REPUGLICANS

Nothing will prepare you for Pete Von Sholly’s deliriously biased portraits of Republicans on display in Repuglicans (128 6x9-inch pages, full color; Boom! Town paperback, $14.99), a gallery of some of the better-known Gabby Old Pachyderms (and a few non-GOPers), converted by Von Sholly’s fevered imagination (and Photoshop, I suspect) into vampires and zombies and various breeds of rotting corpses. Visual name-calling at its most refined. But words fall far short of adequately describing what Von Sholly has done, so we resort to posting a few of his fiendish works herewith. Left to right across the top, you’ll immediately recognize Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Mitt Romney; across the bottom, Joe Lieberman, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Grassley, and the ever ebullient Sean Hannity. Von Sholly’s ghastly renderings (pun unintended but relished) of 53 more of them appear in this volume, each on a right-hand page and on the facing page, short expository effusions by Steve Tatham (stand-up comic and author of 1001: A Video Odyssey, Movies to Watch for Your Every Mood). Here’s his opening annotation on Rush Limbaugh: “A high school dropout, drug addict, and big tub o’goo, the bloviating windbag has undoubtedly done okay for himelf thanks to an army of hypnotized zombies that hang on his every word when they’re not busy gunning down abortion doctors or putting Jesus fish stickers on the bumpers of their SUVs.” And so forth. For Joe Liberman, Tatham resorts to Seussian verse: “I do not like that man named Joe. / I never know which way he’ll go. / He was a friend but then no more. / Seems he’s very much a whore. / Is he right or is he left? / Of true allegiance he’s bereft. / A man of lousy etiquette / A Grinch who stole Connecticut.”

When the publication of the book was announced last February, accompanied only by a reproduction of its cover (depicting Sarah the Palin as a vampire with blood trickling out of the corners of her lips), it was immediately and hysterically denounced by adherents of the GOP, who mustered a catechism of opprobrious adjectives and other parts of speech (sez Tatham) to describe it: stupid, unoriginal, juvenile, infantile, lame, cowardly, a monstrosity, horrible, ignorant, dumb and tiresome. Tatham continues: “Now, I’m not saying that it isn’t all those things; I’m just saying those criticisms were lucky guesses. None knew what was depicted or written on its pages.” Only the cover had been released, remember. “Apparently,” saith Tatham, “you can judge a book by its cover.”