Perry Bible Fellowship

There’s never a bad time to mention the excellent Perry Bible Fellowship, an irregularly but frequently updated comic strip by Nicholas Gurewitch.

The comic strip features no regular characters, no ongoing plot lines and only one or two running gags in countless different and uniquely original episodes. Even the trademark drawing style was discarded a good few strips back in favour of individual styles befitting the varied subjects.

The only common theme was that each story was very, very funny, almost as if you were being presented with material from many different sources by a trusted friend with a great sense of humour, like a treasured comedy mixtape.

Gurewitch has proven himself to be a gifted and dedicated artist. While earlier strips saw him quicly evolve a simplistic but effective drawing style, the innocence of which belied the strips darker content, (often like a silent movie version of redmeat), he later went on to challenge himself with a number of strips that only worked beause of the different illustrative styles that he was able to achieve.

Go take a look now. I’ve linked above to a strip from a little way through, but spend a joyous wee while and start here at the beginning and work your way up through the extensive archives – the evolution of the strip is a wonder.

Gurewitch this year posted a note saying that he has taken a break to ‘pursue other things’. From the quality of each published cartoon, I would say that the collection undoubtedly represents an immense amount of work and that a break is well earned. One day I’d love to see, PreHistory of the Far Side-style, the sketchbooks of his drawings and ideas that didn’t quite get published.