Creased Comics - by Brad Neely (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Beginning at the dawn of the new millennium, the animator Brad Neely materialized as one of the funnier voices on the internet. Youtube hits like the foul-mouthed George Washington, his demented audiobook retelling of Harry Potter in Wizard People, Dear Readers, and the alarmingly prescient Adult Swim TV show China, IL (starring the voices of both Greta Gerwig and Hulk Hogan) all reveal how Neely captured a kind of freewheeling online spirit that is fading fast.

During this ascent, Neely was also quietly mastering another form, the webcomic, where he spliced together historical figures, fairy tales, wildlife, and absurd gag setups into truly laugh-out-loud cartoons: hungry bridge trolls ready to devour local "chappies"; Caesar's real killer (Jeffrey); the Boo-Boo Maker; limousine werewolves; superheroes trying and failing to rescue Christ; and more eye-blasting thrills.

Gathered here for the first time along with Neely's reflections about his work, Creased Comics is a portal into a truly individual creative mind, and a snapshot of some of the best days for webcomics.

Review Quotes

"Inspired lunacy." --The New York Times

"Brad Neely always makes my life a little more enjoyable." --USA Today

"[A] sublime imagination." --Vice

"With respect, Brad Neely is a madman. In Creased Comics . . . you get to find out just how much. Each single-panel comic plunges you into an off-kilter, typically surreal world . . . The cartoons' influences seem wide-ranging, from religion to rural culture, horror to history. Animals with human-like thoughts, strippers, and ennui also make appearances, but truly, expect the unexpected here. Sometimes the universe of a single comic was so fascinating that, even humor aside, I found myself returning to ponder it and its implications." --Kerry Vineberg, Comics Beat

"Call it art. Call it whatever you like. This is work that may seem easy, but there's a special skill at play, especially to be able to create the work time and time again at a high level of consistency. The more you read through the book, I think you'll agree that each page has something worthwhile to offer . . . A very enjoyable collection." --Comics Grinder

"'Cathartic' is a reviewer's cliché, but it is one that applies to Neely's work: he brings before viewers' eyes, in a palette of monochrome pastels both dismal and evocative of hokey 1950s optimism, the pretensions, sorrows, vanity, and fears of American life in the suburbs. It is as though David Hockney's garish visions of carefree California life were allowed to fade and wither in the sun, or as if his subjects had gone mad after decades of floating in swimming pools and sitting at picnic tables and had turned into sexual deviants, obsessive-compulsives, serial murderers."
--Adrian Nathan West, Artillery Magazine

"Neely's cartooning style is direct and unfussy, ensuring the jokes hit with an immediate impact. It's headily irreverent stuff as some of the examples here will attest . . . it's one of those collections that once picked up you won't put down until you've reached the final page of these gloriously shameless reflections on the illogicality of life." --Andy Oliver, Broken Frontier

"Neely is a South Park stalwart, and you can see that in the punky, scratchy, awkward, askance comics on display here . . . Neely's worldview is engaging and endearing and (usually) funny - see the two doctors singing 'Bad Boys' as they sow up some unfortunate on the operating table or the stork who keeps picking up corpses from the wrong drop-off. There are dozens of what you might call zingers." --Bookmunch

"Neely's style -- always single-panel, usually very subject to interpretation, occasionally textless -- makes his cartoons the perfect momentary distraction. No memory of what you last read and no serious concentration is required to meaningfully engage with these strange little pockets of exuberance. More than anything, Creased Comics is consistently guffaw-inducing, so beware: If you're perusing the book in public, people are probably going to notice how good of a time you're having and ask you what the hell you're on about." --Arkansas Times

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