Welcome to the Dahl House: Alienation, Incarceration, and Inebriation in the New American Rome (Comix)
Whether depicting himself directly as “a washed-up, has-been ‘alternative cartoonist’” or vicariously in the adventures of bespectacled, unkempt Gordon Smalls, Dahl is a satirist of progressive posturing á la R. Crumb. He depicts himself possessed of the right “values,” able to say the right things, but too pathetic to impress anybody. Unlike Crumb, who characteristically no sooner gets up on his moral propers than he crumbles in self-loathing, Dahl can rant for quite a while before inevitably deflating: see the epical “How to Steal the Food You Deserve,” which the contents page lists, all too accurately, as “Gordon Smalls Goes to Jail.” Dahl/Smalls isn’t his own worst example, though. “The Origin of Army Guy” hilariously shows even the most un-PC institutional stooge talking the talk, utterly cynically, of course; a nice touch here is that the fork-tongued recruiting sergeant is a dead ringer for Beetle Bailey’s Sarge. An excellent artist, Dahl draws in manners ranging from simple, figure-against-blank-background strips to cartoon-figure against more and less detailed, realistic backdrops—and always expressively. --Ray Olson