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White Noise on Paper: All Rise for “The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories” by Nicholas Gurewitch

Don’t let the bright candy colors of the cover fool you, this is no ordinary “children’s book”, in fact, its not a children’s book at all. Bored and browsing through a mainstream book store where my then girlfriend was looking in the boring Harlequin Romance novel section, my eyes fell on this. At first I thought it was a kid’s book until I opened it, my boredom melted away like Rainbow Sherbet in a hot summer sun. I was laughing so hard I was annoying other customers. I promptly went and bought it. My then girlfriend thought it was disgusting and that is why she is now my ex.

Its as if some maniac played too much “Candy Land”, read too much Frank Baum books, and watched too many episodes of South Park and then decided to make a comic strip. I love this book, it was unique in that it was almost presented as a children’s comic collection but the humor was messed up, and stomach churning in some cases.

The creator, Nicholas Gurewitch, was art director of the Syracuse student paper “The Daily Orange” and first published the strip, “Perry Bible Fellowship” there in 2001. Since then different publications have picked the strip up. The art work can vary from strip to strip which makes the whole thing interesting. The whole book is full of snickers and/or outright belly laughs. Most of the strips in “The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and other Stories” are taken from previously published work. Man oh man where does Nick come up with this stuff?

According to Nick, “Perry Bible Fellowship” is actually named after a real church in Perry, Maine. A lot of the humor is abstract and non sequitur if this annoys you then you might want to avoid this book. Scratch that, if that annoys you why are you reading my blog? Fuck right off. HA! HA! This is something that puts a smile on my face if I am in a bad mood. I am so glad something like this exists, if it didn’t I hope me or somebody else would’ve done it as good as Nick does it.

Nick still till this day updates “The Perry Bible Fellowship” web site, less frequent than he used to do. I am glad he is keeping this going and hasn’t given up on it, the world needs this now more than ever. There is a lot of humorless twats walking around today, maybe they need a unicorn horn thrust through their chests…A unicorn horn of HUMOR.

This insane candy colored, ridiculous, off the wall world needs to be explored more. There is another book out there “The Perry Bible Fellowship Almanack” with more comics, probably out of print and a lot of money. I am glad I bought this when it came out, a lot of the books I like become worth big bucks. I hate when I miss out on something cool the first time around, the price gets insanely jacked up.

So where does one go to have Perry Bible Fellowship study? First you can go to Nick’s site which he still updates infrequently, https://pbfcomics.com/

Cheap copies can still be found used on amazon, get them while you still can: https://www.amazon.com/Colonel-Fellowship-Nicholas-Gurewitch-2007-09-03/dp/B01F81KGT0

And AMEN!!!!