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Bumf 1: I Buggered The Kaiser
This is a collection of all-new satirical short comics by Joe Sacco ( Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza ). In the vein of the old underground comix like ZAP or Weirdo , author Joe Sacco promises that BUMF will go where it needs to go, and do what it needs to do.” Though world-famous for his serious, journalistic books like Palestine , Safe Area Gorazde , and Footnotes in Gaza , Bumf promises to echo back to Sacco’s earlier days as a satirist and underground cartoonist. Bumf is a project that Sacco has been working on in between larger projects like Footnotes in Gaza , indulging his love of satire and cartooning. Often puerile, disgusting, and beyond redemption, Sacco apologized in advance, saying he couldn’t help himself. “They expect better things from me. They’ll never put me on a stamp now.” Black & white
64 pages, Paperback
First published July 15, 2014
About the author
Joe Sacco
70 books1,390 followersJoe Sacco was born in Malta on October 2, 1960. At the age of one, he moved with his family to Australia, where he spent his childhood until 1972, when they moved to Los Angeles. He began his journalism career working on the Sunset High School newspaper in Beaverton, Oregon. While journalism was his primary focus, this was also the period of time in which he developed his penchant for humor and satire. He graduated from Sunset High in 1978.
Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference." After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring," and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the BBC.
He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks. Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese romance comic named Imħabba Vera ("True Love"), one of the first art-comics in the Maltese language. "Because Malta has no history of comics, comics weren't considered something for kids," he told Village Voice. "In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to Holland for an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it's not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not."
Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at The Comics Journal as the staff news writer. This job provided the opportunity for him to create another satire: the comic Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, a name he took from an overly-complicated children's toy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
But Sacco was more interested in travelling. In 1988, he left the U.S. again to travel across Europe, a trip which he chronicled in his autobiographical comic Yahoo. The trip lead him towards the ongoing Gulf War (his obsession with which he talks about in Yahoo #2), and in 1991 he found himself nearby to research the work he would eventually publish as Palestine.
The Gulf War segment of Yahoo drew Sacco into a study of Middle Eastern politics, and he traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories to research his first long work. Palestine was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an American Book Award in 1996.
Sacco next travelled to Sarajevo and Goražde near the end of the Bosnian War, and produced a series of reports in the same style as Palestine: the comics Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and the stories collected in War's End; the financing for which was aided by his winning of the Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001. Safe Area Goražde won the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001.
He has also contributed short pieces of graphic reportage to a variety of magazines, on subjects ranging from war crimes to blues, and is a frequent illustrator of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Sacco currently lives in Portland.
Sacco earned his B.A. in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981 in three years. He was greatly frustrated with the journalist work that he found at the time, later saying, "[I couldn't find] a job writing very hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference." After being briefly employed by the journal of the National Notary Association, a job which he found "exceedingly, exceedingly boring," and several factories, he returned to Malta, his journalist hopes forgotten. "...I sort of decided to forget it and just go the other route, which was basically take my hobby, which has been cartooning, and see if I could make a living out of that," he later told the BBC.
He began working for a local publisher writing guidebooks. Returning to his fondness for comics, he wrote a Maltese romance comic named Imħabba Vera ("True Love"), one of the first art-comics in the Maltese language. "Because Malta has no history of comics, comics weren't considered something for kids," he told Village Voice. "In one case, for example, the girl got pregnant and she went to Holland for an abortion. Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it's not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not."
Eventually returning to the United States, by 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at The Comics Journal as the staff news writer. This job provided the opportunity for him to create another satire: the comic Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, a name he took from an overly-complicated children's toy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
But Sacco was more interested in travelling. In 1988, he left the U.S. again to travel across Europe, a trip which he chronicled in his autobiographical comic Yahoo. The trip lead him towards the ongoing Gulf War (his obsession with which he talks about in Yahoo #2), and in 1991 he found himself nearby to research the work he would eventually publish as Palestine.
The Gulf War segment of Yahoo drew Sacco into a study of Middle Eastern politics, and he traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories to research his first long work. Palestine was a collection of short and long pieces, some depicting Sacco's travels and encounters with Palestinians (and several Israelis), and some dramatizing the stories he was told. It was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 2001 and then published in several collections, the first of which won an American Book Award in 1996.
Sacco next travelled to Sarajevo and Goražde near the end of the Bosnian War, and produced a series of reports in the same style as Palestine: the comics Safe Area Goražde, The Fixer, and the stories collected in War's End; the financing for which was aided by his winning of the Guggenheim Fellowship in April 2001. Safe Area Goražde won the Eisner Award for Best Original Graphic Novel in 2001.
He has also contributed short pieces of graphic reportage to a variety of magazines, on subjects ranging from war crimes to blues, and is a frequent illustrator of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Sacco currently lives in Portland.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
November 11, 2016
Bummer! Joe Sacco’s return to his underground roots should have been just what the doctor ordered. I mean, America’s ongoing slide towards totalitarianism certainly calls for uninhibited political satire, and with his background in both grassroots journalism and absurdist humor, Sacco seemed like the man for the job.
Unfortunately, though, things don’t always work out the way they should. Sure, government secrecy, mass surveillance, institutionalized torture, and the military-industrial complex all make for very worthy topics, but the bits and pieces of outrageous narrative Sacco has constructed around them lack direction, insight, and comic timing. As a result, Bumf feels rather half-baked and obvious, neither informative nor particularly funny.
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I hope Joe Sacco will eventually write and draw that much-needed graphic novel on the politics and economics of globalization - that's a book I'd love to read, and it's also a book I'd love to use in the classes I teach. Globalization is key to understanding ANYthing these days, so it would be great to have a well-written comic book on the topic available! And Joe, I don't see anybody else in the room... - sorry, but I think you're the man for the job.
Unfortunately, though, things don’t always work out the way they should. Sure, government secrecy, mass surveillance, institutionalized torture, and the military-industrial complex all make for very worthy topics, but the bits and pieces of outrageous narrative Sacco has constructed around them lack direction, insight, and comic timing. As a result, Bumf feels rather half-baked and obvious, neither informative nor particularly funny.
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I hope Joe Sacco will eventually write and draw that much-needed graphic novel on the politics and economics of globalization - that's a book I'd love to read, and it's also a book I'd love to use in the classes I teach. Globalization is key to understanding ANYthing these days, so it would be great to have a well-written comic book on the topic available! And Joe, I don't see anybody else in the room... - sorry, but I think you're the man for the job.
August 14, 2018
Just too many convergent perspectives for me - glimpses of something profoundly existentially surreal - but the thematic thread does not quite hold.
February 15, 2015
Joe Sacco is the acclaimed, Eisner Award-winning cartoonist of Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and several noteworthy non-fictional comics on real world conflicts. More recently he released the extraordinary work The Great War, a 24-foot panoramic look at the first day of the Battle of the Somme. So it’s surprising - in a good way - to see that he’s really gone in the other direction for Bumf, Volume 1, subtitled I Buggered the Kaiser!
The double splash page at the start pretty much sets the tone: a young boy gives a priest a blowjob while some guy gets shot in the head. Taste and subtlety are out the window for this relentless satire on… the Obama administration?
It’s a satire on something and a lot of the issues touch on Obama’s America (who is portrayed throughout as Nixon) but there’s a lot of targets here that include Bush 2’s administration, the prominence of religion in politics, the increase of paranoia and fear in Western culture, and the unstoppable military industrial complex.
That’s partly the problem of Bumf - Sacco is going all out but he’s targeting so many things that he lacks focus on any one thing. There’s that and tone. The first story looks to be set in WW1 and a deranged general decides to try a new strategy: get every soldier naked, give them massive erections by staring at a photo of his bum, and then charging towards the Germans en masse to bugger them all!
Bizarre crude comedy then morphs into horror as we see the victims of a firebombing raid burning alive, and then we’re into critiques on religion, the surveillance state, drone attacks, and Guantanamo torture victims. Then later we switch from political commentary to a weird love story between two prisoners with bags over their heads, then we’re in space and…
Sacco’s spraying bullets everywhere and only occasionally nailing a target. Torture has become disturbingly normalised, while drone attacks are a terrifying development in warfare, removing the human element entirely for the controllers making it easier to kill. The proliferation of digital media and the internet has led to a spate of hacks on personal information leading to a more paranoid contemporary mindset and, unfortunately, Obama wasn’t the major change everyone hoped he would be when he was elected (though I still think generally he’s been a force for good).
The rest of it? It’s a rambling, uneven quasi-narrative that goes off on some very strange tangents more than once. Even Sacco becomes a character, “directing” the President in his speech after bombing a group of civilians from his bed. Stringing together a bunch of political cartoons and hoping for them to hang together isn’t the best approach to a book and it doesn’t really work here.
Sacco’s art throughout is fantastic, as it always is, and the splash page showing the trench warfare of WW1 is a taste of his ambitious work in The Great War. That and the religious orgy are the standouts as the most accomplished pieces though all of the pages are drawn in very high quality. The art is definitely much better than the scattershot writing/story.
Bumf is an interesting satirical comic that by turns amuses, horrifies and bores but doesn’t add up to much. It’s not wholly convincing as an indictment of Obama’s terms in office but Sacco’s righteous anger at… many things, is palpable. It’s worth a look for being such an unusual, edgy comic from a brilliant cartoonist, though it’s not among Sacco’s best work.
The double splash page at the start pretty much sets the tone: a young boy gives a priest a blowjob while some guy gets shot in the head. Taste and subtlety are out the window for this relentless satire on… the Obama administration?
It’s a satire on something and a lot of the issues touch on Obama’s America (who is portrayed throughout as Nixon) but there’s a lot of targets here that include Bush 2’s administration, the prominence of religion in politics, the increase of paranoia and fear in Western culture, and the unstoppable military industrial complex.
That’s partly the problem of Bumf - Sacco is going all out but he’s targeting so many things that he lacks focus on any one thing. There’s that and tone. The first story looks to be set in WW1 and a deranged general decides to try a new strategy: get every soldier naked, give them massive erections by staring at a photo of his bum, and then charging towards the Germans en masse to bugger them all!
Bizarre crude comedy then morphs into horror as we see the victims of a firebombing raid burning alive, and then we’re into critiques on religion, the surveillance state, drone attacks, and Guantanamo torture victims. Then later we switch from political commentary to a weird love story between two prisoners with bags over their heads, then we’re in space and…
Sacco’s spraying bullets everywhere and only occasionally nailing a target. Torture has become disturbingly normalised, while drone attacks are a terrifying development in warfare, removing the human element entirely for the controllers making it easier to kill. The proliferation of digital media and the internet has led to a spate of hacks on personal information leading to a more paranoid contemporary mindset and, unfortunately, Obama wasn’t the major change everyone hoped he would be when he was elected (though I still think generally he’s been a force for good).
The rest of it? It’s a rambling, uneven quasi-narrative that goes off on some very strange tangents more than once. Even Sacco becomes a character, “directing” the President in his speech after bombing a group of civilians from his bed. Stringing together a bunch of political cartoons and hoping for them to hang together isn’t the best approach to a book and it doesn’t really work here.
Sacco’s art throughout is fantastic, as it always is, and the splash page showing the trench warfare of WW1 is a taste of his ambitious work in The Great War. That and the religious orgy are the standouts as the most accomplished pieces though all of the pages are drawn in very high quality. The art is definitely much better than the scattershot writing/story.
Bumf is an interesting satirical comic that by turns amuses, horrifies and bores but doesn’t add up to much. It’s not wholly convincing as an indictment of Obama’s terms in office but Sacco’s righteous anger at… many things, is palpable. It’s worth a look for being such an unusual, edgy comic from a brilliant cartoonist, though it’s not among Sacco’s best work.
September 9, 2015
Bullet Review:
What the everlasting hell was THAT?! Holy sh!t, my brain is melting through my nostrils! HELP! HEEEELP!
What the everlasting hell was THAT?! Holy sh!t, my brain is melting through my nostrils! HELP! HEEEELP!
January 9, 2015
Whoa! That was weird. I've been an ardent follower of Joe Sacco, all the way back to the time when he was doing comic books for Fantagraphics in the early 1990s. I've written extensively about him, made several interviews and even had him as a house guest when he was a lecturer at the comic art school in Malmö. Still, this book took me somewhat of guard.
This is the third new book by Sacco that I've read, since I starting reviewing here on Goodreads, and the other, Journalism and The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme, both point to a direction where Sacco is honing his journalistic and historical skills. This is something completely different, though, and harks back to Sacco's underground roots, to the comics published in the comic book Yahoo! early on in his career.
Bumf is boisterous, allegorical, and no holds barred satire, aimed at the US foreign policy of the last decade or so, with recurring visual pokes at the killing of people with drones, of the torture and mistreatment of prisoners and the general idiotic, male chauvinism of war. The main character is Richard Nixon, who seems to have been reborn as Barack Obama, a clear indication of how Sacco views the Obama administration and what they have done.
I can see how Sacco has done these comics as a sort of outlet for ideas and feelings not suitable for the sombre, well-researched, journalistic comics for which he is famous. Especially the meticulous work with The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme must have meant that he needed to get other things out of his system. It is intelligent and allegorical to the point that I'm sometimes not sure exactly what he's aiming for. I must admit that i was not totally taken by this book, and would not mind a book which lands somewhere in between his often almost laconic, journalistic tales and this over-the-top satire. That would be a book well worth reading.
This is the third new book by Sacco that I've read, since I starting reviewing here on Goodreads, and the other, Journalism and The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme, both point to a direction where Sacco is honing his journalistic and historical skills. This is something completely different, though, and harks back to Sacco's underground roots, to the comics published in the comic book Yahoo! early on in his career.
Bumf is boisterous, allegorical, and no holds barred satire, aimed at the US foreign policy of the last decade or so, with recurring visual pokes at the killing of people with drones, of the torture and mistreatment of prisoners and the general idiotic, male chauvinism of war. The main character is Richard Nixon, who seems to have been reborn as Barack Obama, a clear indication of how Sacco views the Obama administration and what they have done.
I can see how Sacco has done these comics as a sort of outlet for ideas and feelings not suitable for the sombre, well-researched, journalistic comics for which he is famous. Especially the meticulous work with The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme must have meant that he needed to get other things out of his system. It is intelligent and allegorical to the point that I'm sometimes not sure exactly what he's aiming for. I must admit that i was not totally taken by this book, and would not mind a book which lands somewhere in between his often almost laconic, journalistic tales and this over-the-top satire. That would be a book well worth reading.
February 12, 2015
Joe Sacco descends from the high perch of "conflict-zone cartoon journalist" to his underground comics roots in this lewd, surrealistic, not-safe-for-public-transit little masterpiece. The cover art alone speaks to the wide-ranging and provocative nature of the work, with the unmistakable stubbled jowls of Richard Nixon declaring "I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message" while twin towers burn in the background and a hooded figure bears a tablet of redacted ten commandments. The plot, such that one exists (self-reference, breaking of the fourth wall, and anachronisms only scratches the surface of the narrative 'irregularities' here) is that Nixon has found himself resurrected as Obama, and has uncovered a portal to another galaxy (where international law does not reign, of course). Meanwhile, cartoonist Joe Sacco is commissioned to draw the story of a WWI general who "buggered the Kaiser." Somehow these stories intersect, guided by a cigarette smoking, anthropomorphic turkey narrator. The "point" (rather than the plot)is Sacco's critique of the 21st century surveillance state and his disappointment with its expansion under Obama. There are also many, many, naked bodies, including Sacco's own less than flattering self portrait. Joe Sacco is not only a brilliant satirist and polemicist, he is a very talented artist, and in some of the larger spreads, he clearly engages with the history of the medium. His chaotic masses of writhing bodies are reminiscent of the apocalyptic tableaus of Bosch and Breugel, while other scenes of urban dystopia look as though they could have been drawn by a 21st century William Hogarth. I highly recommend this quick and dirty read from a master of the medium.
January 10, 2015
Wow. Sacco's been doing sober journalistic comics--and doing them exceptionally well--for so long that one forgets how gonzo some of his early work was. Bumf blows the doors off even that earlier, more underground-inflected work in its scorched-earth political satire. Stunningly drawn, hilarious, and horrifying, this book tears apart America's current and ongoing slide towards totalitarianism. This stream of consciousness/surrealistic screed condemns the culture of paranoia, the surveillance society, and the political arrogance of America today. Brilliant. I hope the "Volume 1" designation is legitimate, and that there is more to come.
May 11, 2016
I love Joe Sacco - but it was great to read him having fun, paying obvious tribute to Crumb too and getting weird and grotty and silly but still retaining the political content, just heavily drawn into satire rather than his (straight/er) journalism.
November 23, 2014
This is definitely not the kind of comic most have come to expect from Joe Sacco. This is a guy who has made his name mostly on his journalistic comics, going into war-torn regions and chronicling the lives, hardships, and histories of a particular people. His work is politically and socially tinged, but it's almost always subtle and veiled behind his more objective reporting. Bumf, however, is quite different. There's nothing subtle about this book, and we get a big dose of satire throughout its many segments. Sacco has done other non-journalistic comics in the past, such as those works collected in Notes from a Defeatist and But I Like It, and some of those have been rather wild. But this is further than I've seen Sacco go before. The book is a surrealistic journey that is a poignant commentary on contemporary politics and culture. This is a very pointed book, and if the "Vol. 1" designation is any indication, this won't be the only occasion of Sacco breaking out in this way. I eagerly look forward to seeing what a second volume of Bumf will look like.
July 2, 2021
This is the weirdest comic I've read all year, with the most naked people in masks getting killed in the most bizarre ways. Part satire on the surveillance state, part commentary on a century of warfare, part cosmic science fiction epic—the cover alone manages to ridicule two presidents, 9/11, Moses, and…Abu Gharib? I’m not sure what some of these things represent. Anyway, it’s got the ghost of Richard Nixon waking up inside Obama’s body, and things get weirder and nakeder from there. This is Joe Sacco at his funniest and cruelest, but also his least accessible. A book not for the squeamish or the easily offended.
November 11, 2016
Sophomoric and superficial...and incomprehensible coming from someone of such talent who has seen real oppression first hand. Joe Sacco has so much to say in his work that I cannot see why he is fixating on two dimensional token targets . With real oppression on the rise his fixation on Nixon and the papacy and his counterculture/Oz magazine faux-obscenity is laughably dated and irrelevant. Sorry Joe, please do something useful!
July 13, 2018
Nothing related with the journalism/social comic he used to do. This one is totally crazy, absurd, out of this world comic, that did not works fine all the time. Anyway, I like this kind of experiments, even if they are not excellent. But if you are look something la Palestine or Gorazde, better to look in another book.
August 9, 2017
Author Joe Sacco promises that, in the vein of underground comics like ZAP or Weirdo, "Bumf will go where it needs to go, and do what it needs to do." Though Sacco is world-famous for his serious, journalistic books like Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde, and Footnotes in Gaza, Bumf promises to echo back to his earlier days as a satirist and underground cartoonist. Bumf is a project that Sacco has been working on in between larger projects like Footnotes in Gaza, indulging his love of satire and cartooning. Often puerile, disgusting, and beyond redemption, Sacco apologizes in advance, saying he couldn't help himself. "They expect better things from me. They’ll never put me on a stamp now." –publisher, Fantagraphics
Most original story I have come across since starting to investigate the medium of comics. Each page, each panel is filled with art that pushes not just the main story but secondary storylines. It makes you go back to see if you missed a detail. Sacco places himself in the story as an unwitting sidekick. Clearly he hates the political system, and it’s a blast watching him take them apart. An S&M-loving Nixon crossing back and forth between alternate universes, what more could you want?
Most original story I have come across since starting to investigate the medium of comics. Each page, each panel is filled with art that pushes not just the main story but secondary storylines. It makes you go back to see if you missed a detail. Sacco places himself in the story as an unwitting sidekick. Clearly he hates the political system, and it’s a blast watching him take them apart. An S&M-loving Nixon crossing back and forth between alternate universes, what more could you want?
February 6, 2015
I really didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did. Joe Sacco's comic strip about Charlie Hedbo was kind of ill informed, and the cover reeked of trying too hard (9/11, Nixon, Obama, the Ten Commandments, the Gitmo bag AND outer space! Uh oh you guys!!) but what starts out as flabby is lifted higher with amazing personal relationships. That's all anything is, a series of anxious relationships with different details thrown in. Love, fear, etcetera. And the satire is good too. "No longer is it enough for Americans to have nothing to hide, now they must have something to show!" As Millenial and 2010's a statement as could be possible. I had a good time reading it. And the man knows how to build beautiful existential terror. Dante like orgies for all. We are always living in a nightmare.
January 19, 2015
If this continues on into another few volumes I'm changing the star ratings to 5; it's basically a 120-page political cartoon drawn in the style of (and dedicated to) the wonderful and under-celebrated Spain Rodriguez. It's quite sad and completely different from anything Sacco has done in 20 years, but it's very interesting, less for what it says about contemporary politics than for its artistic chops. There's a lot here that's tired but Sacco is pretty aggressive about making sure you understand it's tired and think about it anyway, and what it means that you're sick of hearing about Guantanamo Bay. Very much worth the time and here's hoping he keeps it up in terms of artistic quality.
August 26, 2015
The best work of angry graphic art I've read in some time - almost as ferocious as Tim Kreider at his best, combined with the metaphysical nastiness of The Filth or Ed the Happy Clown (though not quite on the level of either of those masterpieces.)
A quick read, but sharp and uncomfortable, and quite recommended.
A quick read, but sharp and uncomfortable, and quite recommended.
January 1, 2015
Totally weird and pointless plot, which is why I liked it so much! It was perfect for Christmas holidays: not strain on the brain, just relax and hand over to Sacco's overly fertile imagination and crisply drawn panels.
Definitely deserves another read. Well more a second look really - some of the panels contain so many details, so sprucely amplified, that all I could do was wallow in the joy of the art.
Definitely deserves another read. Well more a second look really - some of the panels contain so many details, so sprucely amplified, that all I could do was wallow in the joy of the art.
April 26, 2016
Sacco really goes outside in this one - far away from his usual fairly naturalistic depictions of politics, society and war. Here the struggles are other-worldly, both spiritually and astronomically, and, for me, more than a little difficult to wrap my head around. I'm not sure I liked it but it is somehow sticking with me.
December 29, 2014
So, that was weird. A savage skewering of the Obama administration and US foreign policy of the last 12 years with way, way, waaaaaay more naked people than I would have thought possible, let alone expected.
March 28, 2015
This is some out there wackiness from Sacco, who is better known for his more serious non-fiction work. Richard Nixon is somehow Barack Obama and there are portals to the other side of the universe where naked people in hoods are interrogated. It gets weirder after that.
March 23, 2015
A bit of a departure from Sacco's usual faire which I enjoyed.
I laughed out loud at the president's comment on 111; "oh and send some to Harper or we'll never hear the end of it." Seriously, that line tipped this over into four-star territory for me.
I laughed out loud at the president's comment on 111; "oh and send some to Harper or we'll never hear the end of it." Seriously, that line tipped this over into four-star territory for me.
June 22, 2015
Wow! A surreal journal on the history of the absurdity of war, mostly set in the present and/or future. I simply can't do it justice, so I'll let the cover blurb speak for it: an image of Nixon, saying "My name is Barack Obama, and I approve this message."
July 12, 2015
I do love Joe Sacco and anything hyper subversive or edgy like this comic book was. However, Sacco's writing was really heavy handed and repetitious. The whole story arc wasn't that funny or entertaining, but there's some shock value in it... Liked the ending though.
July 26, 2017
Weird and grotesque and accurate.
November 25, 2018
Joe Sacco's satire is dead on. His pen is a descendant of R. Crumb's Rapidograph style and is just as bombastic and bold that fits the surrealistic and bizarro worldscape that is now reality. If you are threatened by lots of naked bodies then give this book to your friends who aren't. There is a heavy dose of William S. Burroughs, too.
The cover is what instantly attracted me to read it. How can it not be when you see the caricature of "Tricky" Dick spouting "My name is Barack Obama. And I approve of this message."? Read it for the fact that our world is making it so much harder for satirists.
The cover is what instantly attracted me to read it. How can it not be when you see the caricature of "Tricky" Dick spouting "My name is Barack Obama. And I approve of this message."? Read it for the fact that our world is making it so much harder for satirists.
November 27, 2018
Schwankte ziemlich zwischen zwei und drei Sternen.
Die Intention von Joe Sacco bei diesem Comic ist schon klar - die USA und ihr nicht sehr weites Entfernt sein von einem totaliräem Regime, und zwar egal ob Nixon oder Obama. Nette Anspielungen auch auf Foltereien (deshalb tragen die Menschen in dieser Geschichte nahezu geschlossen Kapuze), Überwachung und Schändung des Feindes. Aber ganz ehrlich: dieses völlig überdrehte, rabenschwarze und böse Werk ist viel zu verschwurbelt, um Amerika den Spiegel vorzuhalten. Die Zeichnungen und das Drumherum sind wirklich gelungen, aber der Rest ist wie ein im Drogenrausch zusammengeschusterter Drogenritt. Viel zu viel des Guten.
Die Intention von Joe Sacco bei diesem Comic ist schon klar - die USA und ihr nicht sehr weites Entfernt sein von einem totaliräem Regime, und zwar egal ob Nixon oder Obama. Nette Anspielungen auch auf Foltereien (deshalb tragen die Menschen in dieser Geschichte nahezu geschlossen Kapuze), Überwachung und Schändung des Feindes. Aber ganz ehrlich: dieses völlig überdrehte, rabenschwarze und böse Werk ist viel zu verschwurbelt, um Amerika den Spiegel vorzuhalten. Die Zeichnungen und das Drumherum sind wirklich gelungen, aber der Rest ist wie ein im Drogenrausch zusammengeschusterter Drogenritt. Viel zu viel des Guten.
November 11, 2018
Bumf is what you get when a hardass punk scraping money together from show poster sales becomes an Eisner award-winning war journalist, and then decides to throw a grenade into his career and legacy in his old age with an anti-state, anarchistic troll. I mean, this book probably has a penis in it for every other page, including the artist's own. In short, it's pretty bloody brilliant. I'm glad I finished it on Remembrance Day.
☠
Bumf
Joe Sacco
Trade Paperback
Fantagraphics Books, September, 2014
Four Stars
November 9-11, 2018
☠
☠
Bumf
Joe Sacco
Trade Paperback
Fantagraphics Books, September, 2014
Four Stars
November 9-11, 2018
☠
February 6, 2024
Loses steam in the second half but that first few pages has some incredible artwork and I loved the zany stream-of-consciousness style writing. Just pure weirdness and very dreamlike. Reminds me of early Chester Brown stuff. Then we focus on the President character - A Nixon lookalike but he's in bed with Michelle Obama, so it's Obama but he looks like Nixon I guess. He spends his time waterboarding prisoners, using drone strikes like a video game, and exploring the Middle East.
Lots of naked characters which Sacco draws so well.
I wonder why Sacco hasn't done a volume 2 yet.
Lots of naked characters which Sacco draws so well.
I wonder why Sacco hasn't done a volume 2 yet.
May 10, 2020
Flat out awful. I finished it, then disposed of it. I didn't mind Sacco's drawing style (the detail on a few of the pages is impressive), but the content is a meandering mess. I wouldn't say I found it offensive... just rather pointless.
July 31, 2022
Weirdly refreshing, seriously provocative and independent minded, Joe Sacco produces a gem of a graphic novel which pays tribute to the underground roots of the genre. Not easy to find at home, a friend was generous enough to look for it and find it for me in London. I shall be eternally grateful.
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