(High Plains Reader, 12-1-05)
http://www.hpr1.com/lastword.htm
There is a reason most webcomics stay on the web rather than finding a home in the Sunday funnies or the back of an alternative weekly. That being that most of them are crude, inane and spectacularly unfunny, assuming they are legible in
the first place. "Penny Arcade," "Men in Hats" and "Sinfest" are hardly funnier than their mainstream counterparts "B.C.," "Garfield" and "Dilbert." They are good for an occasional chuckle, but only distinguished by the presence of swearing and esoteric subject matter.The four-year-old "toothpaste for dinner" webcomic is a different animal altogether. It's crude, it's often inane and you can pretty much forget about basic legibility. But it is never less than one of the funniest comics available online or anywhere. With the publication of the collection "toothpaste for dinner: Hipsters, Hamsters and Other Pressing Issues," the comic has found its way into the physical world and will hopefully find a larger audience.
The creation of the monomonikered Drew, a research chemist from Columbus, Ohio, the comics are single paneled drawings made up of loppy-headed black-and-white stick figures. If Samuel Beckett were a wiseass office worker who drew simplistic cartoons that displayed a limited artistic range, they might look something like this, though they wouldn't be nearly as funny.
What the strip lacks in artistic expression it makes up for tenfold in humor. The jokes range from smart aleck observational humor to surrealist gibberish to devastatingly true-to-life dialogues. Taken as a whole, the comic seems to document an entire sensibility regarding humor and life, one that is recognizable as the unleashed id of any one of a million cubical jockeys.
What makes the comic work is not so much any individual strip, but the accumulation of them (Drew, along with his fellow webcomic-writing wife, Natalie Dee, has been publishing a comic a day for a couple of years now). The more you read and the more attuned to the overall aesthetic and sensibility you become, the funnier it gets.
This is not to say that individual strips are not funny in and of themselves. "Fashion is a competition to see who can look the most like a retarded clown," states one comic, with pictures to demonstrate, while another that involves a dialog between a father and son includes the sage advice, "As your father, I have to tell you -- don't take drugs unless you think staying up all night writing poetry using only the word 'dog' is a major life achievement."
Much of the humor in the comics comes from the almost systematic busting of clichˇs. Common phrases and references are crushed under the combined weight of absurdity and literalness. "If I had a dollar for ever time I had sixty cents, I would be Canada," explains one earnest stick figure. Science jokes also take the forefront on occasion: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate" or "There are ten kinds of people in the world: People who understand binary and people who have friends."
"toothpaste" is obviously not for everyone and will probably appeal more to college graduates with money and employment problems (it's written by one, so that makes sense). But this is hardly a niche comic, and even a skimming of the book or a quick perusal of the online archives will yield at least a giggle or two from the most jaded comic reader. And while the line drawing aesthetic of the strip might be hard for those used to the more clean cut mainstream comics, it doesn't take long to adjust (the style is not without precedent, as anyone who has seen the animated stick figure violence of Don Hertzfeldt's Bitter Films cartoons would know).
Of course, the obvious question of why you should buy something that is available for free online comes up in regards to the new collection. The answer is the same as the question to why you should buy albums that can be pirated. If you really care about the work, you should be willing to patronize its creator and support its continued creation. In any case, the collection is one of the best humor publications to come out this year and is worth owning just to see it on your bookshelf.
The book, as well as other merchandise, can be bought through www.toothpastefordinner.com. Natalie Dee's equally funny comic can be found at www.nataliedee.com.