‘The Perry Bible Fellowship’ gets bound and pressed

Humor is a terrible thing to waste and comic strips are a terrible thing to ignore, so it’s time to finally pin down Nicholas Gurewitch’s The Perry Bible Fellowship. The strip was initially famous for its doughy, featureless characters that found themselves shoved into fantastic and absurd situations, most of which resulted in a prank, a death or sex. But as PBF wears on and gets picked up in more papers (including here in The District), the strip has become more stylized and varied: art direction that shifts each week, sometimes turning out panels that trace the same lines as Edward Gorey and Shel Silverstein.

Gurewitch has also kept the humor sharp. Ideologically, it’s squeezed somewhere between The Far Side and SNL’s “Deep Thoughts”—quick-witted gags as funny as they are simple and twisted. What makes PBF such a success, however, is that it delivers more consistently than any other strip around. “It’s never usually the gags that I take pride in,” Gurewitch explains. “I think I take pride in executing a gag with a never-before-seen level of intensity.” And that’s what drives the strip: unicorns springing to life to impale childhood bullies, Death counting down a kid’s days as he celebrates his birthday.

All that is offered now in The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories, Gurewitch’s new book out on Dark Horse. For fans familiar with the strip, it’s a compulsory anthology, a hallmark of PBF’s far-ranging laughs that even includes a few new and unpublished strips. And for those new to PBF, the book is a marker of Gurewitch’s tempered fame. When I ask him when he first realized he could make a living off the strip, he just jokes back: “Right about the time I realized I could live off 100 bucks a week. Thankfully, [my] distribution and quality of living have improved since then.”

THE TRIAL OF COLONEL SWEETO AND OTHER STORIES HARDCOVER | 96 PGS | DARK HORSE | $14.95 | PBFCOMICS.COM

Tags: comics, dark horse, nicholas gurewitch, pbf, the far side, the perry bible fellowship, the trial of colonel sweeto