Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship can always be counted on to confuse debates about the quality of print comics vs. web comics, given that it appeared online but was also syndicated in several newspapers. And that it happened to be so much funnier than most other comics appearing in either format.
Dark Horse makes such discussion even more moot with its publication of The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack, a 270-page hard-copy collection of every single Gurewitch strip, along with plenty that went unpublished due to his own or his editors’ reservations.
The Details
For the uninitiated, PBF can be hard to explain—it’s a multi-panel strip with the sort of wide-ranging, odd-context focus of Gary Larson’s Far Side, only more subtle, more subversive and often, much more elaborately drawn.
Another, unfortunate aspect PBF shares with The Far Side is that its creator has retired it, making this book the ultimate collection of one of the ultimate examples of 21st-century comic strips.
Previous Discussion: