Over at DC, they're trying something a little different with Sweatshop.  This is one of the books that they've been pushing heavily with retailers in their discount scheme, for fairly obvious reasons.  They believe it'll sell; they also believe it'll be ordered in miniscule quantities because it's a humour title.

Peter Bagge is still best known for his excellent series Hate, and his last work for DC (Yeah) was a bit of a misfire.  This is more like it, though.

Mel Bowling is the creator of daily cartoon strip Freddy Ferret.  Clearly he doesn't actually create the strip himself, because that would involve work, not to mention inspiration.  So he has a crew of assistants to do it for him - Alfred, who pencils the strip but wants to do superhero comics; Nick, the marginalised misanthrope who's stuck on inking; and Carrie, an aspiring cartoonist with a mental age of fifteen who's been learning to draw the panel borders for the past three years.  Oh, plus the office manager Millie, who actually runs the place.

It's an ensemble sitcom, in other words.  And yes, it's a rather inward looking one - it's comics about comics, albeit a different part of the industry.  There's a reason for that, though, because it allows the series to use its central conceit of showing us the work that the staff are producing in their spare time.  (We don't get to see anything Mel does, because he doesn't do anything.)

The sub-stories range from Carrie's confessional diarising, through to some brilliantly nasty parodies of daily comic strips - complete with clunky set-ups, awful politics and clunky political correctness.  Several of them are not remotely funny at face value, but hilarious in context precisely because they're no good whatsoever.  The self-consciously black comic "Word Up" is brilliantly terrible, down to its bizarre non-sequitur sloganeering.  ("Support the Special Olympics"?!?)

It also works as a straight sitcom.  Sure, the characters are pretty broad brush, particularly Mel, but the book gets away with it by spreading its venom more or less evenly, while still giving most of the characters some sort of redeeming qualities.  Mel isn't so much consciously abusive of the others as completely oblivious to them.  And while Bagge has little sympathy for his Rush Limbaugh shrine, it has just as little respect for the intolerably unfunny left-wing gag writer.

Very funny, and definitely worth picking it up.

Rating: A

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