January 6, 2004
The Book of Leviathan
The Book of Leviathan seems to be a collection of Sunday newspaper strips from England's The Independent. The author, Peter Blegvad, has a website, is a New Yorker, and has performed with the Golden Palominos. I know these things from the back cover of The Book of Leviathan, and that's pretty much all I know about the strip or its creator, but now I need to find out more. This is really, really good -- the best way I can describe it is Zippy the Pinhead if Zippy the Pinhead were actually funny instead of just odd. Blegvad the same willingness to stretch for a groan-out-loud pun (he makes a "bear arms/arm bears" joke, for instance), but where I think that the Doggie Diner is the best part of Zippy, I find this stuff both sweet and funny. The stories are about little Levi, a faceless baby made of aboout a dozen lines. His cat talks to him, the voice of tolerant adult cynicism. There's a family, Mama and Papa and sister Becky, who show up in some of the strips. (The book opens brilliantly, with the cat serving as Levi's guide to the hunting lodge of the dead to bring Mama and Papa back to him, Orpheus-style; I wasn't at all sure where it was going, what sort of thing to expect. It was a brilliant choice on the editor's part; the strips are generally funnier and less narratively cohesive in the rest of the book, but I was hooked.) Blegvad is an artistic mimic; I caught references to Little Nemo, Pogo, and what seemed to be Gorey and Addams riffs. The strips wobble between Duchampian surrealism and a Krazy Kat air of English gone wonky. In one strip the Godlike hand of the author, straight from a Daffy Duck cartoon, compares Levi to Henry announces that Leviathan is "the FRUIT of an UNHOLY UNION between [Dick Tracy's] "NOTHING YONSON" and J.W. Anglund's larval minx." A number of the strips are available on Blegvad's site; check them out. If this is the sort of thing you like, I guarantee you'll like this.
