True Stories #1
by Derf Backderf
All of Backderf's books are excellent - My Friend Dahmer is a remarkable work that doesn't sensationalize the artist's connection to the serial killer, and his Kent State book is absolutely essential reading - but I wish we had a thousand issues of his True Stories.
Produced for free weekly rags that had a half-life of three days, the few issues of True Stories we got collected the best of Backderf's strips. They're all four panels long, all feature some kind of weirdo that Backderf has seen roaming around the American Midwest, and they are as funny as fuck.
The most surprising thing is that even though the people that appear in True Stories are usually very, very strange, the strip rarely felt like it was condescending towards its subjects. It's only a few panels, so it's only the most basic representations of real people in all their complexities, but there is a sense of just telling it like it is, without all that much judgement attached.
And they are also very, very funny people. The glory of living in a society is that we are surrounded by people with strange quirks or mannerisms, and there is humour in their interactions with a straight society.
There is plenty of exaggeration in Backderf's figures, often to extreme effect, but these are real people that we all see out and about every day, and whose idiosyncrasies are usually forgotten as soon as they walk around the street corner.
Instead, a tiny handful of them are memorialized in Backderf's strips. We all know people like this, and we all see people like this, every day in every place, just doing their thing, and making the whole world just a little less drab.
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