Cynical, adult humour anyone?

Important news first: Ian Rankin, best selling crime author of the acclaimed Inspector Rebus series among others has just had his first graphic novel published: entitled Dark Entries, watch this space for a review.
Next. Neil Gaiman, at the Edinburgh Book Festival gave props to web-comics ‘ka-powing’ out of the Internet. Without the need to kow-tow to a publishing monolith, edit, and then worry about distribution, there’re many young (and not so young) artists and writers making their presence felt. Gaiman said, “Before you would have to find a publisher or an editor — a gatekeeper — who would say, yes, this is fit to be published. The glory of the web is that there are no gatekeepers.… There are web comics that I find and wind up following. There are wonderful things out there.”
And in the light of the wonderful things you can www.stumbleupon.com (look it up) this week there’s not one but two great webcomics, one current and one discontinued. Both are primarily in the comic-strip format but Nicholas Gurewitch has gone on to try his hand at making films, television shows.
Gurewitch’s The Perry Bible Fellowship is really, really adult and not just in a sexual way. It’s gruesome, cynical yet somehow, it’s obvious that Gurewitch sees the world differently.
He alludes to Gary Larson training his brain to ‘look at things’ a certain way and how after that, it’s easy to put forward a skewed perspective. Take for example one of his most famous strips.
At a plane crash site, a female paramedic walks away from a male one saying, “Not now” and you pull back to realise that he’s spelt out the words ‘Marry me’ with the corpses from the crash. Yes, the humour is not for everyone. But refer to Gaiman’s ‘remove the gatekeeper’ statement from the above.
Don’t let that put you off though. Like the strip featured above, Gurewitch is hilarious, witty, capable of a beautiful meeting of art and thought and he also hides stuff in his strips which is always fun. Look for Charles Bukowski in the strip Gamblin’ Man.
Quick heads up on Buttersafe.com, out every Tuesday and Thursday. Drawn by Raynato Castro and Alex Culang, the art is largely stick figure and features running gags like ‘the saddest turtle’. Buttersafe.com already seem to have a cult following and encourage their fans to host Buttersafe Expo’s that I suspect largely feature pizza and discussing which inventive, crazy strip was your favourite. Again, very cynical and adult in humour for the most part, occasionally, you do get a silly one that will just not be very funny. But they’re only human.