Magic Whistle #9 - Softcover

Spinning off from an irregularly published series of small comics, Henderson's madcap Magic Whistle is now an annual paperback collection. The author was nominated for an Emmy Award for his work on the cartoon hit SpongeBob SquarePants, and his comics are indeed like storyboards, perfect distillations of misguided cause and disastrous effect. The drawing is minimal-cartoony, almost abstract figures with a few defining characteristics-but the humor, although often X-rated or scatological, can be surprisingly subtle. Henderson's surreal, manic wit tends to be best in short doses (as in single panel cartoons entitled "Cartoon I'm too lazy to send to The New Yorker" or single pages featuring such characters as Dirty Danny and Pickles, the Exploding Dog). Longer stories, such as one about a mishap with a postage stamp vending machine, can outstay their welcome. The central piece is "Tex Drew, Public Defender," a full-color extravaganza drawn in various styles that covers everything from banal newspaper strips to Tijuana Bibles while sending up the idea of the superstar cartoonist (embodied by Henderson himself). Slightly more successful is the social satire of an untitled tale that sees hippies, frat boys and beatniks battling over rights to a beach, each with their own lingo and clichés. Although the collection is uneven, Henderson is truly one of the world's funniest cartoonists, proving the title of one of his earlier collections: Humor Can Be Funny.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Swollen to three times its predecessors' size, number nine of volume two of the would-be annual Sam Henderson's Magic Whistle takes the series into graphic-novel territory. Hence the title, with its doofussy repetition that signals Henderson's comedic style. A Henderson story develops with dumb-bunny logic, and its characters behave crassly and witlessly, like the Three Stooges minus the slaps and plus X-rated content. Henderson's lively line and minimal detail are perfect for a comic strip, and much of this book consists of single-panel and one-page, multipanel gag cartoons as good as many newspaper strips. When Henderson stretches out in running-gag stories, however, the results are rather glorious. In "The Newlyweds," two deadbeats use the prospect of a grandchild to milk support from their parents. In an untitled tale, old hippies and beats join the cops to flush thankless latter-day college kids off of "Hippy Beach." The longest piece, about a supporting player in a continuing strip getting dropped from it and trying to start over in another, is as deliciously pomo as comics get. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved