Faker

After getting drunk at a college party, four housemates wake to find that no one else remembers their friend Nick.

From Booklist

In his first collection, Gaskin struts his stuff in more forms than many a comics artist does these days, including one-panel gags, four-panel strips, six-panel one-pagers, several-page stories, and sketchbook outtakes, funny and not. (The only veteran cartoonist who regularly offers as much variety is Sam Henderson, whose latest Magic Whistle collection, Body Armor for Your Dignity, is reviewed in this issue.) Silliness and pop-cultural referentiality inform virtually everything Gaskin does, sometimes rather complexly. “Speedy Beepy” requires familiarity with (1) the picture-book convention of anthropomorphizing machines, (2) claims made about biodiesel fuel, and (3) the perception of environmental greens and sixties hippies as birds of a feather. “My Kinski” is so quirky and daft that appreciating it doesn’t depend on knowing the Werner Herzog films that inspired it, though such knowledge still helps. Employing the deliberately crude drawing manners of alternative cartoonists from S. Clay Wilson to Lynda Barry and displaying a sensibility poised somewhere between Wilson’s ludicrous obscenity and Barry’s laughing to keep from crying, Gaskin’s a talent to watch. --Ray Olson

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