Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013 by M.K. Brown (March 2017)

Our latest tour this March 2017 will be for Stranger Than Life: Cartoons and Comics 1970-2013 by M.K. Brown, published by Fantagraphics in March 2014.

M.K. Brown is one of the funniest cartoonists of the last four decades — or ever, take your pick — and her body of work has long been savored by aficionados but never comprehensively collected — until now. Stranger Than Life is the first retrospective of Brown’s cartoons and comics from their original appearances in the National Lampoon, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, Playboy, and other magazines and underground comics.

M.K. Brown’s comics stories satirize suburban anxiety and post-modern ennui by the sheer force of her gentle but piquant, off-kilter observations, along with her slightly pixilated but winsome characters, all of which are perfectly captured in her restless pen line and delicate jewel-tone watercolors.

In these pages: Read instructions for the use of glue, making a pair of pants, home auto repair, coping with chainsaw massacres, and jackknifing your big rig. “Another True-Life Pretty Face in the Field of Medicine” introduces Virginia Spears Ngodátu, who (with a bit of a name change) would go on to star in “Dr. Janice N!Godatu,” Brown’s series of animated shorts that appeared on The Tracy Ullman Show alongside the first incarnation of The Simpsons. Plus, enjoy aliens, old people, pilgrims, mermen, monitor lizards, tiny floating muggers and other weirdos in Brown’s side-splitting single-panel gag strips.

About the Author:

M.K. Brown grew up in Darien, Connecticut and New Brunswick, Canada. Her cartoons have been in all sorts of publications, above- and under-ground. She is naturally a bit selfish, maybe a little self-conscious, and self-centered, yet has an enlightened self-interest and a healthy curiosity about any new technology which happens to coincide with her trajectory at the time. She lives in northern California and her cartoons are about that process.

Add to GoodReads:

Available on Amazon.

Tour Sign-ups Are Closed.

Tour Schedule:

March 13: A Bookish Way of Life (Review)
March 16: CelticLady’s Reviews (Spotlight)
March 16: Katherine & Books (Review)
March 18: Readaholic Zone (Review)
March 30: Suko’s Notebook (Review)
June 1: Donna Book Reviews (Review)
TBD: Everything Distils Into Reading (Review)

Follow the blog tour with hashtag #StrangerThanLife