Review by Frank Plowright

Despite being saddled with the woeful Gomer Goof title in translation, André Franquin’s Gaston is a series revered in Europe, with Franquin ranking only below Hergé in the consideration of the greatest European cartoonists. He’d reached a peak in the early 1970s, and each successive collection of strips is five star material. That was the case for Good Golly. Mr Goof, applies to Gomer’s Goons, and it’s likely Goof-Off at the Gomer Corral will be more of the same. So many strips are solid gold, impeccably set-up and paced toward a hilarious punchline, and even those where the joke is more obvious have the wonder of the stylish art.

The sample page speaks for itself, and it reads even better as the culmination of a series of jokes about the impossibly stuffed cupboards and the office staff wondering how Gomer manages to fill them to such a ridiculous extent. The expressions are perfect, as are the poses and reactions. Could the joke be sold any better? Well, you’re welcome to give it a try.

While almost all the strips are Franquin’s work, he’s more than willing to accept (and credit) joke ideas from other creators. Charles Degotte again contributes a great joke, this time about Gomer falling asleep on his typewriter, and sometime Smurfs writer Yvan Delporte provides a great idea about Gomer finding some Soviet circuitry and interfering with the orbit of a satellite.

Picking at faults when reviewing is far easier than conveying perfection, and that results in far shorter reviews.