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Title: Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies: A Novel by Tom De Haven, Henry Holt & Co, Tom De Haven ISBN: 0-8050-4445-0 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Pub. Date: 01 June, 1996 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: nothin' doin '
Comment: i think i got kicked out because my head was derby's in a rowboat. it's night. or because i said bad things about aol. but..
ohboy ohboy. this is wonderful stuff. i wish there were a real derby dugan now, when ugliness prevails and there is no art at all in the funnies. but it's not the comics, it's the american century past and the shmoes (and shmnoos)who lived it that are so wonderful (and shmoeful), i have been reading these books backwards so am hungering for funny papers, but then i started tolkien in the middle and the books still worked. and unlike so many academics, de haven doesn't let a lot of literature get in the way of his story, yet you still can appreciate that there's some serious writing going on.

Rating: 3
Summary: Not as successful as Funny Papers
Comment: I enjoyed Tom De Haven's Derby Dugan, but not to the same extent as his Funny Papers. There is more of a dark cloud over the characters in this novel. Yet, although he's no Runyon or P.G. Wodehouse, De Haven creates living characters that you don't mind spending time with.

Rating: 4
Summary: Derby's in a rowboat. It's night.
Comment: Imagine a very depressed Damon Runyan. De Haven's story works best as an Oedipal love-hate story between narrator Al Br[e]ady, funny-page ghostwriter par excellence, and cartoonist Walter Geebus, a misanthrope who has long since run out of ideas but whose drawings remain one of the few things in Bready's world to believe in. Less engaging is Bready's unrequited--well, unconsummated anyway--love for Jewel, who is married to a real-life cartoon dimwit. That relationship is bittersweet, as is the narrator's love for his damaged sister, the unwilling keeper of the family secret that Bready can't admit. But it's Geebus who breathes life into the novel and into Bready--Geebus: selfish, manipulative, but capable of a sweet belated response to a young letter writer who idolized him as a boy but has since accreted layer upon layer of cynicism.