Drunk is a limited edition hard cover graphic novel about bar stories. Las Vegas artists Michael Ogilvie, Sean Russell, and Michael Todoran have assembled a group of local and national artists to contribute to this graphic novel. Drunk features work by artists like Jay Bailey, Chris Bauder, Brian Hockersmith, Michael Ogilvie, Sean Russell, Rachel Sparrow, Erin Stellmon, Michael Todoran, and more!
Printed on 80lb. paper, individually numbered, with red ribbon marker. Down a shot or two of the raucous Vegas bar scene with the artists who lived to tell about it…
Drunk | Graphic Novel
TWENTY-FIVE artists take readers on a charter ride on Le Bateau Ivre in Drunk: A Comic About Bar Stories, a small-press, limited-edition book. Reprints include Ivan Brunetti’s keen itty-bitty bestiary of beastly drunks, and his two-page autobiographical story of extreme self-loathing—extreme even by the standards of adult comics, which means five floors below Dostoevsky’s underground.
Five fine reprinted pages by Kim Deitch feature Waldo the Cat, megrim of a drunk and disorderly pioneering animator disgusted by the cuteness of the animation world of the 1930s. Some of the most bizarre outsider art ever seen is the drawings of Norman Pettingill, full of visions of North Woods revelry: crowded bucket-of-blood taverns where grimacing taxidermed animals giving the eye to huge-bottomed hags. Jay Pink’s scary narrative of drinkers he has known includes a confession to being accessory after the fact in one drunken murder—fiction, hopefully.
Evan Dent’s “Hot Dog Millionaire” illustrates a low-ball dirty joke, of the sort people enjoy when they’re in their cups. What makes it stick, though, is not the vile story, but Dent’s strange figures—humanoid dogs or bears, devoid of fur and of any touch of cuteness. Jay Bailey, Chad Brown, Sean Russell and Erin Stellmon take the smart road of reporting the strange dialogue one might here anywhere the neon glows and the drunkards ramble. The introduction is by renowned Las Vegas tavernaut Jarrett Keane.
DRUNK: A COMIC ABOUT BAR STORIES
Those whose social life centers around the magic elixir of alcohol have their share of bar stories. Now there’s a whole illustrated collection of them in “Drunk,” a limited-edition hardcover available online. Forego your bartender tips to buy one.
Most of the 25 contributing artists are unknowns, but a couple of names may catch the eye of indie-comics followers: Kim Deitch, with a hallucinogenic nightmare, and Ivan Brunetti, who counts down the 32 types of drunks (i.e. “Mr. Touchy-Feely,” “Miss Giggles” and “Date-Rapist”).
Evan Dent has one of the funniest selections in the book, with “Hot Dog Millionaire,” in which two guys concoct a scheme that will enable them to drink free at bar after bar. Alex Getchell and Laurenn McCubbin’s “Vulgar Display of Power” amusingly details a bar fight over nothing, and Tori Morris recounts picking up a “Bus Date” ” specifically, a woman who snorts coke, then proudly declares she’s “25 days clean of meth!”
What happens when bar tchotchkes like pineapple magnets and hula-girl figurines get lit? Patrick Quilao shows you in “Kitsch’s Night Out.” Even wackier “because fact trumps fiction “are Sean Russell’s “True Stories of the VFW.”
“Drunk” showcase a solid mix of comics, more text-heavy pieces and abstract art. More often than not, they focus on the dark side of getting three sheets to the wind and all the bad things that come from it. Naturally, the subject matter “like the liquid from which it takes its inspiration ” is adults-only.
- Rod Lott
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