Blubber

*This comic is graphic! Just sos you know!*

By Gilbert Hernandez. Published by Fantagraphics. 

Hardcover, 160 pages, B&W, 2022.

The great Gilbert Hernandez's unfettered Id and imagination, unleashed! Absurd, explicit, and profanely funny, Blubber makes all other comics blush.

Collecting the first five issues of Gilbert Hernandez's comic book series Blubber, an absurdly X-rated showcase for the most surreally transgressive of Hernandez's short stories. Weirdos (Blubberoo, Mr. Elvis, John Dick, the Mentor), creatures (the Mau Guag, Doogs, and Orlats…), and anthropomorphs (the Cloarks, the Kekeppy) visit places where most comics fear to go. Blubber veers between an absurdist satire of porn (and occasionally nature documentaries) as well as a defiant provocation to those unable to appreciate the difference between cartooning and obscenity. As R. Crumb said, "It's only lines on paper, folks!" It is also a howlingly funny book, filled with a rogues gallery of colorful comic book monsters (the Pollum, the Junipero Molestat, the mythical Forest Nimmy) and characters (T.A.C. Man, Mr. Hippy, Padre Puto, the Snowman, Baron Mungo, Red Tempest) that echoes the sheer visual imagination of Jack Kirby.

"Hernandez is one of the great craftsmen of modern comics." — New York Times Book Review

"Hernandez has become the medium's David Lynch or Guy Maddin, rolling his personal obsessions and freewheeling abstractions into stories that present as pulp, then take some very weird turns." — The A.V. Club

"Every writer should be so lucky to have the imaginative chops that Hernandez shows." — Southwest Review

"Open-minded adult audiences might thrill to watch Hernandez (one of the comic book medium's most revered storytellers) allow his imagination to run wild, without restrictions." — Library Journal