Snake 'n' Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret
With a tip of the hat to visual punster Glen Baxter, Kupperman lampoons the absurdities of genre fiction, from the Hardy Boys to time-travel fantasies, and of TV series, fromBewitchedtoBiography. The stars of his mad cavalcade are Snake 'n' Bacon, a, er . . . , snake and a strip of bacon who have been movie stars since the 1930s. They turn up more often than any of Kupperman's other characters in this seeming graphic novel that has plenty of plots but far more recurrence than coherence. For instance, Pablo Picasso shows up several times, always irascible, always threatening to break some imagined antagonist into cubes, always speaking in a Chico Marx "Eye-talian" accent. Other repeaters include Cousin Grampa, Long John Silver, Tottie Tinkles, Roger Daltry, Mark Twain, and the Underpants-on-His-Head Man (a costumed crime fighter). Kupperman's figures resemble Baxter's stiff manikins, and his backdrops morph from realism to abstraction with the speed of those in George Herriman'sKrazy Kat. Kupperman bears the banner of absurdist comix humor quixotically forward into the next millennium.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved