February 1, 2023
Cartoonist Maandag (The Follies of Richard Wadsworth) satirizes the human urge to find profound significance in day-to-day life in this collection of three deeply strange, often hilarious stories. In "The Plunge," an office worker's daily ritual of making French press coffee in his cubicle after lunch so obsesses his colleagues that they begin planning their entire workday around bearing witness to the process. The titular tale follows the second-in-command of a bizarre religious order whose scheme to overthrow the group's leader results in a series of gruesome murders and his writing, producing, and starring in a play entitled Harvey and the Amazingly Multi-Hued Human Flesh Coat. The final story, "Full Day," follows an office worker navigating an increasingly nightmarish series of misadventures that include interrogation by an overly semantic efficiency expert, getting kidnapped by a stranger anxious to share an extremely long and violent story about his experience at the DMV, and being forced to undergo trauma counseling following a disturbing encounter on the subway. VERDICT Maandag's combination of surrealism and deadpan humor makes these stories unpredictable, unforgettably weird, and thoroughly entertaining.
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March 6, 2023
Corporate anomie and the madness of modernity are taken for a spin in this alternately ambitious and shoe-gazing collection of comics short stories from Maandag (The Follies of Richard Wadsworth). The surreal lengthy title piece posits a cultish Church of Holy Radiance whose theology of “solarism” (in a universe divided into light and dark, tanning beds are virtuous) seems kooky but benign. That’s until it’s revealed the church endorses killing anyone deemed a “shadowmen” by the righteous. Over the course of the increasingly violent tale, lumpy-headed fanatic Harvey Knight bends the church to his particular megalomaniacal fervor. Scenes of blasé murder alternate with darkly comedic vignettes, such as Harvey’s acolyte serving “fresh owl” for lunch. Two shorter autofiction selections serve as bookends and feature a mild-mannered office worker named Nick Maandag, who navigates lightly Kafkaesque alienation in cubicle land. His tribulations range from the surprise “daily ritual” office mates create around his making French press coffee to his descent into an absurdist landscape of stone-faced bureaucracy and quotidian persecution. The black-and-white art is simple but dynamic, presenting the fantastic with a relentlessly straight face. Not all the elements tie together, but the mordant package will appeal to deadpan comedy fans of the likes of Nick Drnaso or Jason.