![]() Because Carpenter’s Gothic isn’t so much about what happens but how it happens. Moore offers a tidy summary of Carpenter’s Gothic-a summary which should be avoided by anyone who wants to read the novel. I then read Steven Moore’s excellent essay on the novel, “ Carpenter’s Gothic or, The Ambiguities.” (If you have library access to the Infobase database Bloom’s Literature, you can find the essay there if not, here’s a. ![]() ![]() I ended up reading the last two chapters of William Gaddis’s novel Carpenter’s Gothica few times, trying to figure out exactly what happened. Yet they carry on, finding fun where they can and refusing to abandon all hope. Hieronymus & Bosch‘s two heroes get burnt by lava, stabbed with tridents, used as a Q-tip by Satan himself, or just covered in a torrent of poop gushing down from above. However, the bus‘ main character always got out from the practical jokes played on him unharmed, even if a bit confused. Hieronymus & Bosch also evokes Kirchner’s famous comic strip series the bus. Some of the stories published in this book originally appeared on the Adult Swim website. Kirchner drew his inspiration from the medieval depictions of Hell by Dante and Hieronymus Bosch (duh!) as well as from the zany, almost sadistic humor of Warner Bros. This book puts together about a hundred one-pagers filled with hilariously surrealistic and scatological gags by American comic book artist Paul Kirchner. Despite many gag-filled attempts at escaping this literal hell, Hieronymus and Bosch always end up being the butt of their trident-wielding guards’ most humiliating and painful jokes. There, lakes are made of lava (or, more often, poop) and an army of mischievous spiky-tailed devils bully the inmates and play impish pranks. When Hieronymus commits yet another petty crime, things go badly wrong and both are catapulted into a cartoonish version of Hell. Meet the medieval miscreant Hieronymus and his wooden duck Bosch. I hope to have a review up at The Comics Journal soon (where I reviewed Kirchner’s last collection, Awaiting the Collapse), but for now, here’s publisher Tanibis’s blurb: Kirchner’s hapless hero Hieronymus seems like an extension-with difference-of the commuter, the hero of Kirchner’s bus strips. It’s goofy and funny and has a lot of soul to it. This afternoon, I started putting together a review of Biblioklept fave Paul Kirchner’s latest, Hieronymus & Bosch, and I realized that although I’d written a bit about it recently, I hadn’t put together one of these book acquired posts for it.
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