Scrublands

This book presents a visionary collection of hallucinatory comics from South Africa. This is the debut collection of John Daly, whose work has been described as Tintin meets the Freak Brothers in the Cape of Good Dope . Daly’s cartoons - offbeat, trippy and often hilarious - are the latest in the lineage of substance-induced graphic genius that stretches back through Robert Crumb, Glibert Shelton, Victor Moscoso and S. Clay Wilson. Like his forbears, Daly has his own unique vision and a highly-developed sense of the absurd: and, again like his precursors, they are presented in a variety of styles, alternating between straight representation in Jarmuschian black and white to full on colourful psychedelia. Prebaby , the centrepiece of the collection, delves into creation theory, survival, random occurrence and micro/macrocosm conflicts. Told entirely without dialogue, it unfolds musically, as though it is the storyboard to a wonky existential cartoon. In contrast, the Kobosh and Steve strips come across as a series of routines by a demented Abbott and Costello - in which one gag centres around the discussions of two micro-organisms on Bruce Springsteen’s scalp about the meaning of existence.