From Publishers Weekly
The ageless Derby Dugan, comic-strip kid, is back, complete with magic yellow wallet and Fuzzy the talking dog, in this entertaining sequel to Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies. Dugan, passed from artist to artist like a cursed heirloom, has met a hard road in the 1960s, as the hobo adventures that carried him through the Depression and the war years aren't playing to the Kennedy-era nuclear family. Candy Biggs, his current artist (who only received Dugan after being stabbed in the chest with a pencil by his previous creator), drinks his way through Dugan's decline, watching his beloved comic strip vanish from one newspaper after another. Candy's only solace is teaching the Way of the Comic Artist to Roy Looby, a weird, talented neighborhood boy, and his kid brother Nick. In Roy's hand, Dugan morphs into the Imp Eugene, a randy roustabout who epitomizes the late-'60s independent comix craze, smoking dope and gallivanting with chicken-headed busty women. Roy moves to San Francisco and becomes an artist icon, bolstering his fame by disappearing for weeks at a time to produce Eugene's new adventures. Nick, ever the suffering Salieri to Roy's Mozart, is left behind in New Jersey with Roy's abandoned wife and young son. Finally, Nick, who narrates most of the novel, sets off in pursuit of his brother, trying to lay his own claim to Eugene's psychedelic world. This is a nostalgic romp through the funny-book business, as well as a compelling look at the people who struggle to make art out of four-color panels.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) wasn't the first novel to depict the bygone world of newspaper comics. De Haven's new novel concludes a trilogy tracing the trajectory of twentieth-century America by portraying the successive creators of a long-running comic strip, "Derby Dugan." In this volume, newspaper comics have entered their decline, and Ed Biggs' best efforts can't prevent the strip's cancellation. Bitter and disillusioned, Biggs discovers teenage cartoonist Roy Looby and pins his hopes for resuscitating Derby on him. But the misanthropic and eccentric Looby, obviously modeled on R. Crumb, has other ideas. He heads for San Francisco and becomes the leading figure in underground comics. By now the saga of Derby, like the comics medium itself, has lost some of its steam. Hippie Haight-Ashbury and suburban Connecticut, where the newspaper strip artists live, lack the romanticism of the New York City setting of this book's predecessors. What remains, though, is the poignancy of the cartoonists' love for a medium that the rest of society has brushed aside.
Gordon FlaggCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
