Trundling Grunts

Rating:
Summary: After Bathing At Baxter's
Review: British humor at its best. If you enjoyed Monty Python's absurdity or the wild inventions of Peter Cook, you will relish the crazy captions Glen Baxter assigns to his beautifully drawn pictures. The pictures themselves are gorgeous. Baxter's imaginative sense of pastel and his daring use of color and light makes for a certain grandeur of design, and then on top of it is all the humorous, verbal play. Those who cherish the SYLVIE AND BRUNO books of Lewis Carroll will enjoy these cartoons too.

In the US we have no one exactly like Baxter, though I suppose the work of the eminent NY poet Kenward Elmslie resembles it to some degree, in their deconstructive deployment of the innumerable silly tropes embedded in a vicious society. A typical caption reads '"As junior partner you;'ll be expected to work in here," explained Hopkins' and then the picture shows Hopkins pointing inside the absurdly large waistline of his own pants. As Baxter's trademark handsome cowboys, cricketers, sailors, gangsters and Mounties cavort in between the follies of youth and the rituals of age, we realize he is an artist, like Rembrandt, who just gets better with age. TRUNDLING GRUNTS may not be the best of his books, but it's right up there.