Nerd Inferno: The Essential Evan Dorkin- REVIEW
- Bobby Campbell
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
Publisher: Dark Horse
Creative Team:
Evan Dorkin
Sarah Dyer
Where to Buy: Dark Horse or your Local Comic Shop (LCS)
Price: $34.99 for 656 pages
Solicit:
Collecting the Milk and Cheese, Eltingville Club, and Dork comics by Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning comics creator Evan Dorkin. Collected for the first time in an affordable omnibus edition.
The entire Eltingville Club saga. Every Milk and Cheese comic. All the fun strips, gag panels and stories from Dork.The entire shebang is now available in one big-ass Omnibus edition, a staggering display of satire, silliness, and stupidity featuring all the Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz award-winning humor comics by semi-esteemed and somewhat-beloved cartoonist Evan Dorkin. It's going to sell out and you will cry if you don't get a copy, so get to it, kids (This message was approved by Evan's therapist). For mature audiences.
REVIEW
When selecting this imperious tome to review it was done with the intuition that I’m someone who probably should have been reading Evan Dorkin for decades now, but somehow had missed my cue, and that this was a perfect opportunity to correct that mistake. An intuition that would bear out as more true than I could possibly have guessed, and I file this review in service of others who may also have been inexplicably missing out on a generational cartoonist.
...it was done with the intuition that I’m someone who probably should have been reading Evan Dorkin for decades now, but somehow had missed my cue, and that this was a perfect opportunity to correct that mistake.
If you’re someone who is already familiar with Dorkin’s work you don’t need me to tell you about the seething, perfect, intricate rage and love compressed beyond reason onto every comix page, surely exceeding the maximum info density allowed by quantum mechanics. For you I can just say there are 656 suchlike pages, comprising complete collections of Milk & Cheese, Dork, and Eltingville Club. Go forth and enjoy thereof! Otherwise, if previously uninitiated, please stick around for some enthusiastic arm-twisting…
I’ve been peripherally aware of Evan Dorkin’s work since I started reading comics in the early 90’s, at first through Wizard Magazine’s fawning praise of Milk & Cheese (From which I got a skewed notion of what the strip actually was, unfortunately!) And then more recently from his various brutally honest reflections on living life as a cartoonist and the harsh realities of trying to make a living in the comic book industry, which periodically resonate through our shared social networks. An appreciated commiseration over the cartoonist malaise!
“History is written by winners, and we are the biggest winners of all time!!!”
– Milk & Cheese
How do you review Milk & Cheese in a way that they themselves do not already self-reflect upon, mock, and destroy? The pint-sized dairy duo of anger and hate explode off the page with a maniacal dynamism that defies conventional storytelling. They are a vaudevillian comedy duo with no straight man, just two beings of pure, raw, chaotic id. As near as I can tell the characters are essentially identical, with no real distinguishing characteristics beyond the mostly arbitrary conceit of them being anthropomorphized portions of milk and cheese. As such, any story they participate in can only escalate, there is no voice of reason, no mitigating factors, just absolute “yes and” acceleration until the premise of the episode destroys itself, which it reliably accomplishes in three pages or less.
One of the great joys of a collection like this is watching Dorkin’s style develop and mutate in complexity, as he accumulates years of experience across minutes of reading time, like a timelapse video of radioactive, crystalline, fractal mold growing on an old, discarded issue of TV Guide.
His medium is decidedly that of the comic book, but his tool kit seems to owe more to the newspaper comic strip, and develops like a goldfish growing in a bowl with no known boundaries.
And then there’s the lettering! No human being should be able to write with such precise articulation! No matter how small the text gets, and it gets pretty miniscule, it remains legible, expressive, and charming. I’ve never felt self-conscious about my digital lettering until I saw the degrees of inflection possible with expert hand-lettering.
And then we move on to the traditional small press one man anthology section of the collection, hinting at a kind of nominative determinism, with the title DORK!
Here Dorkin’s virtuoso comix largesse pours onto the page with an overwhelming fury. Habitually packing 28 panels per page with archetypal gags rendered to perfection. It is a relentless storm of cartoon nonsense, personal revelation, and cultural reflection.
I’m reluctant to reinforce the artificial boundaries of generational divide, but as a convenient over generalization it’s worth bringing up Generation X here.
While I was reading through this collection I happened upon a statistic showing that Gen X is currently, by far, the most reactionary voting block. They yearn for the boot with inexplicable desperation! It’s perhaps no surprise that Dorkin is raging with such venomous defiance against the prevailing culture of his peers here. This wave of callous stupidity didn’t emerge out of nowhere, there were warning signs, and passionate attempts to stem the tide. (In one of the Milk & Cheese strips the duo react to the Rodney King verdict, a current event at the time, by destroying Trump Tower, which turns out to have been pretty prescient dots to connect!)
Especially notable amongst the Dork comix is “What Does it Look Like I’m Doing?” An emotional tour de force wherein Dorkin completely deconstructs himself on the page, with bewildering honesty and self-awareness, providing a uniquely impactful, vicarious, catharsis for the tortured artist within us all.
(I get the vague impression that the ghost of Wally Wood haunts these pages throughout, and this provides something of an exorcism, if not an outright bustin’.)
Jack Kirby warned us that comics would break our hearts, but the kind of blues you play with that broken heart is what matters most, and Dorkin makes the absolute most of his, even if he, axiomatically, never gets to know it.
Comics take way too much and return way too little, and unlike sports or music with their simultaneous resonances, they are enjoyed within the same vacuum they are created. You never get to hear the crowd pop when they see a page that blows their minds and gives cause to wonder in an asynchronous, starry-eyed, daze, “how the fuck did they do that!?”
(And, it turns out, you don’t have to draw like Jim Lee to accomplish that! Hell, it’s even okay for Jim Lee not to draw like Jim Lee, as we’ve recently learned.)
Then there’s Eltingville Club! Wherein everything I said above about Milk & Cheese and Dork coalesces in a heightened form with the addition of a most potent storytelling ingredient, stakes!
In Eltingville Club, Dorkin applies his craft to create a grounded and consistent world, populated with all too human characters, and when shit hits the fan we have to deal with the mess. Unlike the short attention span, channel flipping, vignettes that I’d grown accustomed to over the previous 500+ pages, there is no easy out here, the consequences of cartoon ridiculousness have to be reckoned with.
From its reputation, I knew Eltingville Club was a critique of toxic fandom, but didn’t realize how dark things were going to get, nor how unlikeable these characters would turn out to be. It plays out similar to the old Milk & Cheese strips, just as a slow burn, where the nerds that inherited the Earth turn out to be consumed with a tortured rage that absolutely destroys everything it touches, including their own idyllic, sitcom premise, status quo. It’s beautiful in its own twisted, pathetic, tragic way. To become trapped in a synthetic surrogate world that promised escape from isolation, but instead serves to incubate an even higher order of alienation, a fantasy of elitism that leaves one alone in a crowd, water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink… Unless!?
I was very appreciative of the addition of “The Northwest Comix Collective” at the end, because I didn’t really grow up as the kind of nerd featured in Eltingville Club, so my feet weren’t really held to that particular satirical fire, but Northwest hits much closer to home! It would be a waste to go see Don Rickles and not have him bust your chops, but luckily I have been zinged and I love it!
In the end, I’m reminded of Kevin Youkilis, the Greek God of Walks, who smashed a homerun without even realizing he’d done it.
How can you not be romantic about comic books?
This was Luis from Comic Book Yeti, don't forget to heart the article it really helps tell us what type of articles you like. Thanks again, signing off with more picks from the Yeti Cave. Be good, do good, and read comics! Find me on the CBY discord or BlueSky @luisgodoyii.bsky.social.
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