The Mini Comics of Tom Gauld 

It's time to reveal my newfound contempt for Tom Gauld. I've had limited experience with the Brittish cartoonist (a few small, seemingly simple and irreverent artist's biographies in the latest Kramer's—already I'm a seething cauldron of jealousy—and a review of his "Very Small Comics" collections by freakin' Tom Spurgeon—'someday', right?) before picking up a few of his projects at APE (from two different tables on opposite sides of the main floor, mind you).

Gauld is, for all intents and purposes, the heir to the thrones of both Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss—taking both their tone and view of the human condition and transposing them into beautifully packaged little mini comics for adults that found their perceptions shaped in part by those two masters of the children's book. His work has the sort of sophistication that Silverstein's former employer, Hugh Hefner, liked to affect and a quiet, moving quality some of Geisel's later, more socialogically bent works had. His characters talk like Silverstein's and find themselves in the sort of situations that might have taken place on the 'slow news days' in the poet's world.

Have I set the fucker high enough up on a pedastal yet?

To take him down a notch (or set him up higher, depending on how you look at it), Gauld doesn't write in rhyme.

fucker.

The earliest work that I have here is also the largest (5.5x7)—except for the Kramer's pieces—and is printed on a heavy-stock, offwhite paper with a grey cardstock cover. More than many other books, the presentation here is telling as the Guardians of the Kingdom live in a grey, overcast world where the color white is probably always a little off. The book came polybagged, suggesting the way the two characters inside are cut off from the rest of the world, and the minimalist cover helps reinforce the idea of two small, very lonely people surrounded by little more than a vast emptiness and a single ostentatious decoration.
The "story," such as it is, is little more than a capturing of brief moments of dark humor between two medieval guards charged with manning the watchtower on a vast wall, similar to an unadorned Great Wall of China. While the drawings, in and of themselves, are minimalistic in form, design and composition; Gauld fills them with damn-near obsessive hatching and crosshatching, building up lovely impressionistic forms (particularly of the desert landscape). I don't want to quote any lines from the book, as they will lose nearly all their weight and humor without the accompanying drawings, but it is a funny book, paced wonderfully.

Jerk.

3 Very Small Comics are three very small comics printed on a single side of nice, cream-colored paper and folded in half three times and stuffed (lovingly, no doubt) into a tiny brown envelope (made of recycled paper, I think—a pox on him and his family for the next three generations!).

fuck fucker.

If I've screwed up some intentional order the books were in, I apologize. The first is Home of the Future and depicts the incredibly convuluted means by which an astronaut gets out of his house for everyday excursions. It explodes 'modern-life's' obsession with 'progress' and the idea of making life easier by making it more complicated. May I ask You Something, Sir is a playful way of looking at the dramatic life-changing events people are willing to make just to have their lives end up the same way they were before—something more poignent on my trip back to San Francisco as I recalled all the things I had done while living there and their similarity to the things I did both before and after. ? looks at the ridiculousness and mundanity of artist biographies and questionaires, by having Gauld's stock troupe of astronauts, cavemen and other assorted childhood fantasy characters provide the answers.

fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.

Two years later, in 2004, Gauld would revisit his charming little concept with Three Very Small Comics Volume II. This time, Gauld experiments with form a bit more (oh, why the hell not?) and presents his best work I've seen to date (God forbid the man should reach his plateau anytime soon). Our Hero Battles Twenty-six Alphabetised Terrors is a poster printed in Blue ink on something a bit more forgiving than ricepaper. In it, a hero faces off against a variety of threats, all in aphabetical order and all in silouete. from an axeman to zombies and twenty four funnier enemies in between. In case comparing him to Seuss and Silverstein wasn't bad enough, this piece immediately brings to mind Edward Gorey. Anyway, it should be hanging on the wall of every child and manchild, lest they forget their alphabet and the horrors lurking within. The Robots Broke Out of the Factory and Fled as Far as Their Batteries Would Allow is short in height and long in landscape format, folded accordion style, printed on cardstock. Essentially an elephant's graveyard of robots rendered obsolete by their lack of independence, this is a sad statement either allieviated or made sadder still by its lovely rendering. Invasion is a funny and sad indictment of war (as was "Guardians") very much in the way Seuss' Butter Battle Book is. It speaks to the meaningless of country and border and the senslessness of violence. A heavy, offwhite paper adds a somberness to a rain-soaked night when two warriors settle a dispute over a mostly deserted island. The cover is a maroon-colored cardstock (marooned?) and is possibly the prettiest thing I laid my hands on in San Francisco that weekend.

Gauld's website is Cabanon Press. There you'll find that he also seems to have a nice relationship with a woman who occaisionally does comics with him. I imagine a fine cabernet also flows freely from the fixtures in his sink.

Where's my gun?

—Justin J. Fox