Pain: When Will It End?

Tim Kreider's cartoons, previously seen only in the Baltimore City Paper, have attracted a cult following for their razor-sharp intelligence and unprecedented viciousness. His manic, spontaneous line, and his eye for facial expression, gesture, and detail make his cartoons more than one-shot gags. His humor is both erudite and puerile, as personally revealing as a drunken blackout and as politically trenchant as a lone gunman. Kreider's work has been likened to the foul result of inbreeding between Ralph Steadman and B. Kliban. The wide range of subject matter in this collection, from religion and politics to Nietzsche and pie, from sex and violence to the sheer pointlessness of it all, can only be suggested by a sampling of titles: "Breakfast for the Devil," "The Four Press Secretaries of the Apocalypse," "Belongings of the Deformed Child," "Learn German While Drunk," and "I'm Sorry I'm So Horrible." (The collection also includes the unspeakable "Graveyard Shift at the Pussy Juice Factory.")

Kreider's vision of the human condition is of a man distracted from the vast starship hovering over his city by a glimpse of a pretty girl's ass; his version of the existential abyss is a cruddy laundromat with old magazines spilled on the plastic chairs and the word "FAGOT" scratched on a dryer; and the only hope or joy he finds in this life is in jigglin' dem monster juggs or setting a monkey's ass on fire. You may be ashamed to laugh, but laugh you will.