Review by Frank Plowright

As self-produced minicomics boomed during the 1980s, Matt Feazell’s strips became the public face of the movement. The reasons are easily identified in this 2003 collection of his signature character Cynicalman, with the primary one being Feazell communicates far better than so many of his contemporaries. Feazell remains loyal to the form to this day, although printed versions of his comics now follow online publication.

Using stick figures may suggest a writer that can’t draw, but even back in the day when the drawing was deliberately rough, the composition immediately dispelled that idea. This collection and Volume 2 aren’t of early material, though, instead gathering The Amazing Cynicalman newspaper strip that ran from 1997. Cynicalman is now between assignments doing humdrum office work for The Board of Superheros, but he’s just the most frequent of multiple characters Feazell bases strips around according to what fits his theme. Sometimes this is the same type of office humour as found in Dilbert, but produced with greater wit, although there are a few lapses into easy tropes. Sometimes it’s the madness of what would happen were Godzilla to arrive in Detroit, and sometimes supporting characters like Anti-Social Man, CuteGirl, Mr. Know-it-All (uncannily like Mr. Logic in Viz) and Stupid Boy leap into the spotlight.

Readers not from Detroit may occasionally feel Feazell dips too far into local problems, but equally some strips of that nature transmit universally. It’s not necessary to know about Hamtramck to appreciate what Feazell’s saying about it in a pastiche of Robert Crumb’s A Short History of America. Vastly outweighing any concerns about parochialism in strips run in local papers is the sheer joyous variety of what Feazell supplies. There’ll be plain gag strips (one with seven jokes in seven panels), sharp observations about local and national politics, Cynicalman’s versions of movies in seven panels, standing in for Santa… There’s no predicting where Feazell’s mind will leap. It’s sometimes surreal, frequently absurd, and only very occasionally ordinary. Round John Virgin, though, is still a cracking joke.

With AI newspaper strips surely on the way, the comforting thing about Feazell’s work is that it can’t be generated by anyone else. It needs his unique personality, and that’s to be cherished. As of writing Amazon UK prices for this collection are ludicrously high. That being the case, why not head to Feazell’s own site for this and discover a lot of other stuff you might want. That should include Volume 2.