A tubby man arches his spoon back as he raises his hand to his mouth: “Food fight!”
His pasty jowls are warped by the force of a slap. The view pans back to show the wannabe food-fighter, berated by a fellow aid-worker.
Both are stood next to an aid truck, as several gaunt children around them queue for food. It’s funny, but it’s uncomfortable, but it’s funny. There’s some deep and meaningfuls in there about world aid and western excess, too...
It’s pretty easy to start writing about the Perry Bible Fellowship. Yet explaining one of the strips , (and the he-bitch-man-slap to the mind that accompanies the final picture) sadly doesn’t do justice to the way it delivers its ideas, as style flits from children book illustration to elaborate vistas.
Typically dark, occasionally brutal, always unexpected these aren’t Garfield/’Animals! Kids! Aren’t They Funny?’ comics. Subjects span from childhood stories, to robot knights, computer game parody, sexual perversion, disturbed kids and space-based drama.
”I'd take a moment to hammer Garfield as loathsome mind-dung, but you know, I think it gave me a smile a few months ago. There was a good gag with a spider.”
PBF’s creator, Nicholas Gurewich isn’t, at least wasn’t, a cartoonist by trade. He’s actually a film-maker, and film school graduate, where the PBF seed was planted.
“While I was a freshman at university, my friend and I constructed a comic during art history class, found it funny, and then submitted it to our school paper.”
The strip was a creative outlet that was both cheaper and far less limited.
“Many PBFs are simplified versions of short films I would have loved to shoot if I had access to dinosaurs and angels.”
Characters often come to a grisly end, but surprisingly the comics aren’t intentionally brutal. “Do I feel brutal? Not really. If I can get myself to kill a fly, I usually feel pretty bad about it. But life is brutal, and comedy demands that you show life the way it is. Comedy invites a person to breathe in the mystery of life, drown in it, and have to swim to the surface.”
Each strip or scene is self-contained- often the whole world is setup for the gag. Next week’s strip will have nothing to do with the last.
The only things resembling a regular person are the ghostly outline drawings that represent the inhabitants of the fellowship.
“The simplified PBF folk are a default. I usually conceive ideas with them in mind.
“If I need to show a tongue, earring, or high amount of detail, I depart from that style, find a new one, and reconfigure the gag to make details enjoyable.”
The strips will usually take more meaning or impact from the style. One strip shows a lucky boy who wins two tickets round ‘The Fantastic Factory’.
The tickets come hidden in a pack of sausages and he is invited to tour the slaughterhouse hosted by the Wonka-esque factory owner. The style is not dissimilar to Quentin Blake, once the illustrator for Roald Dahl.
Part of its appeal could be that there aren’t many comics like PBF out there. “I don't think many people are willing to make sacrifices to their personality. You really become an abnormal person at some point if you regularly conduct pieces that you care more about than your real life.”
The PBF is now printed in papers across the world. In addition to its recent inclusion to The Guardian’s G2 section every Friday, it appears in The New York Press, men’s magazine Maxim in both Britain and… Czechoslovakia. “Translations occur where they're necessary. I enjoy making it easy on them though. Comics without dialogue are very pleasing to me. I got to see a copy of the job they did with "No Survivors" (where dead bodies spell out a marriage proposal) and was pretty impressed with their Photoshop work.”
The strip has also helped Gurewich secure film shorts on MTV2, and he is in discussions with several US television studios, though this has been more difficult.
“There have been delays in the specifics of that production. I hope this is simply the earmark of something so brilliant, that it requires a lot of planning, but I fear we simply don't see eye-to-eye on a couple of things.”
Fans are drawn to his website, which has soared from 200,000 hits at the start of the year, to over 800,000 last month and money from published strips is “much more than I need to sustain my existence”. There’s also a book in the works. Why did it explode like this?
“It's always made me laugh. I'm not terribly surprised that it makes other people laugh too.”
ANATOMY OF A MIME
“I'm really liking the one about the Mime City lately- it leaves much to be imagined. I think it also sums up one of my many unoriginal philosophies about the universe.”
“I wanted to do a short film about a bowling mime who knocked bowling pins down with only implied action. Then I got the idea to push it further; to show his pantomime affecting another person, even to the other person's detriment (an unwilling, possibly even subconscious participation on their part).
An incredible concept such as this would probably require some kind of bizarre, multi-mime location where such interaction was the norm: Mime City. Why would they be congregated? A political gathering of some kind. Would there be talking? No. It would be sterile. Straightforward. Direct. With lots of stripes and shapes. Black and white, with a little bit of colour: like a mime.”
Perry Bible Fellowship is published each Friday in the Guardian's G2 section. Check www.thepbf.com for past comics.
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