Review by Frank Plowright
Nerd Inferno combines three previous collections, themselves combining previous comics, into this one humongous compilation of Evan Dorkin’s comics work from around 1988 (avoiding licenced characters). Covering roughly twenty years, with a few items slightly extending the remit, it’s a sprawling, energetic, chaotic glimpse into creative genius, skewering pomposity, pretentiousness and phonies, immensely dense and featuring a higher laugh ratio per page than any other comic you’d care to name.
Dorkin has enough respect for his audience to ensure there are no extras that would mean people who’ve already bought the three original hardcovers miss out if they don’t also buy this. Your choice is the paperback Nerd Inferno, or the slimmer collections Milk & Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad, Dork and The Eltingville Club, although given the others are out of print and in high demand, this is the better bet.
It’s not doing Dorkin justice to distil his extensive cultural awareness into three categories, but for review purposes his work broadly falls into either cultural assaults, best represented by the rampages of Milk & Cheese, three or four panel gag strips, and more structured sitcoms. Bickering comics, horror and SF fans the Eltingville Club represent the latter, but so does ‘The Murder Family’ a smart pastiche of feeble jokes in laughter track sitcoms, and featuring a family of killers. There’s an exception, but we’ll come to that. The common denominator is raging against stupidity.
A slight downside is much of the content being dependent on cultural references, either contemporary during the 1990s, or absorbed by Dorkin from earlier times. Anyone unfamiliar with 1951 SF thriller The Day the Earth Stood Still will get little from a joke about not being able to take Gort anywhere. On the other hand, the jokes come so thick and fast, especially on pages featuring seven single tier gag strips, that if one flies over your head, the next will hit the spot. And it’s not as if cultural nods are exclusive territory. In between jokes wondering why celebrities with no discernible talent are still offered work, God being bored and bandwagon culture, there are gags about Sigmund Freud, James Joyce and Ayn Rand. Comedy with intelligence can then give way to the crudest imaginable joke. Not every single gag strip works, but the hit rate is immensely high.
That fourth category of material? Midway through his run of Dork it became dark, introspective and confessional for a while, a breakdown in pen and ink with neuroses scattered like raindrops. It’s uncomfortable and intense self-therapy, yet still shot through with razor sharp humour.
Dorkin’s still finding his artistic style on some of the early, looser Milk & Cheese strips, but it rapidly becomes neat, compact and precise, yet also imbued with a frenetic energy. That’s best seen in the exploits of the Eltingville Club, possessing the certainty of youth that their niche interests are unrecognised masterpieces. The bleakness that occasionally manifests in other strips reaches full fruition here, yet it’s simultaneously hilarious in the manner of someone else being poked in the eye with a finger.
Astute observational comedy drawn to perfection doesn’t come better than Dorkin’s output and in a sane world every household would have a copy of Nerd Inferno.
