Duplex Planet Illustrated 13

Short Review: An interesting idea, but not a good book.

On English T.V, there was a few years ago, a series of adverts for Electricity, which featured clay-mation animals lip-synching to the conversations of members of the public, on the subject of how Electricity affected them. For those that care, it was based on a similar animation called Creature Comforts, by the same production team, who won Oscars for both it and The Wrong Trousers. But enough of the Animation speak. One of the most striking things about the commercials was that the voices were obviously unscripted; People interrupted each other, corrected their mistakes as they went, and so on. It was cool. Many of the stories in this book follow a similar direction, appearing as "told to David Greenberger by...", but miss a few points:

• Creature Comforts was animated/audio, and a lot of what a person meant of felt like during a mistake was clear from the tone of the voices , or the movements of the character. Here,. there's no vocal tones, and many of the pieces aren't conversations, but ramblings, which jump from subject to subject per panel.
• The speakers in Creature Comforts had English as a first language, or very near. Some of the speakers here have hideously bad English, not to mention no idea what they're talking about. See, while Creature Comforts didn't re-record the voices, they did edit them, something that David has clearly failed to do. There's a lot of nonsense here, and if you don't like a lot of the artists, it's a losing proposition.