Magic Whistle #14

Sam Henderson is disgusting. In the same way that farts are disgusting. By which I mean always funny. And in the same way that fart humor is not very sophisticated, neither is Sam Henderson’s humor, but it just makes you laugh like a twelve year old boy. Henderson’s drawings aren’t very sophisticated either, but they don’t really need to be to get the joke across. It would be hard for me to show you this book and make you believe that there is an underlying intelligence…maybe even a genius, in Sam Henderson’s work. But believe me…it’s there.

I’ve been following Henderson on social media for a few years now and the thing that becomes clear there is that he really is a student of the comic form. He’s always posting old comic strips and books with some analysis of what’s going on there that can be a lesson to the modern comic. Magic Whistle is a bunch of short gag strips or one panel gags and not a single funny narrative. There are some recurring characters and some tropes that repeat, and a lot of ass jokes. Henderson seems to be obsessed with the ass and it being removed or bitten or something coming out of it, or it getting stuck in something….Just a lot of ass jokes.

I think anyone could probably write a single cartoon or maybe even two or three that would make me laugh, maybe even laugh hard. There is a certain genius or at least an amazing work ethic that allows a person to produce a large volume of work that seems to all (ok, maybe not all, but certainly a large percentage) make me belly laugh. I started reading this on the train and had to finish it at home or risk being hauled off when someone reported a crazy person rolling around on the floor of the train, laughing and wheezing out the word “butts”.

So yeah, this comic was read at home on 09/30/2014