
Whether you love comics like this or hate them, the simple fact is that we need more like them : legitimate “anything goes” creative free-for-alls that have nothing limiting them other than the scope of the author’s imagination — or, in the case, the authors’ imaginations, plural.
The “comic like this” in question is Swonknibus, a newly-released collection of cartoonist Chris Cajero Cilla and writer Greg Petix’s weekly Swonk strip that ran in the pages of the University of Arizona student newspaper The Daily Wildcat from 1995-97. It’s more than that, of course — Cilla published this under the auspices of his own Sardine Can Press (apparently there’s also a hardback version available as a print-on-demand job from Lulu) and has seen fit to include an intriguing smattering of ‘zine content he created with Petix from roughly the same time period, and to round the entire package out with three pages of extensive footnotes — but for purposes of this review, all you really need to know is that if Swonk is to your tastes, the supplemental material is sure to be as well, and if it’s not, then it won’t be. Fair enough?

I’m a longtime admirer of Cilla’s comics, but this is my first time even hearing of Swonk, let alone actually seeing it, and as such it’s interesting to note the ways in which it both is and isn’t what a person would expect from the “warts and all” early work of someone who would go on to become an auteur cartoonist. A fair amount of the divergence from expectation can likely be chalked up to Petix’s influence, of course — he wrote this material, after all — but it’s equally interesting to note how markedly similar their sensibilities are in so many key respects, and therefore easy to see why collaboration was such a natural thing for them. They both share a decidedly askew view of reality and aren’t afraid to take the piss out of just about anyone and anything, but they both have a gift for making nonsense make sense (if — errrmmm — that makes sense), and so don’t be too surprised if much of what’s on offer here ends up feeling to you like it could just as well have been the product of one mind rather than two.


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Swonknibus is available for $12.00 from the Sardine Can Press Storenvy site at https://sardinecanpress.storenvy.com/products/31736386-swonknibus
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