Tachyon Publications: Bob the Angry Flower: <br/>Dog Killer, Stephen Notley


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			Stephen Notley

			Visit the Stephen Notley website.

	Stephen Notley was born Canadian, in Canada. He lived there for years, drew cartoons, and attended schools, among them Fairview High School and the University of Alberta. Continuing to draw cartoons into his early 30s, he avoided useful work for many years until eventually moving to Seattle to begin employment at PopCap Games, which is where he is and what he's doing now. Somewhere along the way he published four collections of his Bob the Angry Flower cartoon strip: In Defence of Fascism, Coffee With Sinistar, Everybody vs. Bob the Angry Flower, and The Ultimate Book of Perfect Energy!!!

Bob the Angry Flower:
Dog Killer

by Stephen Notley

Introduction by Ted Rall
Cover image by Stephen Notley; Cover design by Ann Monn

The long-awaited Dog Killer (Tachyon) is a whole new chance to revel in Notley's fevered, nihilistic madness.
-The Onion

Intensely funny. I've been laughing like a supervillian for days.
-Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Combining the politics of The Boondocks, the surrealism of Zippy the Pinhead, and the pop-culture hilarity of The Simpsons, Bob the Angry Flower is an edgy, trenchantly political, and achingly funny comic strip. Whether he’s building killer robots, running for Pope, or just getting creamed at 20 Questions, Bob is locked, loaded, and ready to destroy the earth—unless there’s something good on TV. Bob the Angry Flower: Dogkiller is exactly what disaffected teenagers, jaded grownups, disgruntled geeks and Peter Pans of all ages have been waiting for: a flower with a brilliant mind, a bipolar temperament, and the attention span of a five year old loaded up on sugar and Saturday morning cartoons. This first U.S.-published collection of Canadian cartoonist Stephen Notley's syndicated masterpiece is a crazed love letter to monster movies, petty demagogues, and vegetarian tyrants alike. Unpredictable, original, and wholly outrageous, Bob is coming to America-and not a moment too soon.

Notley's syndicated Bob the Angry Flower exemplifies the new science-fiction comics. Instead of rocketing around the galaxies, it generally stays on terra firma and lets the aliens come to it. It features robots, especially the lugubrious author's-alter-ego, Lovebot, and, getting brainy for a change, quantum phenomena, as when Bob, instead of just chopping a "spunky crippled kid" up with an ax, whacks him with a "quantum waveform decollapser" that renders the annoying child into innumerable, identical, possible spunky crippled kids. Trenchant references are made to highbrow fantasy (Kafka) and sf (Brave New World), but Notley is obviously most inspired by 1950s "sci-fi" flickers and their progeny of giant reptile/bug/thing attack yarns (though the big critter that most excites him is the already-big-enough bear; see the long, wordless story in the center of the book, "Pure Action"). And he's incensed by the Bush administration. Bob is pretty transparently another Notley alter ego**the main one**yet he also seems an ambulatory bud from The Little Shop of Horrors' Audrey. Energetically drawn, top-drawer madness.
- Booklist

Dog Killer is rife with wry political commentary and subversive play, but it's also an appealing work of dark surrealism. In Bob's world, the sky hails eyeballs and the local furniture store sells chairs made of human skulls. Bob follows his shadow underground, only to discover a Starbucks at the end of the cavernous journey. Bob slays ghosts with a samurai sword, and begs to know why they are haunting him ("Stop...killing...us!" is their answer!). Notley's sly approach has got a knock-out underground power to it: Notley plays freely with form, experiments with structure, and just takes no prisoners in his attack on conventional truth and habitual ways of seeing. In this book's introduction, Ted Rall describes "Notley's rageful ranting" as revealing a "tragic honesty" about the American universe through some "pretty scary allegory" that's "grim" even when it's optimistic. "This brutal appraisal of the human condition," Rall writes, is "never crueler than when it's turned inward, [and this] bugs the hell out of people." It's courageous alternative art. Sounds a lot like what I enjoy about horror fiction...
-Michael Arnzen, The Goreletter

Bob the Angry Flower will rock your world
-Keith Knight, author of The K Chronicles

How I pity those English monolinguists who will only know Bob the Angry Flower as a hysterically funny force of chaos. Those who read Bob in its original Klingon know it to be a keen, insightful look into the humorous nuances behind today’s headlines.
—Phil Foglio, co-author of Girl Genius

It’s amazingly funny, totally offbeat, and like nothing else I’ve ever read.
—iComics

Notley’s artwork scampers across the page like a spider on fire.
—Exclaim! Magazine

Bob. The. Angry. FLOWER. Maybe it's because I can relate so well that I just laugh my butt off every time I see Bob having one of his hissy fits. And who else describes what we live with now so succinctly — 'Cheney's tiny Republican heart, tight with hate.'? Bob is me and Bob is you and Bob really should get that fetus of his into dayschool. Before something really bad happens.
—Donna Barr, author of Desert Peach and Stinz

Bob the Angry Flower bursts at the seams with frenetic energy—some might say perfect energy—as it takes you through a surreal world of sci-fi oddities mingled with the absurdities of everyday life. Thanks to Notley's highly expressive drawing style, you'll be laughing and screaming along with Bob in no time flat.
—Jen Sorensen, Slowpoke Comics

Notley’s strip has a biting sense of humor reminiscent of Keith Knight or Evan Dorkin, and the sources for his ideas are as varied as modern politics, cheesy Japanese monster movies, and of course, the realities of the comics industry.
—4th Rail