Hagen, Brian – Vermin

Website

Vermin

The intro comic to this book has a character saying “This way… to contrived bullshit without context”.  While Brian is being a little too hard on himself, that is a more or less accurate description of his comics.  This is a collection of a dozen strips covering a wide variety of subjects, often not making a whole lot of sense.  I was hoping that his website or his blog would have more examples of his comics, but could only find one strip on his main page.  An archive of some sort would have been helpful, but I’ll just stick to commenting on the stuff in the actual comic instead.  There’s the combination of pussy and pastrami, fun with rhyming, the merits of a threesome versus a foursome, images of homosexual penguins, a conversation-stopper of an answer to the question “Where do you see yourself in five years?”, and being robbed of manliness.  These strips fall more into the category of headscratchers than being laugh out loud funny (except for the pussy/pastrami joke and the comic on the cover), but everything is gorgeous and that’s a ton of variety for 12 strips.  Maybe if you dig around his website more than I did you can find more samples, as I didn’t see this book for sale anywhere.  I’m sure if you contact him he’ll find a copy, and he also mentions on his site that he’s willing to draw anything for anyone.  Any rich people out there willing to test him out?  No price, so I’ll randomly call it $2.