressive, and that Wodehouse describes the action of the matches well, with a deep facility at drama and knowledge of cricket terminology and tactics, even if it all just turns into a wall of random words to me.

Our central character is Alan "Bishop" Gethryn, head prefect of Leicester's house at the fictional Beckford public school. He's seventeen or so, near the end of his schooling, smart and upright and full of all of the traditional English public-school virtues. Bishop meets two new students in quick succession: first is his new fag (yes, yes, I know - it was a very different era and the usage of that word has shifted quite a lot) Percy Wilson, who is true and smart and good and rather boring and plays very little part in the novel. Next is Bishop's uncle, who he has to meet at the station. He thinks this is a conventional uncle: a generation older, with luck open-handed with the pocket-money and not too tedious with the advice. But it is actually a younger boy, one Reginald Farnie, who has been kicked out of three well-known public schools already, and is the kind of terror Wodehouse would get a lot of mileage out of later in his career.

As it is, though, Farnie doesn't do a whole lot here, though he does cause Bishop to miss a very important cricket match - which Bishop cannot explain to anyone, for the usual vague and unclear stiff-upper-lip reasons - and that means Bishop loses his place on the school's cricket team after they lose that very important match to a rival school. But Bishop is still captain of his house's team, so there's more planning and training and detailed descriptions of inter-house matches and a muddled rebellion by some of the "bad boys" of that house, who Bishop kicks off the team and replaces with very junior boys.

Again, there's a lot of cricket in this book. I think it's told well, and could be gripping to a reader who understands what's happening. For me, though, it was largely a sequence of baroque technical terms about kinds of bowling and where balls are being hit and how wet and/or sticky the particular ground was that day. Wodehouse also includes a certain amount of "well, this match is against that village, and they have a couple of ringers from this county team, so it's semi-important, but the next one is against Rival School, so it is of earth-shattering importance, and then there's the inter-house play, of which only these three houses are important, for reasons I will detail at great length". So I did the names-in-Russian-novels thing and mostly hummed through the cricket matches, which are roughly 40% of the novel by weight.

If you want to read a really early Wodehouse novel, to see how he did school stories, I recommend Pothunters. If you know how cricket works, you could try this one instead, but be sure you really do know how cricket works. It will test that knowledge very strongly.