Mon Jul 20, 2009 — by Andrew Wheeler

Review: Goats: Infinite Typewriters by Jonathan Rosenberg

Yet another webcomic comes to print

Goats: Infinite Typewriters
Jonathan Rosenberg
Del Rey, June 2009, $14.00

It’s not true that every webcomic will eventually have a book, even if it seems that way. There are some projects that even Lulu will choke on; some things that are too short and obscure and just plain pointless to be immortalized in cold print. But, with magazines and newspapers running around like the proverbial head-chopped chickens – all the while conveniently neglecting to mention the fact that newspapers had the most profitable two decades of their existence right up to a handful of years ago, and collectively blew those profits on buying each other out and paying off the families who were smart enough to take huge wads of cash and toddle off to do something less glamorous, like badger sexing – webcomics are beginning to look like the only good game in town, so even staid book publishers – like Del Rey, the science fiction imprint of Ballantine, which, despite being part of the massive, serious, Bertelsmann/Random House empire, has made buckets and bushels of money over the past thirty years from Garfield books and even less likely drawn items – are surfing heavily from work, calling it research, and drafting up big-boy contracts for cartoonists whose work has only previously appeared in shining phosphor dots.

(And, now that that sentence has cleared the riffraff out, let me get down to specifics.)

The house most active in snapping up webcomickers is the comics publisher Dark Horse; I don’t believe they intended it that way, but they’ve taken a strong line in signing up nearly all of the webcomic creators that I read and appreciate on a regular basis. What does that leave for other publishers? Well, it’s a big web, and God knows – despite my occasional pretense otherwise – I’m not the Czar of Online Comics (though that would be a great job to have – mental note: give BHO a call later to see if it’s possible), so there are almost certainly dozens of damn good comics online that I don’t already read.

Which is a really roundabout way of saying that I wasn’t familiar with Goats – even though Rosenberg has been doing it since the end of April 1997, and the entire archives (including the strips reprinted in this book) are all available online, costing no more than a few cents for electricity and an attention span unusual in any web-surfer. If you don’t believe me, have a link – that goes back to the very first strip, which, in usual daily-comics fashion, bears very little resemblance to the strips reprinted here.

Infinite Typewriters begins with a twenty-six page section that is completely new and unavailable online, forcing all of Goats’ cyber-fans to buy the book (or lurk around dark, extra-legal corners of the Net for their “torrents”). This functions partially as a half-assed attempt to introduce the main characters – who turn out, for most of the strips in this book, to not be the two youngish men chatting in a bar, or even the talking goat (which, even is he is entirely singular, would at least have something to do with the strip title, which otherwise seems as detached from the strip itself as Peanuts was), but rather a talking rooster and fish. Before long, that rooster has spawned a child – a cute little chick, who, as required by all mass media, is Machiavellian and megalomaniacal in a direct relationship with how widdle and cute he is. There are also two aliens, in the standard Gray configuration, who are about as important as the two young men. (And then the reprints kick in, starting with December 1^st, 2003 and running through January 12^th, 2006.)

These characters – men, aliens, goat, fish, poultry, and others, including, very late in the book, the monkeys on the cover – bounce off of each other in various, very odd adventures, which Rosenberg moves forward through lots and lots of very wordy, generally humorous dialogue. (Any insinuation that Your Humble Reviewer has drunken of the Rosenberg Kool-Aid and that said beverage has influenced the writing of this very review will be met with scorn and derision. Come to think of it, nearly any statement that YHR even mildly disagrees with will be met by scorn and derision. Scorn and derision are quite useful rhetorical devices, you know.)

It’s difficult to describe or summarize the plots of Goats stories – suffice it to say that Jon and Philip, who I believe are the cartoonist and his best friend/roommate/imaginary friend, steal the aliens’ spaceship, fly to the center of the universe, meet God, who is living in a condo, trick him to shape-shift into a pork chop, and then eat him…all to settle a bar-bet, and all as part of that new introductory story, which is basically just Rosenberg cracking his knuckles and clearing his throat. Things get generally more demented from there, though they always seem to make sense within any one strip.

All right, let me break out a quote. Scott McCloud, who has forgotten more about comics than the entire art staff of Image Comics ever learned, said thus: “Jonathan Rosenberg has perfected a concoction of bizarre plot developments and quietly absurd dialogue.” See? What he said.

Infinite Typewriters is the first of three volumes that Del Rey will publish – the upcoming books are named, as of course they would be, The Corndog Imperative and Showcase Showdown. Given that Infinite Typewriters collected approximately two years and six weeks of strips, I’m going to estimate that Corndog will bring Goats up to mid-March of 2008 and Showcase into the far-flung future of the early summer of 2010. But if simple linear extrapolations ever worked, we would be up to our ears in Beanie Babies right now, so I very much doubt that is actually true. In any case: there will be two more books. Those books will be at least as demented as this one. This will be a good thing.

I might have missed Goats before without knowing it, but, if I miss Goats from now on, it will be on purpose!

No, wait: that didn’t come out right. Goats makes very little sense, and takes place in a world ruled by whimsy and farce as much as by villainy and evil – but it’s funny in its dementia, and it’s more like Goats than any other strip ever could be. And you can’t ask for more than that.

Andrew Wheeler has been a publishing professional for nearly twenty years, with a long stint as a Senior Editor at the Science Fiction Book Club and a current position at John Wiley & Sons. He’s been reading comics for longer than he cares to mention, and maintains a personal, mostly book-oriented blog at antickmusings.blogspot.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Andrew Wheeler directly at acwheele (at) optonline (dot) net.

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