I'm glad to see that the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards 'Outstanding Comedic Comic' category went to Nicholas Gurewitch, an artist I was introduced to by the TCJ Message Board sometime last year. Reading back over the strips, it's obvious that many of the gags are variations on ol' staples; jokes about guys who don't have a penis, guys who have really huge penises, jokes about how desperately men want to look at naked ladies and, of course, jokes about turds. But although the themes of many of the gags are somewhat adolescent or left-overs of childhood obsessions Transformers, Aliens, a combination of aliens and transformers, Gnomes and Unicorns make regular appearances too). But there's something in the inventive execution of these gags that shows a real mastery of technique and uniquess of vision that sets them apart from any thing else that I've seen recently. This strip for example, makes about as good an argument for the real motivating factors behind a adolescent males decision to finally 'grow up' that I can think of, and the humour of Sgt.Grumbles and Cars is totally disarming in its candy-coloured and cheerful brutality.
Although the strips are getting their fair share of attention (I found 798 very enthusiastic posts about the stip on Technorati) Nicholas is primarily a film maker. Since doing the strip is a sideline for him, I fear that now that his short films have started getting noticed (MTV3 is now playing some) that he will likely be called a way to devote himself fully to the potentially greener pastures of film-making. I don't think I can bring myself to feel too bad though, since the move to film improves upon the strips; in the original strip- version of New Specs for Ken the mechanics of the gag seemed too contrived to really make me laugh. In the film version the absurbity of the whole situation is heightened by the contrast between the banality of the opening dialogue between the animated corn-cobs, and the weirdly discordant shift to a mesmerised Ken gazing powerlessly up into the glare of the midday sun that makes the whole thing even somewhat profound. Same goes for Eden, where the addition of a voyeuristic gopher (gophers are regulars in the strip), provides just enough of a distraction to make the punchline unexpected, an adds some pathos to the ugly proceedings. The Golden Turtle is comparable to Team America in its devotion to realizing the potential of the type of crazy ideas that tend to come to stoners watching TV and usually forgotten by the next morning (and God Knows what an accomplishment that is). What really makes all these films work for me is not the quality of the 'gags' so much as a commitment to squeeze as much dark beauty and meaning from them as possible.
