Cartoon Workshop/Pig Tales

    (Picturebox, 2007)
™ and © Picturebox

The most obvious thing about this title is that, despite being called “Cartoon Workshop,” this book is most certainly not for children. Although the book mostly stars animals, and about half its pages are brightly colored (the other half are not colored at all), these pages are full of images of rampant drug use (thinly masked), consumption of alcohol, violence, and bizarre psychedelic imagery.

The website of the book’s publisher notes that their books are meant to be “an accessible peek into art comics right now,” and this seems to be the best way to take Cartoon Workshop. This is very avant-garde stuff—there isn’t even a discernible plot to follow, just page after page of cacophonous images. The most familiar creator I can liken this to is R. Crumb, if only because of the book’s favoring of animals, its copious drug imagery, and its apparent nostalgia for 1960s culture; but there’s so much more to this book than that—indeed, this is an art comic one could spend hours or even days dissecting.

— Eric Garneau
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