All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall

This is McCall's fourth book and I own them all, having been a fan of his work since he first began appearing in NATIONAL LAMPOON more than thirty years ago. His art is satire of a particularly sly sort, taking things to unreasonable extremes -- planes that are too huge or too heavy to fly, but which helped win the war, etc -- and his style combines realism with absurdities of scale. He's not above being political, either, as "Mr. Bush Has a Dream" will show. McCall produces grins rather than wild laughter, but that's okay with me. He's the reason the word "wacky" was invented.

I've been reading and looking at and laughing at McCall's stuff for something like 35 years, from his early 70s material in Playboy and The National Lampoon right up to last week's squib in The New Yorker. I have a 2-inch-thick file of my favorites torn from Forbes and many other publications, and a 7-foot-tall shrine to McCall in my living room. Well, that last part about the shrine is false, but the rest of it is true. Why should you buy this? Because it's funny. It helps if you're smart, though-- McCall references lost culture and super-annuated thinking the way SJ Perelman did, so if you don't know who SJ Perelman was, you may not really appreciate these brilliant little blossoms of satire and absurdity. If that's the case, I'm deeply, deeply sorry.

Here is another wonderfully wacky collection of imaginary nostalgia from Canadian cartoonist Bruce McCall. This is pretty much the same sort of collection as his book _Zany Afternoons_ was, and it is a pleasant surprise to see that there is no recycled material from the earlier book to this one.In case you are unfamiliar with McCall's work, he used to be an automobile advertisement illustrator back in the Fifties. He uses the same style to the same retro-cheesy effect in his spoofs of old Popular Mechanics articles, imaginary stomping grounds of the rich & famous of the Twenties and Thirties, and lots of gibes at his old home, Canada.The original written material for this book is so-so, but it's only a page long, every thirty pages or so. The cartoons, with their marvelous verisimilitude of the real period pieces they send up, are just great. McCall is a master at capturing eras that never were.