Bob the Angry Flower: Coffee with Sinistar
Stephen Notley
Leftover Books, 1999
Available for purchase from Angryflower.com, where you'll also find an online archive.
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Isn't the web great? Ten years ago when I was secretly screwing
the man by
sneaking the newspaper's comics section into the washroom, I never
imagined that
in the year 2000, I'd be able to sit at my desk and read comics
online all freaking
day, effectively screwing the man ten times worse while -- and this is the best bit -- looking busy.
There are hundreds of cartoon sites on the net. A vast majority
of them are of the
Geocities "I want to be a cartoonist, and here's some of my
work" variety, and they tend
to be, shall we say, "differently good." But for every few of
those -- okay, let's be honest, for every thousand of
those -- there's a good strip. Perhaps it runs in a few
regional or trade publications, or maybe it exists solely online
-- whatever. It's really, really funny. And the strip's author
has thoughtfully archived his/her comic's entire history online. Hundreds,
sometimes thousands of strips, sitting there like a big-ass dish of M&Ms at a Weight Watchers meeting.
And suddenly, there goes your productivity for the next few
days. You've gotta read 'em all.
The very best strips, of course, find their way back into the
dead tree format in
more permanent form...which brings us to the two books we're discussing today.
Strangely, they're also both Canadian.
First up: Coffee with Sinistar, which compiles a couple
years' worth of
Stephen Notley's "Bob the Angry Flower," which has appeared in
various Edmonton magazines and papers, recently returning to its
ancestral home at See Magazine.
Bob's a 5'5", anthropomorphic flower with a love of robots and a
penchant for
world domination. Frequently accompanied by his "friends"
Stumpy the tree stump
and Freddie the Flying Fetus (!), Bob leaps from absurd
get-rich-quick schemes to absurdist social commentary to
occasional clashes with, and subsequent humiliation of, UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Christ, that made the strip sound stupid. Trust me, it
isn't. The joy of BtAF is that it's all but impossible to tell
what's going to happen in the space of eight panels. It will
quite possibly involve bears, violence, enough giant lasers and
robots to keep Doctor Evil happy for a lifetime, and of course
the underlying belief that all people who aren't Bob are
gibbering cretinous imbeciles. The humor is generally savage,
typically clever and rarely topical or regional -- a safe bet
where longevity is concerned. Think of a mixture of Bloom
County and Evan Dorkin's immortal "Milk and Cheese," as drawn by
Eugene Ionesco and Terry Gilliam. Or don't, as it's quite
disturbing and not particularly accurate.
If you're mourning the loss of Peanuts, Bob isn't for you. Bob
doesn't always progress from point "A" to point "B" in a
leisurely and linear fashion. A typical Bob plotline might
begin, nominally, at point "A", jump immediately to point "Q",
change tacks and head for point "L" at the fifth panel and then
return to point "A" for an ironic twist -- and then try to go
backwards. Or not. Fans of the impossible, the fantastic, the
non-literal and the subversive will be delighted. Why not read a strip yourself to see what you've been missing?
Visit the site. Buy the book. Whatever.
User Friendly is an entirely different animal. A daily strip
with more than two years' worth of history, UF appears in Linux
Journal and Canadian Computer Wholesaler, though its
high-traffic website is probably the strip's most public forum.
As you might guess, User Friendly is techie humor, with a strong
bias towards the Unix/Linux contingent, but it's pretty
accessible to anyone who considers a computerless home
"unfurnished".
Written by one "Illiad" (aka J.D. Fraser), User Friendly details
the life and times of the employees of Columbia Internet, a tiny
ISP. Fraser, who not surprisingly lists an ISP on his own
resume, mines a rich vein of humor, taking in everything from
tech support trauma to Microsoft's DOJ follies and the eternal
struggle between the techies and the marketing department.
Illiad works both sides of the fence, lampooning Windows 98 and
NT, Apple, Palm Pilots, AOL and other easy targets but also
mocking the stereotypes, social ineptitude and other oddities of
sysadmins, Linux acolytes and Quake fans.
While User Friendly ostensibly takes place in the real world,
it's not quite the world as we know it. It's a world where a
Canadian ISP's employees can launch a daring commando raid on
Microsoft HQ, armed only with foam-dart guns. It's a world
where the Dust Puppy (a big, cuddly dustball with feet, born
from the dust inside a server casing) can not only exist, but
code an Artificial Intelligence that'd pass the most stringent
Turing Test imaginable. It's a world in which Microsoft
Solution Providers are hogtied and hung from the ceiling. Quite
possibly a better world, in other words.
The User Friendly book holds roughly a year's worth of
strips -- most of the complete storylines from 1998, beginning
with the birth of Erwin the AI. As such, you're denied the
first two months or so of UF, missing some character background
but starting at the point where the strip really hit its
stride.
Illiad's simplistic illustration style owes its own debt to
Berke Breathed and Bloom County -- watch for Breathed-eque
pictures on the wall, for instance. While the complexities of
human anatomy often elude Illiad, something about his art
captures the tech-geek look perfectly. And unlike many other
tech-inspired humor sources, the laughs here are mostly
character driven; only a few of the strips reprinted here depend
heavily upon knowledge of the Linux world for their punchlines,
and most of those make sense in context. You'll note, by the
way, that User Friendly is published by premier tech-book
house O'Reilly (whose covers typically feature black-and-white
animal etchings), which should give you some idea of the
audience it reaches. Or you could just see for yourself.
For both Coffee with Sinistar and User Friendly,
an important question exists: why buy these books when their
entire contents are available free on the web?
Two reasons. The first is respect for the authors.
Whether you discover these strips online or in book form, you're
going to want to read every single one of them. UF aptly
describes this urge as a "productivity virus" -- reading the
"User Friendly" archives can knock an entire IT department out
of action for several days (two and a half, in my office's
case), and Stephen Notley's annotated "Bob" archive will finish
off the week. And let's face it, any author who makes you laugh
as much as Illiad or Notley deserves to sell a book.
It's more than a fair trade.
Second, and more importantly, the books are portable and
compact. Not as portable and compact as your laptop's hard
disk, you say? Maybe, maybe not. But it's a lot easier to
sneak them into the employee washroom.
-- George Zahora
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