One panel from... Dork

Welcome back, action wizards and sexy robots, to my latest look at a single panel from a remarkable body of work. This time, I'm looking at the comics of one Evan Dorkin, from New York.

Dorkin's comic Dork ran sporadically throughout the 1990s and lasted 11 issues. It was built around what he called 'inventory material': one-off gag strips as well as lengthier stories, and other work done for various comics anthologies and magazines.

Most of what appeared in the first ten issues of Dork were collected in two volumes, Who's Laughing Now? and Circling The Drain, which I bought from Quality Comics in Perth in 2005, on the strength of the back cover gag of Dork issue #6. They wrapped all their books in plastic, but from what I saw in that one issue, Dorkin's style and sense of humour appealed to me.

Because I liked issue #6, it was disappointing that nothing from that issue appears in either of these two volumes. However, I only had to wait a mere sixteen years before I got the bumper Dork compendium seen below. Oddly enough, nothing from issue #6 appears in here either, except its contents page. There are colour reproductions of all the front covers too, except #6. So what gives? Was it omitted for legal reasons or because the publisher didn't like it or what?

Anyway, there's just about everything else Dork-related in here apart from Milk And Cheese – Dairy Products Gone Bad and The Eltingville Club, which are collected in other volumes. There's the three-panel comic strip Fun! wherein we meet such characters as Phil the Disco Skinhead, Myron the Living Voodoo Doll (seen on the cover of Who's Laughing Now?) and Seiji Nakimushi, World's Worst Kamikaze Pilot.

My favourite bits though are The Invisible College of Secret Knowledge, in which a character known as the Devil Puppet (that's him on the cover of Circling the Drain) nestles itself on someone's hand and begins to tell tall tales of how certain historical things came to be, such as the KISS Navy and Wertham's comics code. In one memorable story, he talks about how in 1928 the department store Macy's started releasing the inflatables at the end of their Thanksgiving Day parade, offering cash rewards for their return, the amount determined by the size of the balloon.

At the parade in 1932, everyone wanted that year's largest balloon, the comic strip character Fritz Katzenjammer. After one man dies falling from the balloon's ropes, scores of balloon-hunters chase the drifting balloon into New Jersey, and then, this happens:

There are a few of Evan Dorkin's trademarks on show here: smarmy New York City dialogue, plenty of detail on the characters (some great facial expressions), and jibes at comics fandom (although rather subtle here — chasing one of the Katzenjammer Kids for big bucks seems like a precursor to the nebbishy practice of buying first-issue comics just to make money off them later, eh?).

So that's that. Oh, and apparently the German word 'katzenjammer' (literally, 'cat's misery'), is their word for 'hangover'. So that's another piece of useless trivia for you.