Gruenwald, Nate – Pacho Clokey

Pacho Clokey

Wow. I was starting to think that all these Robot Publishing books were going to stay right around the mediocre to good level, and this one blew the rest of them away. It’s a critical analysis of the late work of a dead cartoonist. Using rough pencil sketches and dialogue that was probably just temporary, Nate deconstructs this guy and the main character, Pacho Clokey. The only problem with that is that I’m pretty sure that this Cesar Spinoza guy (the creator of Pacho Clokey) is fictional, which makes this comic all the more fascinating. Looked at from that perspective, it gives a lot of the older, stereotypical comics a haunting self-awareness of what happens to them in any given week and the futility of struggling against it. A unique and fascinating work. I have no idea where this guy is (no contact info in the book), but you can order it for a couple of bucks from the fine folks at Top Shelf.