Welcome to the Dahl House is a collection of Ken Dahl’s slice-of-life comics from 1997-2007, most of which are really crap – and I’m a fan of lo-fi sad bastard indie comics!
Most of the short stories feature Gordon Smalls, a pathetic thirtysomething loser with no job or money or any kind of life, who alternately moans about airport security, holds a garage sale to pay his rent, and gets arrested. The arrest comic is slightly interesting as the reader sees the minutiae of the American justice system from the defendant’s perspective, which I didn’t know about before.
Other than that? Boring. The garage sale comic is about how Gordon can’t skateboard anymore now he’s middle-aged and how today’s kids are so much better at it than he ever was. Boo-bloody-hoo. The airport security thing was like bad stand-up and came off as whiny.
And speaking of whiny, an extended monologue about the history of ‘zines was a total yawnfest. It’s Dahl bitching about how poorly paid self-published cartoonists are (duh, you’re self-published!) and how little attention people pay to their work (if this one’s anything to go by, people ignored zines because they were shitty narcissistic diatribes about esoteric subjects no-one but the creator cared about).
Welcome to the Dahl House is full of instantly forgettable, unfunny, unoriginal and plain uninteresting comics – some frustrated guy ranting about nothing in comics form. Harvey Pekar this guy is not!
Welcome to the Dahl House
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