The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Tom Tomorrow, �When Penguins Attack!�

Started November 1 � Finished November 2, 2002; 125 pages. Posted 11 November 2002

While the word for the last book was filler, this word for this entry must be hubris. Look it up.

After I finished the Preacher graphic novel I thought I could, in the remaining hour and a half, finish one more small book and thus add to my monthly total.

Unfortunately, I had these little small rushes in previous months, and there wasn�t much left to read that was small. Still, I thought I could get this finished pretty quickly � after all, it�s just a book of cartoons, a book of cartoons that is enlarged to fill up an entire page with just one entry even. How long could it take?

What I failed to remember is that each cartoon that Tom Tomorrow (�This Modern World�) does has almost as many words as your average short story. It took me nearly three hours to get through.

This is the most recent collection that I know of, so many of the cartoons were familiar to me, many of them appearing just after I got back from England. Having read some of his earliest work, you can see how Tom has really hit upon a formula that works, maybe even too well.

In one outing he mocks his own formula, having a generic version of his comic appear while he is on vacation that has the normal characters: the well dressed clueless yuppie has a word balloon reading, �Misguided enthusiasm for social trend or political event based on uncritical acceptance of superficial mainstream news coverage!� The ever present penguin has a balloon that says, �Castigation of misguided enthusiasm � followed by alternate analysis of trend or event rooted in a more cynical view of the probable though unstated motives of the politicians or other protagonists involved!�

Well, if it ain�t broke...

Though there are several instances of repetitiveness, and while they still hit the mark, it makes me slightly worried that Tom may be running out of ideas. But with the recent election results, I can�t think he�ll run out of material. (Katherine Harris? Is everybody in Florida completely fucking retarded? Don�t answer that.)

Oh, I nearly forgot � strangely enough, the funniest things came from the oddest places - the introduction from Dave Eggers, and the introduction and author information that came from Tom Tomorrow himself. If this guy decides to put his clip art away and write a book, I�m gonna buy it.

I hope he doesn�t. I have enough to read, thanks.

A note on the final rating, however. This has a hologram on the cover, which bumped up the price of the book to an ungodly amount. If it were cheaper, the rating would be higher. I would say it was worth new, but not for fourteen bucks! What the hell is this hologram made of anyway? Gold?


Rating: Worth working in a used bookstore and getting for really cheap, but with above qualifying statement.

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