Tales of Old Snake Creek is 36 pages of cover to cover comics.  Printed in full color on heavy white stock, it presents four short stories along with two one-pagers, all rendered in pen & ink with watercolors, and each – to varying degrees – filled with Lerman's trademarked wordplay and puns. 

BACK IN STOCK!   Limited supply.

Here's twenty magazine-size (8.5" x 11") pages filled with all new full color drawings from the sketchbooks of Ignatz Award-winning cartoonist Drew Lerman as he channels the spirit of the early, early days of comics.  Fun!

Here's the latest Snake Creek book from Drew Lerman.   We snoozed on when it came out last year, but finally got it in.  And we're glad we did, as its 176 square-formatted pages collect 160 fantastic four-panel comic strips that are freely drawn, and perhaps even more freely written, filled with dialect-heavy speech phonetically rendered, very much in the manner of George Herriman's writing in Krazy Kat – which is clearly a major influence, as the world of Snake Creek is cut from cloth patterned after that of Coconino County.  What's not to like?

There's quite a lot going on here.  First and foremost, Lerman has managed to grasp, tame and present the rhythms of regularly produced, classic four-panel comic strip cartooning.  Reading contemporaneous material in this classic format is like feeling a fresh breeze entering a long closed room filled with stale air.  It's quite refreshing!  And what's more, he does so here the service of the form itself. 

Escape from the Great American Novel uses comics to confront the challenge presented by how best to manifest the creative communicative drive.  Along with the novel, poetry and song are explored. Cultural identities, communal living arrangements of various sorts, private property and business interests, as well as conflicts between the public and the private, and the forces of nature and technology all figure in the narrative as it unspools amidst the lo-fi hi-jinx of scratchy ink delineated cartoon characters.  

An added dimension is that the cartoon characters populating the largely masculine world of Snake Creek serve as stand-ins for the unconscious drives that populate the male psyche.  With Dav and Roy standing in for the ego and the id weaving through a Freudian obstacle course filled with emotional baggage that has obvious roots in Jewish history, embodies Hebraic attitudes, and that flowers in Yiddishisms.

In the end, as the ontological frame within which the entire debate transpires, it is no surprise that it is the comics form itself that emerges as the most effective means of communitarian communication and the premiere instantiation of the creative drive, in its metonymically panoptic subsumption of all other forms.

Delve deeper into the mysteries of Snake Creek by reading Leonard Pierce's review from TCJ.com.