The Little Man: Short Strips 1980-1995

Rating:
Summary: surrealist pretense
Review: Brown is a guy who can neither write well nor draw well, so to try disguise these rather obvious facts he uses the tried and true formula of inventing artificially outrageous or surreal situations, replacing shock value for adult themes or visual attractiveness. This book won't change your life or even entertain you. It exists so that funnybook fans can pretend to be interested in it and insult people who don't "understand" it, when there is nothing here to understand. Lovecraft or Dali Brown is not; just a pretender.

Rating:
Summary: Acquired Taste For the Bizarre
Review: Chester Brown is an eclectic, yet diverse innovator. Upon first glance his drawings & artwork look crude & unfamilar, but upon further inspection one becomes engrossed in his unusual storytelling. His stories range from the bizarre and surreal as in his Yummy Fur stories, to the autobiographical, which deals with the growing pains of adolescence to even Biblical and historical, yet they take on a mixture of emotions from endearing, to humorous, to heartbreak and shocking. Chester is a true originator.

Rating:
Summary: Acquired Taste For the Bizarre
Review: Chester Brown is an eclectic, yet diverse innovator. Upon first glance his drawings & artwork look crude & unfamilar, but upon further inspection one becomes engrossed in his unusual storytelling. His stories range from the bizarre and surreal as in his Yummy Fur stories, to the autobiographical, which deals with the growing pains of adolescence to even Biblical and historical, yet they take on a mixture of emotions from endearing, to humorous, to heartbreak and shocking. Chester is a true originator.

Rating:
Summary: surrealist pretense
Review: Chester Brown is one of the greatest comics artist ever and in this book you'll see why. This book collects various stories from Brown's acclaimed comic Yummy Fur and some stories done for now defunct anthology titles, including some of his earliest works. The stories range from sci-fi to horror to religous to autobiographical. Almost all of the stories are superb. But the real value of the book is in the way it shows Chester Brown's growth and development into a master of his artform.

Rating:
Summary: Like eating rusty staples. One...by one...by one...
Review: He never fails to confound, delight, shock, nauseate, charm and confound again with his way of somehow keeping one gnarled claw rooted in the sacred and the other hoof equally grounded in the scatological. Now if only he'd reprint ED THE HAPPY CLOWN, but with its complete final Yummy Fur disgressions into the inner workings of the First Family. Anyway, "The Little Man" is priceless.