Goldfarb, Andrew – Ogner Stump’s One Thousand Sorrows

April 23, 2010

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Ogner Stump’s One Thousand Sorrows Now Available! $4

I’ve been sitting here for about twenty minutes now, trying to put my thoughts about this book into some semblance of order, but I’ve come to the conclusion that that’s just not going to happen. For anybody out there who likes bizarre, gothic comics (Jim Woodring, Richard Sala, and Edward Gorey, to name a few that fit in at least one of those categories): you have a new hero. Seriously, this is an almost flawless work of demented brilliance. Ogner Stump is a guy who has all sorts of horrible things happen to him, from plague to haircuts to apes to islands to defecation to rock and roll to… I could go on for a while here, but I think you get the idea. The thing is that all of these chapters have the most innocuous titles, like “Eggs” or “Employment”, but there’s nothing remotely normal about any of it. Enough about that, check out his website for samples of things too if you don’t believe me. The rest of the book is various short stories which, while lacking the sense of cohesiveness that the Ogner Stump stuff has, are still wonderfully insane in their own right. There’s a story about a floating head and another one about a truffle tree. Look, just get it. It’s $9 for about 150 pages of insanity and, if that’s your thing, this is perfect. If that’s not your thing, loosen up a little…